eweekchat

A6: Stopping viruses or their mutation won't be easy but certainly responding to any such outbreak and containing it can be facilitated with tech like Digital epidemiological surveillance and rapid case identification

A6: Also hoping this pandemic pushes rapid population level vaccine deployment and population level home testing (or even water effluent testing programs)

I think the ability to gather data (as we were discussing with handhelds) can help predict overall trends that are happening.

With mutations - being quickly track and trace the spread of a mutation and map the vaccine that will be most effective against the variant and then deploy it before the variant becomes the dominant strain (like we do with the flu)

The gathering of data is only the start; what do you do with the data next? Metrics, actionable reporting and the like will translate the data into useful information.

@saagrawa It would be ideal if we could share data like this, but the problem is there are issues with sharing data (geopolitical, HIPAA regulations, GDPR, etc.) that prevents a lot of sharing data.

Q6. Health IT can develop analytic dashboards to make it easier to analyze data and identify trends.

@KenyaSmith_NC That's a perfect way to get the data and be able to make better decisions for your organization, and the patient.

A5: Personally I think we will settle into a hybrid world where some demand will be shunted to Telemedicine but it's hard to replace for example some Oncology appointments in person

A5: However second opinions, skin conditions, other less "I need to see / touch, examine the patient" conditions can move far more effectively online. Maybe with imaging that can be read online we could do even more.

A5: And if Michio Kaku is right and we all walk around with a hand held $100 MRI machine maybe we can do everything online!!! :)

Q5: Sadly, I think telemedicine is starting to put the onus of diagnosis on the patient. In other industries, such as food, being able to customize your order the way you want can be beneficial. Requiring the patients to do more is problematic.

Good point, Mike. Telemedicine is a two-interaction; ordering takeout is one-way. Big difference

A5: I've been thinking a lot recently with telehealth in the context of health maintenance. as remote monitoring tools (like CGMs, etc) continue to get better, appts with diabetic educators, A1c checkins, etc will get even more valuable as a remote capability

@saagrawa A5: I agree some exciting innovations are coming, but I think it might actually degrade our level of healthcare. I could be wrong, as perhaps medical professionals could maybe focus on higher level tasks than before.

A5: To @adityabansod's point - all these watches and devices we wear can be really quite helpful for maintenance, a form of virtual health checkups

A5: I think one major innovation that will happen in remote healthcare (broader context than just telehealth) will be as continuous glucose monitors become the standard instead of finger pricks. once we solve the mountain of data they generate, it'll be a huge step

A5. I see an expansion of telemedicine in more acute settings. i.e ICU

How so, Kenya? Can you offer a little more detail?

A4 LOL this reminds of me of the XKCD comic: there are 15 competing standards. we need one universal standard! ... how there are 16 competing standards.

https://xkcd.com/927/

A4 I agree with @adityabansod and am hopeful FHIR will be adopted more broadly and extended in it's definitions

A4: Good question Chris! The first question IT needs to ask with what problem am I trying to solve? You need to know what risk that you're trying to address first. Developing or purchasing software without a clear path creates more problems than it solves.

A4: also hopeful that walled gardens will be less so - reading and writing to multiple systems with a common framework would make life so much easier for everyone for sure. Seems like a "tooth fairy" like concept at this point though

A4: Once you know what risk you're addressing, then you can target what data you actually need from the system. The best way is to start with actionable metrics, such as the amount of vulnerabilities remediated within 30 days, over a span of a year.

A4 I really want to believe that FHIR is going to be as close as we get to one solution for the universe, but having now implemented 80+ EHRs @lumahealthhq and implementing all the major EHR's FHIR implementations ...

Then, you can develop or acquire the system that best suits your reporting needs. Having a clear project management path normally helps problems of purchasing systems that don't interoperate, and ending up with a bigger problem then you started with.

A4 ... we end up having a distinct FHIR implementation per EHR. And on top of that, there are ~3 versions of FHIR in the wild. so i'd say it's "better" than where we were 5 years ago but it's not great by any means in terms of getting access to clean or real time data.

@LeanTaaS we enable hospitals to do more with less - see more patients at lower cost with less wait by improving the utilization of their existing assets

We do this by matching supply and demand of these assets (both of which are stochastic by nature) in a much more mathematically precise way than EHRs can

thanks @editingwhiz! we @lumahealthhq provide a full EHR-integrated platform to help engage, communicate, guide, and retain patients at all points of their care journey. needing care is hard, getting access to care shouldn't be.

We wrote a book about it - https://www.amazon.com/Better-Healthcare-Through-M...

Schellman offers a wide range of compliance audits and assessments, such as HITRUST, HIPAA assessments, SOC 1 & 2, ISO (many varieties), CMMC and the like. If you need IT Compliance, we most likely have what you're looking for!

A3: Grading healthcare on a curve, we’ve made relatively great technology leaps in the last decade with EMR adoption. Thankfully we don’t use faxes any more (or less anyways) but we are still 30 years behind where airlines, transportation, package delivery, retail ar

A3: EMRs are very good databases for collecting health data, but not great for understanding data / developing cures or optimizing throughput

A3: few key areas here:

1. Physician Burn Out -- health IT caused caused it and now we have to fix it. We've made great strides in terms of data capture but for the benefit of whom?

What's exciting is the equivalent of what SalesForce or Workday have done on top of SAP or Oracle and that's starting to happen - diagnostic imaging, revenue cycle, asset optimization, clinical workflow optimization

It's amazing faxes are still being used every day somewhere in business. Yes, they have their physical form value, but still ... ;-)

A3:

2. Patients As Their Own Champions -- new regulatory frameworks and consumer apps (e.g. Apple Health / etc) are putting patients in to the drivers seat of their own HC and the overall HC software stack is struggling to keep up as patients demand more access.

A3: The biggest roadblocks are still the "sacred cows" in adopting software based tools

@adityabansod A3: I agree Aditya. I find that my clients are able to generate massive amounts of very good data; but most just accumulate it and do nothing with it. It's those that develop actionable metrics around the data that find success.

A3:

3. The Whole Patient Journey -- having the 360 degree view of what's happening for a patient can help better clinical decision making and help the patient be their own champion. There's a lot to unpack here we have a lot of interop-related questions yet to solve

@MikeSeegel When doing HITRUST assessments, HITRUST forces my clients to perform actions on the data they get, such as reviewing unauthorized record view activity, or attempted brute force attacks. They have to do something with the data they get.

A3: Agree @adityabansod - parsing through the data is the hardest part.. it's 80% of all data science

@saagrawa @mikeseegel signal to noise ratio is healthcare is just insane -- it's sorta back to to @saagrawa list from Q1 of how sift/sort thru it all where there are distinct audiences (both clinical facing and patient facing -- but also financial facing)

A3: Yep - starting with narrow "business problems" and going deep in areas with value is the only way we have found. Else you end up trying to create magic potion like IBM Watson and Haven and it doesn't quite work.

A3. EMR adoption and interoperability. Allowing patients to access and share their health records across providers.

Thank you, Kenya, for joining us!