From their thoughts on how healthcare innovation has evolved throughout the pandemic to their opinions of retail disruption in the industry to their concerns about HHS' upcoming interoperability rules, here are six key quotes about the role of innovation in healthcare that executives from hospitals and health systems recently shared with Becker's Hospital Review:
Daniel Durand, MD. Chief Innovation Officer at LifeBridge Health (Baltimore). As many observers in the industry have noted, the pandemic has been like a “fast-forward” button for the history of healthcare with regard to digital health and consumerism. It has very clearly validated the legitimacy of care delivery through telehealth, mobile patient engagement, remote patient monitoring and sometimes even AI. But the 12 plus months of unrelenting stress and fatigue has also reminded us that healthcare workers may be heroic, but they are not comic book superheroes — they are ultimately human and vulnerable to burnout. As a result, we now have more innovation initiatives than ever that are focused on ensuring the health, wellbeing and resilience of the healthcare workforce.
Brian Herrick, MD. CIO at Cambridge (Mass.) Health Alliance. The biggest retail disruption so far to healthcare has been convenience. Healthcare has been built based on what is easiest for the healthcare system to deliver great care. The introduction of retail into healthcare has people voting with their feet.
Convenience is one of the most important factors for people choosing where to seek care and the big stores know how to deliver convenience. This competition has forced a paradigm shift for traditional healthcare providers — to start to think of care delivery from the patient perspective and move from great care to exceptionally patient-centered care.
Kathy Azeez-Narain. Chief Digital Officer at Hoag Hospital (Newport Beach, Calif.). Technology for the sake of having all the systems you need is no longer enough. We have spent more time on identifying the key problems we have to solve for the patient/provider/consumer and overlaid a deep focus on where digital/innovation plays a role. We want to pursue the ideas that will improve healthcare, not just focus on implementing what already exists in the industry.
Audrius Polikaitis. CIO and Assistant Vice President of Health Information Technology at UI Health (Chicago). 2021 interoperability is limited to the United States Core Data for Interoperability data set, which typically is all contained within our EHR systems. However, in 2022, the interoperability requirement is extended to all electronic health information, which can originate from EHRs, diagnostic systems, imaging platforms, etc. It is yet completely unclear how we will comply with these requirements. There is much more fun to come.
Ash Goel, MD. Senior vice president and CIO at Bronson Healthcare (Kalamazoo, Mich.). The key to a persistent and sustainable model that creates disruption in the retail healthcare delivery sector is a set of wraparound services that acts as a consumer’s navigator, advocate, educator and financial advisor-in-chief while creating pricing alignment between payers, pharmacies, hospitals, providers and providers. This can only be done by taking on the whole set of products and technologies that provide the entire gamut of what a consumer might want.
Zafar Chaudry, MD. Senior Vice President and CIO at Seattle Children's. Getting healthcare information systems to communicate in a predictable and secure way will be a continuing problem. Getting healthcare information systems’ vendors to play in a collaborative way with each other, even with the rules, will remain a risk.