Patient Engagement

An interview with Philip Daffas, CEO of PainChek.

The multiyear expansion will see the Utah health system and IT vendor continue to "diligently work toward the goals we set out to accomplish together," said HIMSS-CHIME CIO of the Year Marc Probst.

Not only can speech recognition increase the time clinicians spend with patients, but using the technology in the cloud will ensure clinicians are less restricted, says Dr. Simon Wallace, CCIO at Nuance Communications UK Ltd.

What are the issues that will make up the agenda over the next few years?

Update: HIMSS20 has been canceled due to the coronavirus. Read more here. Outdated technology and processes create challenges across an overburdened healthcare system, resulting in increased costs, alienated patients, and inferior outcomes across the healthcare system. However, virtual health assistants and chatbots aim to improve the conversation between healthcare provides, payers and patients and put more information in the hands of the end users, to help healthcare organizations improve processes and reduce costs. "Virtual health assistants can help healthcare organizations improve processes and put more information in the hands of their users," explained Hadas Bitran, group manager for Microsoft Healthcare Israel. Bitran, who will address the topic this week at HIMSS20, said to provide value, virtual health assistants need to be built with healthcare intelligence, including understanding medical terminology, user intents and context, and providing credible answers. "The virtual assistant needs to be integrated to the organization’s assets and extended to support its processes and needs, while maintaining top privacy, security and compliance standards to allow it to handle healthcare use cases and data," Bitran noted. "Virtual health assistants need to be designed to bring enough value to users, be it patients or doctors." She said challenges and pitfalls can include virtual assistants that are designed to be too limited, or can only do one thing. This means virtual assistants need to be able to handle diversion from the conversation and unexpected responses, and they need to constantly learn what the user expectations are. "Especially in healthcare, virtual assistants need to constantly update the content they rely on, and need to understand when they don’t understand or can’t help," Bitran said. "Those challenges and pitfalls need to be considered right from the start, when choosing the technology." Microsoft Healthcare sees a broad range of use cases for virtual health assistants, including cases that involve checking symptoms and finding information about providers, services, locations and coverage. Virtual health assistants could also help with finding information about healthcare conditions, medications and procedures, and improving administrative processes like proactive follow-up, sending reminders and scheduling. "We also see use cases like assessment questionnaires and matching patients to potential clinical trials,” she said. “As virtual health assistants become more integrated with the healthcare system, their role will expand." Mobile technology and connected devices will also allow virtual health assistants to become a productive mean of communication between remote patients, providers and payers, and put more information in the hands of users when and where they need it. Bitran noted one example for this impact is that the broad types of media available to mobile users introduces the need for virtual health assistants to support voice channels, handle visual inputs, and enable contextual handoff to humans over chat, voice or video. She noted that while virtual assistants will not replace medical professionals, the virtual assistants could augment the medical professionals’ work and reduce the burden on them from the system. Bitran will share insights on virtual health assistants in her HIMSS20 session, "Virtual Health Assistants: Best Practices and Real Use Cases." It’s scheduled for Tuesday, March 10, from 3-4 pm in room W414A.

Stephen Bromhall, CIO at East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust, says that interoperability is the key when it comes to being able to deliver the right care, at the right time and with the right information.

Dr. Khulood Mohamed Alsayegh, head of clinical standards and guidelines at the Dubai Health Authority, says that the drive toward leveraging telehealth to empower patients is aimed at utilizing technology and the human factor to improve the patient experience.

AdventHealth, the faith-based Florida health system that runs 50 hospitals and more than 1,200 outpatient settings in nine states nationwide, has decided to deploy a new electronic health record and revenue cycle management system from Epic – replacing its existing Cerner technology. According to reports from KCTV and Kansas City Business Journal, AdventHealth – which was known as Adventist Health System until this past year, and is one of the country's biggest non-profit systems – says the transition will begin next month and could take three to five years. "The shift is expected to take up to five years and Cerner is committed to working closely with AdventHealth to continue delivering superior healthcare technology solutions throughout the transition," said Cerner officials in a written statement. AdventHealth has been a Cerner customer since 2002, and with the technology some of its hospitals have reached Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model. The choice to move instead to rival Epic was a business decision, driven by the need to improve provider and patient experience, AdventHealth President and CEO Terry Shaw told KCTV. "Our journey to become a consumer-focused clinical company requires a fully connected network throughout our entire enterprise," said Shaw. "Connecting our network with a robust, integrated health record platform will give our caregivers access to the clinical information they need at the point of care and ultimately advance our consumer promises through a more seamless experience for those we serve." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.

Kalle Killar, deputy secretary general at the Ministry of Social Affairs in Estonia, says that citizens have full access to how their data is used in managing their healthcare which helps ensure trust remains high between the stakeholders.