As CEO of EHR giant Epic, Judy Faulkner keeps a close eye on evolving trends and innovations in the healthcare system.
This year saw digital health adoption skyrocket and a strong shift to virtual care thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five of Ms. Faulkner's most interesting thoughts and quotes from 2020 about the future of healthcare:
1. Ms. Faulkner unveiled Epic's work on its new website, EpicShare.org, in November during Forbes Chair Steve Forbes' podcast. The website will allow Epic and non-Epic users to share creative ideas since customers' executives often want to know what others are doing so they can replicate it.
"We call that imitate to innovate," Ms. Faulkner said. "What we're saying is that it's good to have a chief innovation officer, but you really need a chief imitation officer to watch what others are doing and share."
2. During a Dec. 13 episode of former Sen. Bill Frist's "A Second Opinion" podcast, Ms. Faulkner highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence in healthcare and how it is making an impact in clinical care.
"I think where AI really works well is when there are so many things to think about that the human brain doesn't work as well as a machine. There are many inputs – for example, the patient is deteriorating or has sepsis – that AI can alert healthcare givers to hours before they would have been able to recognize it on their own. And that's going to be saving a lot of lives – it already is."
3. On whether the pandemic has changed her outlook on interoperability and sharing data, Ms. Faulkner told CNBC's Bertha Coombs the following:
"We were actually the originators of interoperability. That was in the early 2000s, and it was because my husband, who's a physician, had a patient who was under good care, but she went with her family to another city. She got sick, she went to the emergency department, and she died. And he kept saying, 'If they had her record, they would have known what to do. It would have been easy.'"
4. Ms. Faulkner told Business Insider in April that she thinks hospitals and health systems in the future will standardize data definitions so regulators, such as the CDC, can more quickly access data needed for monitoring public health emergencies.
"If people define the data differently, then you can't aggregate it. So that's a big problem that there isn't enough standardization. And just collecting the data when it isn't standardized doesn't get you very far," Ms. Faulkner said.
5. Because of the pandemic, Ms. Faulkner thinks IT deployments at health systems will become more efficient, she said during a September Business Insider interview. She added that her team has worked with providers during the pandemic to redesign the implementation process to make it virtual and do the install faster.