Here are nine key quotes about the role of innovation in healthcare that executives from hospitals and health systems across the country shared with Becker's Hospital Review in July:
Kristin Myers, executive vice president, CIO and dean of IT at Mount Sinai Health System (New York City): "Delivering the patient experience so that patients and families strengthen their relationship with the health system is our best opportunity. Technology can be an enabler when there is a holistic experience. From scheduling all the way through to discharge and remote monitoring at home will be an important part of our strategy. The key to all of this is providing a seamless patient experience; one that is easy, clear and from the tech perspective, not fragmented. Pulling all that together is a challenge, but patients will become more empowered in the future and they will expect the kind of consumer experience that they get in retail and other sectors."
Cris Ross, CIO of Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.): "We're all coping with working remotely, some better than others. As the pandemic lingers, people's expectations will rise, and we quickly need the next generation of virtual collaboration tools. Virtual care has been a success, and we've learned a lot, but patients and clinicians want next-generation tools for virtual care."
Shez Partovi, MD, director of worldwide business development for healthcare, life sciences and genomics at Amazon Web Services: "The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption in the healthcare industry. We are seeing our customers ask for support in several areas, so they innovate to better serve their patients. COVID-19 has also validated the immense value of data and interoperability. We are seeing health systems continue to lean in and explore how they can eliminate data silos more broadly, as they have done with COVID-19-related data."
Lisa Stump, senior vice president and CIO of Yale New Haven Health and Yale School of Medicine (New Haven, Conn.): "As we work to overcome the financial challenges resulting from the COVID pandemic, we will need to bring technology and digital tools that enable efficiency, patient engagement and safety, and we will need to do so quickly, creatively and cost-effectively to support the recovery and build upon the digital advances we've seen in our response. This means reprioritizing and focusing on what is critical, leveraging the depth and breadth across all segments of the IT team in flexible and agile teams."
John Halamka, MD, president of Mayo Clinic Platform: "We're going to have more demand for telemedicine, telehealth, hospital-level care in the home, wearables and the ability to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to new data sources for cure plans. That's going to be here very soon because we have changed so much, so fast with COVID-19."
Daniel Barchi, group senior vice president and CIO of NewYork-Presbyterian (New York City): "It's said that the best tech is the simplest tech to use. These are the things that can be readily used by nurses and doctors in their practices. It is the appropriate algorithms that inform them with the data they need to make decisions in the moment."
Deanna Wise, senior vice president and CIO of Banner Health (Phoenix): "Due to the pandemic, telehealth has seen an increase in adoption because of the ability to deliver care while decreasing or preventing hospital readmissions, and focusing on shared decision-making and collaborative care. Supplementing telehealth with skilled home health nursing, and expanding services to include care for mental health and continuous bedside monitoring, is going to transform this care delivery model."
Peter Fleischut, MD, senior vice president and chief transformation officer at NewYork-Presbyterian's Hauser Institute for Health Innovation: "We don't want to implement technology for technology's sake. At the end of the day, it's really about the people, process and technology, with people making up 80 percent of it, the process taking 15 percent and tech making up the remainder."
Joseph Colorafi, MD, system vice president of clinical data science at CommonSpirit Health (Chicago): "The more advanced we are on the analytics side for both short- and long-term forecasting, the more we can see where hospitals are filling up and project whether that will continue and when it will peak."