In hailing cabs, shipping goods, even ordering pizza, the future is now — but it’s only just arrived for health care.
As hospitals and health systems work to make their electronic health records interoperable, and new apps try to better connect patients to their doctors beyond the walls of the examining room, five executives at the intersection of tech and health gathered for a keynote panel on the second day of the 2016 U.S. News Healthcare of Tomorrow Conference Thursday in the nation’s capital.
Ed Park, executive vice president and chief operating officer of athenahealth, which provides cloud-based tech services for health providers and apps, led off with the luncheon keynote address:
“We already know what the future of health care is going to look like, because we are living it in other areas of our lives,” he said. He highlighted the expansion of Amazon, which grew from bookseller to one-stop-shopping site, to most recently a web-hosting platform and innovator for delivery services.
Its web server and warehouse services, he added, are leased not just to collaborators, but to competitors — illustrating how tech innovations and the cooperation they foster is disrupting fundamental business models, and could offer potential paths for health systems to follow, too.
“Competing and collaborating at the same time in whatever is in the interest of the customer,” Park said. “The question for us is this: We have seen what Silicon Valley has been able to do by putting the customer at the center at their world. What would happen if we put the patient at the center of ours?”
A panel discussion, moderated by NPR’s Scott Hensley, followed:
Innovation requires shifting how providers think of health care, and where to dedicate resources:
“We focus on people who get sick. We drive all health care to people who are sick. And it’s not care. Before, through whatever the treatment, as post that, that’s care,” said Yumin Choi, a partner at HLM Venture Partners, which invests in health care technology.
Tech will help bring about that change:
Electronic health record, or EHRs: “We’re in the process of just laying basic infrastructure in place, and the really interesting stuff is just about to get started,” Park said. “With the EHR infrastructure we have in place, we can predict things like the flu. We can know which antibiotics work in which areas of the country. That kind of surveillance … can happen once you have the basic building blocks in place.”
Devices and mobile apps: “There’s a lot of things that happen between doctors’ visits that are really important,” said Stephanie Tilenius, founder and CEO of Vida, an app that pairs users with health coaches. “Measuring someone’s blood pressure on a consistent basis, someone’s heart rate when they work out, someone’s water intake when they have CHF or COPD, what they’re eating if they have Crohn’s [disease], stress levels — there are a lot of things we capture that are important to the physician to understand what’s going on on an ongoing basis.”
The cloud: RingMD connects doctors with patients, and it’s had particular success in Southeast Asia, says Laura Wallace, vice president of health and life science at Microsoft. For patients in rural areas especially, they have “to travel quite a distance to get a diagnosis,” she said. “They can’t go back if it’s wrong or they have a reaction.”
Business models are changing, and that’s forcing hospitals and health systems to use these new tools and new realities:
Interoperability between software: “Interoperability is now becoming an existential thing to most hospital systems,” Park said. Hospitals and health systems will need to not only have the ability to share data across platforms, but the willingness to do so, too.
That interoperability remains a huge challenge: “The average hospital has over 200 systems, most of them don’t speak to each other … When you start digging into the weeds why that’s a problem, it’s not that you have all these disparate systems, you have different groups that all things differently, they have different codes. It becomes exponential. So how do you unify that in a way that makes sense? It becomes exponentially hard,” Choi said.
All the while, consumers are more empowered — but still constrained: “We’re paying health insurance premiums, we’re paying copays. If you ask someone to pay an extra $200 to get a diagnostic done, you look at the payer” — the insurance company — “and ask, ‘Why aren’t you paying this?'” Choi said. But, a system as easy as “going to Amazon and seeing what has 5 stars and clicking yeah I’ll buy that, we’re still a ways away from that.”
SPECIAL REPORT: [Healthcare of Tomorrow]
But even with the most advanced and most functional tech, humans matter most:
“You can use automated intelligence, you can use bots, you can use a lot of technology to augment the human element, to enable scaling, but the human element is essential,” Tilenius said.
“We want to get back that doctor-patient relationship. It’s about having the technology in the background, not the foreground,” Wallace said. “Allow the humans with their intellect to do what they do best. That’s going to be the design point for where we go forward.”
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Health Care Goes Digital, and Hospitals Look for Human Role originally appeared on usnews.com
