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The agency is dealing with interoperability and cybersecurity, just like everyone – but add to those hurdles a vast and work-intensive EHR overhaul, stringent budgetary requirements and challenges with workforce visibility, and the DHA has a tall order.

David Swenson, RPh, Vice President of Medical Affairs at BD, reflects on conversations with customers to provide some perspective on an underreported aspect of the opioid crises – healthcare professional drug diversion - which is growing importance to hospitals across the United States.

After introducing the Accelerate-Redesign-Collaborate strategy two years ago, Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest hospital, has become a serial producer of digital innovations.   “This strategy really fuels everything that is happening in Sheba today, and we are seeing that medical centers in other countries, especially in the US, are now trying to copy our model,” Sheba CMO and CIO Eyal Zimlichman recently told HIMSS Insights.   An open innovation campus sits at the heart of the ARC strategy, with five topics of focus, including digital innovations in surgery, VR/AR, personalised medicine, AI/ big data, and telehealth/ mHealth, and a chairman responsible for each of them.   Meanwhile, 30 new innovation projects are being launched every year, receiving $50,000 each over a rapid development cycle of ten months, a “virtual currency” used to obtain access to digital development capabilities, and staff can apply for these grants.   “We have been through three annual cycles of this now, and many of those who have applied for the nearly 100 grants are in fact physicians,” Zimlichman added. The third issue of the HIMSS Insights eBook, launched during the HIMSS19 conference taking place in Orlando this week, puts the spotlight on digital health leaders that have made innovation possible around the world.   It seeks to show that innovation is not as much about management or allocating funding, as it is about overcoming obstacles.   Find out more about Sheba’s approach to bringing innovation into healthcare here.   Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.  

The updated infrastructure offers baked-in data anonymization as well as advanced encryption and user permissioning, built on Bitfury’s Exonum private blockchain framework.

A new survey reveals that consumers still prefer phone interactions but want more communication, including digital means. And a majority are open to giving their doctors real-time access to health information via connected devices and apps.

The new Claims Lifecycle Artificial Intelligence works with Change's Intelligent Healthcare Network to improve the revenue cycle, the company says.

Regional Director for Europe Zsuzsanna Jakab spoke at the WHO Symposium on the Future of Digital Health Systems in the European Region in Copenhagen last week.

They're big and expensive projects to get off the ground, and their ROI can't just be measured in dollars and cents, said an expert at HIMSS19: Value depends on the perspective of patients and physicians too.

There’s little debating that healthcare and technology are at an interesting intersection right now. So many big ideas, so much promise. But wide-scale transformation doesn’t just happen. “All the ideas need doers, those who enable action to shift ideas to execution,” Google Cloud Director of Global Health Solutions Aashima Gupta said at the HIMSS19 Cloud Computing Forum. Three such doers also took the stage to offer a glimpse of how they are using cloud computing today and hints about the future: NewYork-Presbyterian, Mercy and Humana. “By 2022, we’re expecting to move the majority of our applications and infrastructure to the cloud, leaving just 20 percent on-premises,” Vice-President for Analytics and Clinical Systems at NYP, David Vawdrey, said. It’s not merely embracing the cloud for cloud’s sake. Vawdrey said it’s to improve patient experience, make the hardest parts of tech invisible to users and equip them with patient-facing technologies such as virtual visits. “Imagine you are asking financial advice. You call the 1-800 number, and Warren Buffett answers the phone,” Vawdrey said. “This is the vision we’re trying to create with telehealth.” Antonio Melo, Director of Humana’s Digital Experience Center, said it’s working to shift from an institution-first model to one that is person-first. “We’re interested in providing care where people spend the majority or a lot of their time,” Melo said. “How do we reinvent who is improving care in the home? How do we create contextually relevant experiences for what might be considered low-level care? We’re talking about lifecare, and it’s an entirely different thing.” While acknowledging the cultural shift required to move considerable data sets into the cloud, Curtis Dudley, Vice-President of integrated Performance Solutions at Mercy, said that moving to the cloud has also enabled the system to commercialise its cloud services and, in turn, offer them to other hospitals. Cloud-based “descriptive analytics has led to the development of data science, AI and machine learning,” Dudley said. “Our goal is analytics at the speed of thought so they can walk into meetings to actually make decisions.” NEXT UP FOR MERCY? “Our future on the cloud side is going to be more and more healthcare data in the cloud. We’re working with Epic, Azure [and] Google, and our view is the cloud analytics competent is reaching inside four walls of the hospital and accessing the data in our datacentre. We are sharing data with third parties today through the cloud, in more than 200 different places,” Dudley said. “The more we do, the more people want, internally and externally.” Humana Edge CTO Jeff Hawkins said embracing the cloud opens doors to innovation. “Cloud is important for the future of how we engage our consumers. We’re taking an approach of automation over lift and shift,” Hawkins said. “We are not moving to the cloud for speed and resiliency, though we think we’ll achieve those. The fundamental drive of the cloud is to improve the experience of our consumers.” NYP’s Vawdrey agreed that it’s about patient and caregiver experience. “We want to provide a more comfortable, relaxed environment, where caregivers can deliver high quality, high satisfaction for low acuity patients,” Vawdrey said. “That’s using tech to re-humanise rather than de-humanise healthcare.”