Head of Radiology Solutions at Philips, Sham Sokka has spent his career innovating in the healthcare space. Here, he discusses the key trends in health IT today and the most exciting developments to improve the patient experience.
Question: How does your organization gain buy-in when it is implementing a new technology or solution?
Sham Sokka: I think the fundamental piece of this is to truly understand how people will benefit from the new technology or solution and what it will require from an implementation and maintenance perspective. From the beginning, all stakeholders should be engaged to provide perspective and feel educated and empowered to move through the process with you. For a technology project, key stakeholders include IT folks and clinical operations folks -that's physicians- and you have to bring them on board. There are some organizations that have clinical consensus groups, who would need to be brought into the process as well.
Q: In the past 12 months, how have you adapted to new patient experience expectations in the age of consumerism?
Sham Sokka: I think what we as patients and consumers are expecting is a similar experience and level of service that we get at a retail store or when buying something online. People want to have things like online scheduling and the confidence that they’ll be seen on time so they can schedule their days around their appointment. The retailization of the patient experience is driving a whole new paradigm – and with high deductible health plans, patients have choices. I think health systems are realizing that they are losing patients and business due to operational ineffectiveness. A brand name hospital may not be operationally effective, meaning they are not able to get people in and out in a reasonable amount of time, and they are losing patients. Additionally, the HCAP scores as a benchmark for patient experience is a thing of the past. I think it's fantastic; it's causing hospitals to look at themselves and realize what they could be.
Q: What is the most exciting thing happening in health IT right now?
Sham Sokka: The patient experience innovations are extremely exciting. You are seeing things like text messaging chat bots that can answer questions or ping patients about upcoming studies, as well as scheduling and results communication. Also, extending that into the home care arena, where you have patients who can really move the care programs and compliance for that. That's outside of the hospital, but if you go inside the hospital, what I think is interesting and exciting is all of the real-time analytics and embedded systems being put into the workflow that now have operational support and clinical decision support in context.
Q: What's one conviction in healthcare that needs to be challenged?
Sham Sokka: The challenge of access -- the idea that there are different levels of access to care. Medicaid and Medicare patients may have access to a different level of care than privately insured patients and you're seeing that in the field. I think if we truly use all of these technologies to drive our cost structure down, we can provide a much higher level of access and base services than we do today, and that’s really why I'm excited to be in this space: using informatics and IT to take mundane costs out of the system so we can bring healthcare access to the patient.
Q: How do you promote innovation within your organization?
Sham Sokka: At the end of the day, Philips is an innovative company and we are always motivating people to do the next best thing for patients. We invest a lot of effort and resources for it, and work in very close partnership with healthcare providers and patients to ensure we’re driving meaningful innovation. We can't do this in a vacuum and welcome collaboration – a lot of our partners are patients because these are home care solutions, so it becomes co-innovation.
Q: How does Philips help organizations improve the revenue cycle process?
Sham Sokka: We aren't directly in the revenue cycle area, but we’re at the front end of the revenue cycle – all of the billing and coding and exam-type of protocol upfront. If we can help automate a protocol, visit or study, and automatically make it a certain code — and we have several types of solutions where we are working on those types of things — then the revenue cycle isn't deciphering how to code things. You have a direct one-to-one mapping, and can speed up the revenue cycle. That's more the area we are in – getting clinical transparency in mapping, to enable optimization of the revenue cycle downstream.