The world of healthcare IT is similar to the birth and expansion of our universe. It started out slowly until a big bang set it all off into motion. And now, just like the expansion of our universe, healthcare IT is only picking up speed and getting bigger and bigger. So with the world of healthcare IT only getting faster and expanding out into newer and bigger areas, how can we keep track of everything? Alone, the task is impossible, but together we just might manage it. In search of a status report, we reached out to our brave Healthcare IT Today community to see what problems, technologies, opportunities, or issues they have been noticing but aren’t being talked about enough. The video below is a compilation of their answers.
Jeff Gartland, CEO at Relatient – I really think at the core and the heart of healthcare has been the relationship between the provider and the patient, the consumer. I think a lot of times we talk about the technology and think about it as a technical problem, when in reality it’s people. So I think we can talk a little bit more around that core relationship, how we optimize it, and how we improve it.
BJ Boyle, Chief Product Officer at PointClickCare – Continually, one of the challenges is really we need to drive thinking about true care coordination, which is not just about making data show up when someone goes from the hospital into the senior care setting, but really, how do we drive, take that friction out of care to help empower the caregivers on both sides to put the patient in the center of all things we do.
Isabel Hines, Senior Director of B2B Marketing at Oshi Health – Digestive health, gut health, is really coming up in the surface. It’s been long stigmatized, it was mental health 5 years ago, and now everyone’s talking about their mental health, but a lot of people still aren’t comfortable talking about their gut health. It’s poop, it’s having acid reflux, all those things but it is something that so many people, 1 in 4 Americans, are dealing with on a day-to-day basis and it’s something they can’t shut off. They’re not finding the answers they need, the system isn’t really set up to support them.
Kyle Faget, Partner and Co-Chair of Healthcare Practice Group at Foley & Lardner – Coverage and reimbursement for telehealth services. I think that we saw a lot of movement during COVID, we saw a lot of commercial insurers actually move toward covering more telehealth services, and we saw Medicare increase coverage for telehealth services, but we need more. In the past few days, there have been a couple of announcements about roll-backs for telehealth coverage and that’s exactly the wrong direction, we need more coverage not less.
Matt Hollingsworth, Founder and CEO at Carta Healthcare – I think one of the biggest things to talk about now is just how hard it is for patients to move their health data from one place to another. I just had a kid with a really complex congenital heart defect, where I had to move from Portland down to San Francisco to have a surgery done and it took me a better part of three weeks to move the data back and forth. And at this point, we’ve done a really good job at passing regulations to make that easier but the actual true linkages haven’t happened yet.
Kedar Ganta, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Caregility – In all the excitement of AI, the key thing that many are not talking about is trust and accountability. Trust is something that we have to give to our care providers and people who are receiving care. How do we establish their trust?
Elad Walach, CEO at Aidoc – When people talk about the problems with AI, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, but the thing I want to talk about more is – How do we get it at the hands of as many physicians as possible, as quickly as possible? How do we get it in the hands of community hospitals, where they need the help the most?
Mitesh Rao, Founder and CEO at OMNY Health – Data collaborations. The opportunity really is for organizations across the healthcare industry to be able to partner together through a common language of data. I think together, there’s a lot more that we can accomplish. I’d love to see more provider organizations and life science organizations coming together to further patient care and do that through research and the potentials for new medicines.
Reesha Dedhia, VP at Vaultree – In healthcare, there’s so much sensitive data, from large hospitals trying to protect all of their data infrastructure and then you go to pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, drug discovery, and there’s all this sensitive data. There are challenges protecting that data, but there’s a huge opportunity that’s missed where you can unlock value out of that data. How do you keep that secure and still unlock value?
Huge thank you to Jeff Gartland, CEO at Relatient, BJ Boyle, Chief Product Officer at PointClickCare, Isabel Hines, Senior Director of B2B Marketing at Oshi Health, Kyle Faget, Partner and Co-Chair of Healthcare Practice Group at Foley & Lardner, Matt Hollingsworth, Founder and CEO at Carta Healthcare, Kedar Ganta, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Caregility, Elad Walach, CEO at Aidoc, Mitesh Rao, Founder and CEO at OMNY Health, and Reesha Dedhia, VP at Vaultree for taking the time out of their day to talk with us! And thank you to all of you for watching the video and reading this article! We could not do this without all of your support. What problem, technology, opportunity, or issue do you see not being talked about enough? Let us know in the comments down below or over on social media! We’d love to hear from all of you!
