Arun Ramasubramanian, system senior vice president of IT and digital at Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, stopped by the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast" to discuss future health IT innovations.
Listen to the full episode here.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What technologies are you most excited about right now?
Arun Ramasubramanian: I'm really excited about the partnership I have with various chief medical officers and chief medical informatics officers in our organization, with the operators that are running our integrated delivery networks in different parts of the country. CommonSpirit is one of the largest in the country. It is just exciting to see the technology's impact on the real delivery of healthcare.
In the last decade or so, the technologies we are talking about, — to name a few, cloud engineering in general, omnichannel, consumer engagement, artificial intelligence, and actionable intelligence based on a 360 degree view of a patient — have been a barrier for adoption.
These are all technologies that have been evolving over the last 10 years, but I think it's in the last couple of years they've reached a certain level of maturity that's required for healthcare. This is unlike some of the other industries, like retail; in healthcare, the complexity around the topics of privacy, health equity and access to care makes it even harder for these technologies to scale and be reliable and affordable. That has been changing in the last two years. The maturation of these technologies is really exciting — to see that we can [apply] these to real-use cases and help patients and help the health systems in our country to get better.