At the Becker's Hospital Review Annual CIO and CEO Roundtables in Chicago, Nov. 4 and 5, Bill Shickolovich, CIO, Tufts Medical Center in Boston; Gautam Shah, vice president of product management, Vocera; Keith Griffin, MD, medical group CMO, Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health; Bryan Yarbrough, web, mobile and social media marketing, Tulsa, Okla.-based Hillcrest Healthcare System, Albuquerque, N.M.-based Lovelace Health System and Amarillo, Texas-based BSA Health System, discussed the mhealth technology today and what kinds of problems it needs to help solve in the future.
Here are five key observations from the panel discussion:
- mhealth means different things to different people, said Mr. Shickolovich. "For us, implementing health IT and mhealth resulted in a case mix index jump up 20 percent as well as fewer patients coming in for uncomplicated problems. But, we are seeing higher complexity of cases," he said.
- According to Mr. Yarbrough, we tend to think of mhealth as being an application or a wearable device, but it includes anything that is on-the-go, such as Youtube, social media platforms, etc. "Patient education is an important aspect of mhealth," he said. "At my organizations, we are producing custom videos and blog posts to educate the patient population."
- Mr. Shah noted that communication among healthcare providers and between providers and patients is key for high-quality healthcare delivery and that is one of the biggest issues that mhealth must address. "Communication is the innovation that makes healthcare better," he said. "But it goes beyond that. It also needs to be able to drive efficiency." Health systems can look into wirelessly connecting the most important apps providers use so they can complete everything they need and see the data in one place.
- Video visits are another aspect of mhealth that healthcare organizations should consider. Novant Health has seen some success with these typed of visits, especially with postoperative care for uncomplicated procedures, according to Dr. Griffin. "We are still figuring it out," he said. "However, it is a partial solution. We also have a project we are piloting for adolescents and children who need to see a psychiatrist. They can go to their primary care provider and have video conference with their psychiatrist."
- It is key, however, that healthcare organizations remember that great communication and great data isn't useful without context, according to Mr. Shah. The data needs to be actionable.