Health IT officers need to be prepared for the future and have a plan to adapt to economic and technological changes.
Three health IT officers recently joined the "Becker’s Healthcare Podcast" and were asked similar questions about the future of care and the challenges that the future presents.
Question: What are some of the top challenges that you are preparing for over the next two years?
Denise Basow. Chief Digital Officer at Ochsner Health (New Orleans): I started this saying how, what an interesting time it is in healthcare. It's also a pretty challenging time. I think from a health system perspective, our biggest challenges will be around the workforce and the economic consequences of that. Healthcare has not been immune to the "Great Resignation." Everybody's aware of the rising costs of delivering that care, and that's unlikely to change. The pretty rapid rise in cost to care that we've seen in the past year or so, that's not going anywhere. We have to come to terms with that new reality and figure out how we're going to deal with some of these workforce issues from a health delivery perspective.
I think the change management to bring about some of the transformation that's required is going to be very challenging. Change is hard for everyone and especially in healthcare, where systems have been established for literally decades. We will literally be asking our clinicians to practice differently, and that's never easy. I think a third challenge is around health equity. We're beginning to talk about that more and more. I've seen that in stark terms in Louisiana, which has a population that has a lot of people that are in high need and also have poor resources.
Question: What are some of the top challenges that you are preparing for over the next few years?
Joel Vengco. Senior Vice President and CIO at Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare: Right now I think we're all facing financial challenges. There are numerous factors that are creating these workforce challenges for us. We have a lack of nurses and the ability to get nurses. We end up having to do a lot of agency outreach, and that is expensive reimbursement contraction, the lasting impact of the pandemic, geopolitical issues that are impacting economies, supply chains, inflation and so on. We were anticipating this year of having a banner year in many ways, because of the way that Hartford HealthCare has really sort of withstood the pandemic and all the different types of things we have built up to this point. And all indicators suggested that we were going to do very, very well.
I think we are challenged this year, and I think we are doing better than most, but we are still challenged. I think financially speaking, those are one of the top challenges that we have, especially as we think about growth. As we think about putting into place new digital and data capabilities, you need enough capital to be able to orchestrate that. I think that is going to be a challenge. I think the second challenge is really just about how we get to market faster. Our vision of personalized, coordinated care is achieved by accelerating this data and digital platform and really getting to this on-demand healthcare model.
Question: How do you see healthcare delivery changing in the next five years? What technologies are most essential to support that shift?
Michael Pfeffer, MD. CIO at Stanford Healthcare (Palo Alto, Calif.): I think if you ask five people you get 10 different answers. So I kind of think about this shift of value and that has been talked about, but I am looking at it in a little bit of a different light over the next five years in that the value that people or patients or providers get out of healthcare delivery and working in healthcare, I think is more personal and requires personal preference and personal choices in ways that we are getting better and better at providing. It is kind of an individual value proposition to patients, to clinicians and to society in general.
So how do we do that with technology while we really need to get our technology smarter in order to better support clinicians and patients? So, you know, a lot of the buzzwords — AI, precision health wearables, all of these things — but being more customized to the patient's needs and easier to use and integrate for our clinicians. So it is really focusing on those that are receiving the care and those that are providing the care. I would also say that I think we are getting better with big data and analytics, and this is going to have to become more and more useful for both providers and patients. I think that is going to happen by a little bit more focus on what I call small data, which is the kind of individualized data that is collected and aggregated into big data. As smaller data gets more accurate [and] easier to collect, we are going to get better insights as we bring all that data together.
So I think that is going to be really important and something that our technologists and data scientists are gonna play a huge role in. I mentioned health equity. I think this is absolutely critical. We need to weave it into the fabric of all our technologies that we are using in healthcare. And then finally, clinician well-being is really, I think, front and center now. It is absolutely critical to how we think about the user experience, how we design and implement technologies and how we look toward improving upon automation opportunities to help reduce some of the burden around technology and administrative tasks.