In this episode, Mike Alkire, President & Incoming CEO of Premier Inc., discusses the ongoing vaccine roll-out and the lack of resiliency in the medical supply chain for U.S. healthcare.

He discusses how Premier is expanding their data analytics capabilities, such as AI and machine learning to make the supply chain infrastructure more resilient and support better clinical decisions. Mike believes that the changing competitive landscape of healthcare and the entrance of non-traditional players is unleashing innovation in the industry. He also shares three leadership lessons from his long and successful career. Take a listen.

In this episode, Jim Beinlich discusses the current state and maturity level of data and analytics in healthcare.

Healthcare lags other industries when it comes to using new technologies. The industry still needs to apply standardization, governance, and ensure data quality to get the right data at the right time to the right person. Jim states that one of the challenges with data is inserting it back into the workflow to make it useful. One of the important use cases of Penn Medicine’s data and analytics program has been the transition from traditional analytics to cloud-based tools and leveraging data lakes to unlock self-service data models.

Penn Medicine is one of the very few healthcare organizations to integrate genomic testing results into the EMR for diagnosis and treatment. Jim shares their extensive protocols for integrating genomic data into patient records for diagnosis and treatment. Take a listen.

In this episode, Kash Patel discusses his role as the Chief Digital Technology Officer at Penn Medicine and provides an overview of their digital transformation initiatives covering all aspects of the institution, including research, academic programs, and patient engagement.

According to Kash, the hard part with digital transformation is not necessarily implementing technology but ensuring the patient experience is seamless with the technology and they feel positive about it.

While making technology choices, Penn Medicine’s first and foremost preference is to make the maximum use of their existing EHR infrastructure. Kash also describes the governance process that includes their leadership and subject matter experts to make technology decisions about newer digital tools and platforms. Take a listen

In this episode, Dr. Rich Parker and Jennifer Polello discuss their vaccination distribution program, challenges around vaccine hesitancy, and how they have overcome this.

Community Health Plan of Washington is a not-for-profit health plan that caters to the underserved and non-English speaking communities. Their role has been to support the community health centers and getting members educated about the vaccine. One of the most successful vaccination outreach programs has been their text messaging campaign, with a nearly 80% success rate.

Arcadia works specifically with data aggregated from disparate data sources like claims, EHR, lab, state health information exchange, social determinants of health, and others. This longitudinal record of each member helps them risk stratify and identify gaps in care, thereby helping them with their vaccination outreach and distribution priorities. Take a listen.

In this episode, Josh Goode, CIO of SCAN Health Plan, discusses their digital programs, the patient population they serve, and how they evaluate digital technologies and deploy it at every stage of the care journey for improved outcomes. 

Being a Medicare Advantage plan, SCAN Health deals with the senior population. They strive to address the digital divide in the elderly by implementing software that aligns with their requirements, is easy to use, and delivers improved outcomes while taking care of patient privacy and data security. The technology considers the social determinants of health by implementing a robust data and analytics program that has helped develop AI models to predict chronic conditions. 

Josh also talks about person-centered design processes and how it helps deploy the right digital technology by looking at the patient’s journey touchpoints. Take a listen.

In this episode, Dr. Stephanie Lahr, CIO of Monument Health, and Peter Durlach, Chief Strategy Officer of Nuance Communications, discuss voice recognition technology, its demand and adoption level in the marketplace, emerging use cases, and the next stage of improvements in the technology.

According to Peter, much before COVID-19, the healthcare industry was already going through the pandemic of administrative burden resulting in clinician burnout. Nuance, through their ambient virtual assistant technology, is eliminating that burden by powering virtual consults with clinical documentation that writes itself.

Dr. Lahr states that voice recognition technology is the best way for patients to interact with their providers opposed to any other user interface. She further states that going forward the integration with the EHR and the voice recognition technology is an absolute requirement. Take a listen

In this episode, Casey Ross, National Technology Correspondent at Stat News, discusses his recently published report on FDA-approved AI-enabled tools. These are Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) tools that work as decision support tools to supply patients’ data to physicians and help them diagnose and treat the patients.

Data is the core ingredient that AI tools use. As per Casey, one of the major issues prevailing in the industry today is that there are inadequate disclosures on data sets used by many medical devices and algorithms approved by the FDA. To improve healthcare outcomes, transparency and disclosure in date sets must be the central agenda in the future. He further states that the pace of innovation, development, and building process of AI tools is outrunning the FDA and other regulators’ ability to stay on top of AI innovations. Take a listen.

In this episode, Mona Baset discusses how SCL is transforming its digital capabilities to provide a seamless digital patient experience just like other industries – retail, travel, and financial services.

According to Mona, one of the biggest challenges in adopting digital engagement is shifting to a consumer mindset. Health systems are now increasingly focusing on their digital front door initiatives. However, one of the biggest challenges in building a robust consumer app is incorporating both outside and native foundational capabilities, and bringing together a single native app.

SCL is a non-profit healthcare system and focuses on patient engagement and technologies to enable better patient experience. Take a listen

In this episode, Katherine Lusk discusses how AHIMA works at the intersection of healthcare and technology to empower patients with their health information, and ensures to keep the data accurate, accessible, and safe.

Health systems are working towards mapping patient data to the EHR systems so that the frontline care providers have the information readily available to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes. The next step is to standardize the data normalization process and make it interoperable while taking care of patient data privacy, confidentiality, and security.

Katherine says that the industry must now focus on implementing initiatives to reduce social issues such as the digital divide and health inequalities . She further states that AHIMA’s focus is to make sure that patient’s virtual health information is documented in a safe, secure, and convenient way. Take a listen

In this episode, Harry Fox discusses his role at Whitman-Walker Health (WWH) and how as a community-based health center they are serving a diverse patient population with technology disparity and making healthcare inclusive for everyone.

WWH is a federally qualified health center. A significant part of their patient population is the low-income group and LGBTQ community. Harry shares that half of their patient population is below 100% of the federal poverty level, and around 40% are below 50% of the federal poverty level. This automatically creates an issue of digital divide among them where they struggle with technology. Technology providers are addressing these disparities, and several standalone point solutions are emerging. However, the two major issues – interoperability and integration – still exist in the healthcare space. Take a listen.