Marquee speakers share thoughts at Chicago conferences

I was back in the office this week after a trip to Chicago for the American Health Information Management Association’s annual conference plus our Clinical Innovation + Technology's CMIO Leadership Forum: Transforming Healthcare through Evidence-Based Medicine. I hope you were able to read our coverage of both meetings as several prominent leaders in the healthcare community shared their thoughts and predictions on the current state of healthcare reform.

For one, Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, national coordinator of health IT, called this is “a heady and hectic time” for healthcare. “The pace of change only seems to be accelerating,” including change in the structure of delivery and in how care is paid for, he said.

With all the change in healthcare, including hospital consolidation, patient-centered medical homes, bundled payments, accountable care and much more, “there is a lot of uncertainty about exactly what shape” the healthcare system will take in the future. He is optimistic, though. He said he appreciates that transforming healthcare is a “tall order” and “sometimes it’s hard to feel that this time is going to be different.” However, healthcare has to find a way to deliver higher quality care at lower cost. “We have to.”

This time is different, he said, because “we have tools we never had before.” Plus, the three things that have to change in order to convert an ecosystem are, in fact, all changing. Those three essentials are how care is paid for, how care is delivered and how patients care for themselves. If just one of those essentials was changing, it wouldn’t work. “All three are lining up,” he said. It’s not easy, partly because no one entity controls healthcare but, “the changes are being brought together in a triple strand for a new DNA for our healthcare system.”

Population health management is “the clearest form” of changes in the delivery of care. It’s the “phrase that’s all the rage.” But, providers have to get the data first. That’s why, he said, quality measures were included in Stage 1. So providers could get the data, work on the workflows and get feedback from the data. Those measures “set the foundation for data collection and data use, and improvements and quality within the practice.” Providers should collect, monitor and review data over and over in small cycles, he said.

Meanwhile, Wil Yu, senior advisor on innovation for the city and county of San Francisco and former special assistant, innovations at the Office of the National Coordinator of HIT (ONC), urged his audience to “think through a lens of innovation.”

All healthcare innovation efforts should begin with the patient, he said. “That is the driving reason why we innovate. Never lose sight of this because it’s easy to talk about all the technology and lose sight of the patient.

Yu related the current healthcare system struggles to those experienced by travelers in the 1500s who often suffered from and died of scurvy. Although experimenters began learning in 1601 that consuming a small amount of lemon juice during their travels prevented the disease, it took more than another 250 years for that discovery to reach full diffusion through such developments as the British Board of Trade incorporating a requirement of citrus aboard all merchant vessels.

Today, “diffusion of innovation is vitally important to the improvement of healthcare delivery,” Yu said. “If we can innovate new tools, services, applications and business models, we can contribute to better care for that patient who, too often, receives care that is just average or typical."

Beth Walsh

Editor, Clinical Innovation + Technology

bwalsh@trimedmedia.com