Karen Murphy, PhD, RN, executive vice president and chief innovation and digital transformation officer for Geisinger in Danville, Pa., joined the Becker's Healthcare podcast to talk about innovation amid the pandemic and how technology improves healthcare delivery.
Below is an excerpt of that conversation. Click here to hear the entire episode.
Question: How is Geisinger thinking about innovation today, and what's on the horizon?
Dr. Karen Murphy: At Geisinger, we don't innovate for the sake of innovation. We innovate to solve problems. The healthcare industry has a lot of problems to solve, but we try to remain focused on true transformation. Successful innovation is really hard to do because it's hard to move the needle on cost and quality, but we're really trying to focus on developing transformational care models that produce measurable results where we can actually demonstrate we've made a difference in cost and quality.
Q: Where have you seen success with innovation, and what are the new projects you're planning?
KM: We're accelerating what we were working on before the pandemic and concentrating on where we can be impactful. One of those areas is chronic disease management, or developing new care models for chronic disease patients taking a really holistic approach. Historically, we've always looked at a patient who is diabetic and prescribed one way of managing care. We manage patients with COPD another way and hypertensive another way. We're now trying to look at the whole patient and develop strategies of leveraging technology, patient-reported outcomes, artificial intelligence and machine learning to figure out how we stay closer to our patients versus the episodic, once-a-month call or visit to the physician.
We want to leverage technology to stay closer to patients so we can actually prevent exacerbation of disease requiring a higher level of care or progression of disease and really improve patient outcomes in that way.
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