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AI will be key to the high-intensity modeling needed for personalized care – and New Zealand is offering a unique test bed for the development of new approaches.

Health system merger success may hinge on the work done by CIOs to create a single IT platform to support the newly created organization.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar joins the roster, which also features Aneesh Chopra, Karen DeSalvo, Michael Levitt, Mick Ebeling, Seema Verma and Susan DeVore.

Connected Care initially will be aimed at improving stroke outcomes by connecting patients in ambulances or ERs to neurologists.

The forthcoming Cloverleaf 19.1 will be the core of Infor's suite, with support for API management.

Healthcare has previously been one of the industries hesitant to shift to the cloud, but that trend may be changing for the better. Healthcare hesitated on adopting cloud in the past, due to a number of issues, such as interoperability, data security and privacy concerns, infrastructure availability and regulatory compliance worries, amongst others. The sensitive nature of data within the industry – ensuring that health data like medical histories, allergies, blood types and other health records aren’t compromised – means interoperable sharing or keeping biometric data secure is high-stakes. And regulatory compliance can be a difficult space to manage. In 2010 itself, the Australian Centre for Health Research identified more than 22,600 pages of combined state and federal legislation across 305 different Acts of Parliament covering the health sector. These regulations have created disparities between states, sometimes causing confusion and increasing the barriers to cloud. These challenges can’t be overcome immediately, but the industry has shown a surge of interest and more flexibility in cloud adoption. A recent report by GlobalData, Cloud Computing in Healthcare – Thematic Research, has found that in recent years, the global healthcare cloud computing market size is forecast to be almost US$35 billion in 2022. This amounts to an annual growth rate of 21.7 per cent between 2018 and 2022. Findings also identified that the pharmaceutical cloud computing market size is predicted to grow from $4.7 billion in 2017 to $12.1 billion in 2022. INDUSTRY SUPPORT FOR CLOUD Global industry partnerships signify this uptake of cloud. Microsoft and Allscripts subsidiary Veradigm recently announced a deal to develop a new product to help researchers conduct studies via Allscripts cloud-based electronic health record (EHR), aimed at improving time to market for new drug therapies and slashing costs on research and development. One of Australia’s preeminent clinical trials research centres made a move to consolidate electronic data capture systems into a unified cloud platform. The National Health and Medical Research Council Clinical Trial Centre at the University of Sydney has adopted Medidata’s eClinical platform for studies, said to help simplify, improve and accelerate research. In addition, Australian cancer institute Peter Mac has deployed two new cloud-hosted systems to replace a suite of systems and supercharge precision medicine in Australia. This enables the consolidation of multiple sources of information into a single data repository, stored in Microsoft Azure and accessible by multiple concurrent users. MedicalDirector’s Helix solution, built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, also aims to improve the delivery of healthcare, increase the efficiency and flexibility of medical organisations and improve evidence-based decision-making. This shows that investing in cloud computing technology has become an increased priority for healthcare organisations and networks. “For healthcare, a prominent shift is expected in cloud systems from simple data storage to using the technology to lower costs and increase efficiencies within the system,” GlobalData Managing Pharma Analyst Alexandra Annis said.    “It is foreseen to lead to a fully integrated platform in pharma that can compute tasks such as personalised patient care and clinical trial optimisation.” Snowflake Healthcare Strategy Vice President Todd Crosslin said there are three types of cloud that has become popular with the healthcare industry – infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Crosslin explained that these forms of cloud are sought after for their various capabilities. [Read more: What’s needed to drive innovation and improve affordability in healthcare? | Future healthcare tech may be beneficial, but also poses risks: report] “IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are all in demand. IaaS enables the lift and shift of existing technologies, but while not the most efficient, is well-established due to the flexible nature of the cloud and the potential cost savings of having to purchase or maintain infrastructure at various locations,” he said.  “SaaS is for companies that want the business value without the IT overhead and can compromise on customisation. As for PaaS, why build components from scratch when they are available and can be built upon?” WHAT DOES CLOUD OFFER? The majority of healthcare organisations have historically hosted their applications and data on-premises. With the adoption of virtualisation and automation, on-premise infrastructure hosting has transformed. Crosslin said disruptors born in the cloud are forcing incumbents to embrace the cloud so as to achieve speed and agility. With the speed of technological advancement, healthcare too has been under the pump to adopt it.  For GlobalData’s Annis, cloud is the bridge for the healthcare industry to enable their organisations with the latest technologies and innovation. “The industry will be able to drive to the next level of innovation and analytics, for example by using the cloud’s functionality to match data effectively with patients. This personalised approach will provide physicians with the tools to make the best treatment decisions for patients,” she said. “The power of the cloud also offers the potential to speed up the drug development process [in pharmaceuticals], without compromising efficacy or safety. This will draw from its ability to collect data from patients around the world in real-time.” [Read more: How to explain the real cost of cloud computing to your C-suite | What are the barriers to widespread telehealth adoption?] Zscaler ANZ Country Manager Budd Ilic mentioned that cloud also enables organisations to deploy applications to customers faster and provides an easier exchange of information with third parties for access to update healthcare data. “Traditionally, a patient went to a health care provider’s location to receive care or treatment. Now, with the emergence of things like telemedicine, wearable monitoring devices and remote sampling devices, patients and physicians no longer have to be in physical proximity to deliver and receive care,” Ilic said.  “Cloud allows organisations the ability to better and more quickly share information regardless of where the patient is located, while also providing better security for patient records.” CHALLENGES OF CLOUD, AND A DIFFERENT APPROACH NEEDED Ilic said cybersecurity has been done the same way for 30 years or more and the industry needs to think about and implement it in a completely different manner.  “We can no longer secure the network, as evidenced by continual breaches and data loss. We can, however, secure access to cloud applications and data by ensuring that individuals trying to retrieve that data are authorised to do so and then securing that access,” he said.  “This among other things, such as reducing complexity and utilising the cloud to provide traditional security stack services, are the way to mitigate the risks of cloud deployments.” [Read more: Big leap forward as the cloud transforms GP technology | Peter Mac looks to the cloud to supercharge tech help for cancer treatment] Other vendors, like Snowflake, said there is a need for heightened security offerings. “Many vendors, like us, have made security part of their DNA. Security concerns can be addressed with Tri-Secret Secure (three-key) encryption and fine-grained data access controls to securely and performantly store customer data,” Crosslin said. “The current mechanisms of sharing data between customer and client, or partner to partner, is typically done via file transfer protocol (FTP). The drawbacks of this method are widely understood – security, staleness, time, etc.  “But security-focused companies ensure that data sharing is done by allowing accounts to share data by query. The data does not get copied from one account to another. This can be done securely through specifying the method of access and limitations,” he added. THE FUTURE OF CLOUD IN HEALTHCARE Ilic said the next level of innovation and analytics is where healthcare’s move to cloud will have a global effect on care delivery, diagnostics and treatment.  “The ability to use large historical data sets to make preventative health care interventions based on millions of individual datasets will drive our ability to end many diseases that plague mankind today,” he said.  “The ability to draw correlations between epidemics we’ve never seen before will have a large scale impact on global health that we haven’t seen since the discovery of penicillin.”

Hospitals can use artificial intelligence-driven technologies to automate manual and expensive processes. For instance, communicating with payers has become one of the most arduous responsibilities for revenue cycle departments. This is one of the messages health IT vendor Recondo Technology wants to get across to attendees at the upcoming HIMSS19 conference. "Anyone outside this department would be shocked at the sheer volume of transactions to process," said Eldon Richards, chief technology officer at Recondo Technology. "And payers typically will only go over three at a time on the phone. When you have on average 16,000 queries to wade through a month, that's not going to cut it." The other option – to look up authorization status on the payer's website – is less time-consuming but still requires a lot of staff hours, he added. Automation is the key Automation is a proven alternative that substantially reduces time and human effort to the entire authorization process – from querying the payer's website to find out if prior authorization is required, to automating the retrieval of the payer's answers, said Richards. Recondo Technology will be discussing a variety of trends with HIMSS19 attendees, though two stand out: AI and price transparency. "AI has been under an intense spotlight. Healthcare leaders really need to be able to discern where the ROI opportunities are biggest right now." Eldon Richards, Recondo Technology "AI has been under an intense media and industry spotlight," Richards said. "Healthcare leaders really need to be able to discern where the ROI opportunities are biggest right now. We believe based on our customers' successes that automating revenue cycle management processes are among the most significant ROI opportunities at present with AI – specifically, via robotic process automation, and even more so when this automation is further enabled with machine learning and natural language processing." Interest in price transparency has redoubled since CMS mandated that hospitals must post their chargemaster lists online, he said of the other trend. "That mandate goes into effect this month, so I expect price transparency will be top of mind with many HIMSS19 attendees," he explained. "I would caution that simply complying with this mandate will not be enough to bring true price transparency to patients, as many will be confused to discover that what they will actually pay for services is markedly different than what's on the chargemaster list. So HIMSS19 attendees should be on the lookout for solutions that do give that authentic transparency into cost." Breaking through the AI hype And Richards has more advice for HIMSS19 attendees. "A lot of CIOs and CTOs will be heading to HIMSS19 with the intent to find out where AI is really working, because there's just been so much hype surrounding the topic the last few years," he said. "Now it's time for the rubber to hit the road, so to speak. My advice for separating the 'fake it till you make it' vendors from those who have an authentic AI solution to offer is to look for three basic proof points: cost, time and the use of neural networks." If an AI system can process a lot of transactions in a short amount of time but at a high cost, that's an indicator that human effort was used instead of AI-driven automation, he advised. "If it can process a lot of transactions at a cheap cost but over a longer period of time, that's also a sign that humans were doing most of the work," he said. "These first two proof points are more geared toward evaluating AI technology such as robotic process automation. When evaluating claims that a solution is machine learning-capable, make sure to verify the solution is powered by neural networks versus standard rules-based engines." With price transparency, HIMSS19 attendees should consider the CMS mandate a marketing opportunity to retain more patients, Richards said. "The mandate will drive more potential patients to the hospital's website," he commented. "An online price calculator that's easy to use, gives an accurate estimate of the patient's cost and even provides payment assistance options will give them a reason to schedule services with your hospital."   .jumbotron{ background-image: url("http://www.healthcareitnews.com/sites/default/files/u2556/HIMSSSignJumbotron.jpg"); background-size: cover; color: white; } .jumbotron h2{ color: white; } HIMSS19 Preview An inside look at the innovation, education, technology, networking and key events at the HIMSS19 global conference in Orlando. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com

The association called on government agencies to takes steps toward making data-driven healthcare more commonplace.