With healthcare professionals retiring at a rapid pace, one chief innovation officer believes in teams interacting with other teams to bind the organization.
Richard Zane, MD, serves as the chief innovation officer at Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth.
Dr. Zane will serve on the panel "Building a Culture of Rapid Experimentation in Healthcare: Strategies That Work" at Becker's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place Oct. 4-7 in Chicago.
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Question: What are you most excited about right now?
Dr. Richard Zane: I'm excited about the potential integration of data and prescriptive intelligence into care. Digital health's potential is remarkable. Bill Gates says people overestimate the importance of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. That defines where we're going with analytics and digital and virtual care.
Q: What challenges do you anticipate over the next two years?
RZ: The biggest challenge is going to be bending the cost curve, the regulatory curve and the adoption curves. When we want to deploy technology in healthcare, it is very different than deploying technology in the travel industry, banking or shopping because of the requirement for exactitude and because healthcare change management is much different than in other industries. But the biggest challenge we have, in addition to what I described, is the regulatory and payer environment is years, or even decades, behind where healthcare is going from a technology perspective. So there are perverse disincentives in healthcare that are headwinds against the adoption and deployment of technology, and they are regulatory and financial.
Q: Where are the best opportunities for disruption in healthcare today?
RZ: Right now, we have traditional bricks-and-mortar in-person care and traditional synchronous communication. We have whatever we're describing as digital or virtual care and asynchronous communication. To disrupt and deliver a continuum where all of those different modalities can be synchronous while being one episode of care, without having to describe them as separate episodes, bills and communications, we can exponentially disrupt healthcare. In addition, we will be able to deliver what patients need: access, affordability and quality. So we will be able to bring care to them where they are, how they need it, when they want it and where it doesn't bankrupt society.
Q: How is your role as a chief innovation officer evolving? How are IT teams changing?
RZ: The way teams change is that it's not just for engineers, operators, executives or project managers; we're talking about an addition to IT experts, engineers, providers and patients. This is where the foundation of our CARE Innovation Center has been partnering with small startups and large industries to adopt their cadence and understand the requirements that others have.
It's not just at the pace of medicine, which is slow, but at the pace of the industry and being able to have a commiseration and a collaboration across multiple disciplines. Also, when I say disciplines, it's not just cardiology, emergency medicine and healthcare, but across all of the stakeholders in society, including industry, because I think the most innovative and vital work happens at the intersection of disciplines, not in isolated disciplines.