Welcome to our Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundup. Each week, we’ll be providing a look back at the articles we posted and why they’re important to the healthcare IT community. We hope this gives you a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed during the week.
eClinicalWorks Goes from 0 to 60 with AI. At the recent eClinicalWorks Enterprise Summit, CEO Girish Kumar Navani spent an hour on demos of AI across the eCW EHR, from search to summaries to robotic process automation. Navani compared the surge in AI functionality to the impact of the smartphone in healthcare – only ChatGPT has done it in months, but it took the smartphone years. Read more…
Learning by Listening: A Winning Formula for The Health Management Academy. THMA CEO Renee DeSilva spoke to Colin Hung about gathering insight from more than 2,000 healthcare executives to identify key industry trends such as the impact of AI and process automation and the steps necessary to protect against cyberattacks. Read more…
Looking at Fax As An On-Ramp for Interoperability. The fax machine is the technology that everyone in healthcare loves to hate – but 75% of patient information is still exchanged via fax. Scott Turicchi at Consensus Cloud Solutions told Colin that the ubiquity of fax shouldn’t be ignored as the industry aims for interoperability, especially since faxes can easily be converted to structured, digital documents. Read more…
How Houston Methodist Stood Up a Virtual ICU in Six Months. The organization’s Michelle Stansbury spoke to John Lynn about the benefits of remote monitoring and smart devices in the virtual ICU, along with the need to consider everything from network and security infrastructure to AI and ambient listening when expanding the use of virtual care within the hospital. Read more…
Simple Basics Are Still Needed to Thwart Cyberthreats. Ryan Witt at Proofpoint and Tom Stafford at CDW told John that training against phishing attacks, practicing responses to attacks, and implementing proven technologies are the fundamental cybersecurity steps that all organizations should take. Read more…
The Forgotten Benefits of Multi-Cloud in Healthcare. Fear of the cloud seems to have subsided in healthcare, especially given that the cloud enabled organizations to be flexible in the early days of the pandemic. Listening to a panel at HIMSS23, John heard three health systems explain how a multi-cloud strategy supports scalability, data-sharing, and innovation – priorities for most organizations today. Read more…
It’s Time to Just Get Connected Already. Ten years after CommonWell was funded, and with TEFCA in full swing, John sat down with the organization’s Paul L. Wilder and Liz Buckle and talked about building momentum for interoperability beyond treatment at the point of care to support public health and manage patient healthcare journeys. Read more…
Improving Internal Communications Leads to Better Stroke Outcomes. The sooner a patient with a stroke is treated, the greater the chance of survival. Dr. Will O’Connor at TigerConnect told Colin how instant communication with an emergency shortens door-to-needle time form 60 minutes to as little as 15 minutes. Read more…
Taking a Continuous Approach to Cybersecurity. In the latest CIO Podcast, John and Renown Health’s Steven Ramirez discussed all things cybersecurity, touching specifically on the benefits of zero trust in a healthcare setting as well as looking at cybersecurity as more than check-the-box compliance. Read more…
How Epic Is Working to Incorporate Generative AI. John spoke with Epic’s Erika Koch and Seth Hain at HIMSS23 about Epic’s collaboration with Microsoft Azure AI to make doctor’s lives easier by automating tasks such as organizing inboxes or drafting messages to patients. The conversation also covered Epic’s increasing interest in genomics and life sciences. Read more…
AI Is Transforming the Patient-Provider Relationship. The need for physicians to do administrative tasks before, during, and after visits gets in the way of building better relationships with their patients. Ronen Lavi at Navina described how generative AI can revolutionize how data informs the physician-patient interaction and make more holistic care possible. Read more…
The Goal of RPM is Management, Not Just Monitoring. Remote monitoring is a proactive approach to care delivery, and RPM succeeds when organizations put data to use instead of just collecting it. Dr. Lucienne Ide at Rimidi said getting remote patient management right requires interoperability, data transparency, and decision support. Read more…
Data Sharing Transforms Medicine, So Let’s Make It More Accessible. Timi Leslie at BluePath Health and Gregg Smith-McCurdy at Hill Physicians Medical Group outlined the benefits of complying with California’s Data Exchange Framework, which helps providers and community organizations share information and improve care. Read more…
Your Teams Need the Right Skills to Protect Healthcare Data. New regulations, modern technologies, and heightened risk of data breach make protecting patient data more complex than ever before. Ameesh Divatia at Baffle highlighted the importance of classifying data and keeping tabs on how data is moved and used throughout an organization. Read more…
Choosing Tech That Benefits All Healthcare Stakeholders. Providers are experiencing burnout from complex administrative processes and technology workflows. Holon Solutions’ Jon Zimmerman called for an empathetic approach to designing clinical software that prioritizes the needs of providers while aligning with the expectations of payers. Read more…
Featured Health IT Job: Ambulatory Analyst at a Long Island-based client of Lloyd Staffing posted to Healthcare IT Central.
Bonus Features for May 21, 2023: 82% of wearable users are willing to share data with their physicians, and 81% of Americans trust pharmacists and nurses to diagnose minor illnesses. Read more…
Funding and M&A Activity:
- Care management platform Laguna Health closed a $15 million Series A funding round.
- Pear Suite raised $2.5 million in seed funding; the company is developing services to help community health workers identify and respond to social determinants of health.
- Cost transparency platform Cascade Health raised $1.7 million in venture funding.
- Real-world data marketplace Prognos Health raised $23 million in growth equity.
Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.
