The Big Unlock

In this landmark 50th episode of our podcast, Aaron Miri discusses contact tracing and UT Health’s contribution to prevent the spread of COVID-19 through their public-private partnership with city of Austin, TX.

Austin Public Health has partnered with Dell Medical School and UT Health Austin to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by doing contact tracing on behalf of the city of Austin. Besides contact tracing, the University is also using emerging forms of healthcare delivery such as symptom checking, COVID-19 drive-through testing stations, home monitoring, and nurse triage to control the spread of the current pandemic. Currently, the medical school has over 200 contact tracers working remotely and have successfully performed one-third of the contact tracing in the city of Austin.

Due to the current COVID situation, healthcare consumers are adopting virtual care technologies that are changing the way healthcare is being delivered today. To ensure smooth delivery of care post-COVID, Aaron discusses how virtual care should be a flawless experience for clinicians and patients.

On data interoperability, Aaron suggests three major areas of focus: Identifying and capturing data for public health; the need for the entire continuum of care to be on some sort of a digital system. According to Aaron, healthcare organizations need full data transparency, governance, and internal communication working together to advance interoperability. Take a listen.

In this episode, Dr. Ashish Atreja, Chief Innovation Officer, Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System discusses how virtual care technologies – remote monitoring, video visits, telehealth, and digital medicine – will bring value to health systems by decreasing cost, increasing efficiency, and improving healthcare outcomes.

Dr. Atreja’s role at Mount Sinai Health System is to enable digital health for value-based and patient-centric healthcare. He states that COVID-19 has been the most significant technology transformation agent in the healthcare industry. According to Dr. Atreja, the next technology after telehealth that will rise out of the current pandemic is digital monitoring.

Dr. Atreja is also the founder of non-profit Network of Digital Medicine (NODE.Health), that promotes evidence-based digital medicine by bringing together a network of societies, foundations, and health system associations to enable digital transformation in healthcare.

In this episode, Ceci Connolly, President and CEO of Alliance of Community Health Plans discusses the findings of their recent survey on how COVID-19 has shifted consumer behavior towards healthcare and tripled the use of telehealth and other virtual care technologies.

Ceci shows concern about the existing health inequities and hopes that we close the fundamental gap of the digital divide affecting certain sections of the society. She believes that in a post-COVID-19 era, healthcare payers and providers will focus more on virtual care for better patient experience. Ceci further hopes to see virtual care at the core of value-based model in the future.

ACHP is a non-profit organization that brings together innovative health plans and provider groups delivering affordable, community-based, high-quality coverage and care.

In this episode, Tom White, Founder and CEO of Phynd Technologies discusses why digital front door technologies and interoperability are the key to the healthcare delivery ecosystem. He also talks about the company’s evolution and the marketplace needs they address.

Digital front door technologies are being adopted extensively by healthcare systems and are practical and useful for the industry, especially in the current pandemic situation. Tom believes that 80% of healthcare should be driven through digital means and 20% through phone calls, unlike the current situation.

Phynd Technologies’ platform focuses on the provider data, defined as people, places, and services, and simplifies provider data management for healthcare systems.

In this episode, Dr. Ram Raju discusses how the global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Northwell Health and how in future healthcare delivery systems will change in response to the crisis.

Northwell Health is one of the largest health systems in New York and has been a telemedicine leader for the last five to six years. Dr. Raju believes that storing data in the EHRs and EMRs is going to be very different in the future – more video clips than text notes will be used. This means the final interoperability rule will take a different tone in terms of who gets to access the patient information and who finally owns it.

Dr. Raju also believes that healthcare systems will need to evolve and change their workflow as more and more people will be seeking care through virtual technologies. Primary care will probably shift to virtual technology, shifting face-to-face medicine to virtual medicine, and specialty care will stay in the hospitals.

In this episode, Seth Hain and Dr. Sam Butler discuss how emerging technologies like video visits will become an integral part of healthcare in the future and how the current COVID-19 pandemic is proving its effectiveness. They also discuss how health systems are advancing their virtual care technologies in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Epic observed 2.5 million video visits in April. Seth states that the changes we are seeing in the industry due to telehealth is not only convenient to the patients but also preventing the exposure of providers and clinicians on the front line. He further states that the effectiveness of technologies, like contact tracing, will be driven by broader adoption and will need to be augmented to fully account for the whole population.

Sam believes that in future physician’s schedule would be 50% face-to-face and 50% non-face-to-face visits through video, telephone, and an asynchronous electronic visit back and forth. He further states that video visits are here to stay and hopes that these visits will be associated with appropriate reimbursements models.

In this episode, Russ Branzell, CEO of CHIME discusses their role in the healthcare industry and how COVID-19 will impact health systems. Russ also shares his thoughts about the final interoperability rule and FCC telehealth investment program.

CHIME supports its members in their transformation and growth journey by assisting them in their professional development and be the best leaders in the healthcare industry. Russ states that we may see mergers and acquisitions accelerate in the industry due to the current pandemic. He also believes that the technology impact due to the COVID-19 crisis, whether intended or unintended, will accelerate digital activities in health systems.

In this episode, Amit Zavery, VP & Head of Platform and Aashima Gupta, Head of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions discuss how Google Cloud is helping healthcare organizations with digital transformation and operational efficiencies. They also discuss the new Cloud Healthcare API and how it will accelerate the healthcare industry.

In the context of healthcare, Google Cloud is providing API connectivity by applying AI/machine learning algorithms and making it accessible for the industry. The company’s new Cloud Healthcare API solution is built to ingest complex data from different industry-standard sources and provide a unified access to it for a meaningful usage. Google Cloud offers the whole lifecycle governance, policy management, security, tracking, delivery, and ease of use over time so that more value and real-time capabilities can be built around it.

To help the healthcare industry during the current COVID-19 pandemic, Google Cloud is taking targeted solutions to the market like helping researchers with cloud credits, helping with Kaggle competitions, and enabling healthcare-focused chatbots with their Cloud AI platform. They are also enabling the healthcare organizations with digital triage that can treat patients remotely and can reduce in-person visits through telemedicine.

In this episode, Karen Kobelski, VP and General Manager of Clinical Surveillance of Wolters Kluwer Health, discusses their new offerings that are helping clinicians respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. She also discusses how health systems are adopting the new interoperability rule and how it will result in better healthcare outcomes.

At Wolters Kluwer Health, the mission is to bring the latest evidence-based medicine to the benefit of clinicians, learning communities, and patients. Their infection surveillance system and pharmacy surveillance system are helping hospitals and health systems respond and cope with the current Covid-19 crisis. Karen believes that with the new interoperability rule in place, patients can be treated in a lot of different ways if they have access to their health records. She further states that telehealth will stay with us for a long time, and traditional visits to hospitals will be replaced by virtual treatments, just like everyone is working virtually today.

In this episode, Will O’ Connor, Chief Medical Information Officer of TigerConnect discusses their company structure, the marketplace they are servicing, and challenges healthcare enterprises are facing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. TigerConnect is a clinical collaboration and communication platform and serves around 6000 customers across the world.

Due to the ongoing crisis, healthcare providers are witnessing a massive uptick in telehealth and virtual care. Dr. O’Connor states that in the last 2-3 weeks there has been 10 to 15 years of advancement in telehealth both in terms of policy and in practice. The company saw a growth in their messaging platform from 5 million to 6 million in just ten days.

Dr. O’Connor hopes that after Covid-19, care delivery will undergo a permanent sea change. The notion of delivering quality of care to patients who can be managed remotely will stay with us for a long time. Take a listen.