Dr. Ashis Barad has a vision for healthcare; one in which providers leverage the information they have to guide patients along the journey. One in which a pediatrician, for example, knows right away why a parent has taken his or her child into the clinic. One that works, “simplistically, like a Netflix engine. We surface our recommendations to you. We guide you, and you choose what you want.”
Getting to that point, however, is anything but simple. “In order to guide you, we need to know you. And to know you, we need data,” said Barad, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Allegheny Health Network. And not just data, but an infrastructure that enables it to flow (at least somewhat) seamlessly, a governance structure that ensures the right processes are in place, and a culture that ties it all together.
During a recent interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor and Director of Social Media at healthsystemCIO, Barad talked about how having both digital and IT under his purview has enabled him to create “one integrated roadmap,” while also lessening the burden on clinicians. He also discussed how Highmark Health and Allegheny Health Network’s “Living Health” initiative hopes to bolster engagement by breaking down traditional walls; and how he is leveraging his experience as a physician to “bring that voice to the table.”
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* By placing digital and IT under one umbrella, AHN leadership is able to “make sure anything and everything we do in this digital, virtual health world does not in any way add burden to our clinicians’ experience.”
* “Because there has just been way too much on the plate, legacy healthcare IT has been a ‘no’ culture,” said Barad. The goal is to progress to ‘no, because’ to ‘yes, if’ and eventually ‘yes, because.’
* As CDIO, “my role is to determine how we can surface that to clinicians in a way that they see value in the data that’s flowing back to them, but without data overload and alert fatigue.”
* There weren’t enough clinicians at the table that were representing the voice of the end user and building it into the workflow in a way that made the physician say, this is something I want to use. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing; to bring that voice to the table.
* In order to guide you, we need to know you. And to know you, we need data. I think that’s our journey here. Through our partnership with Google, and with having a payer and a provider, we feel like we have all the elements to go down that path with data.
Q&A with Ashis Barad, MD, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Allegheny Health Network
Gamble: Hi Ashis, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. Can you provide a high-level overview of Allegheny Health Network and Highmark Health?
Barad: I’m happy to do it. Thanks for having me, Kate. Allegheny Health Network just celebrated its 10th year anniversary as a network. Allegheny General Hospital has been around for a long time, but the confluence of the 14-hospital system that is owned as one entity by Highmark Health has been around for a decade. The system does $4 billion in annual revenue, has about 2,000 employed providers, and more than 300 clinical locations and offices. We’re part of a very successful clinically integrated network in the western Pennsylvania region that comprises around 7,500 providers.
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