ONC Annual Meeting: How to innovate in healthcare
What’s the winning strategy to successfully innovate in health IT? Take advantage of government resources, know your customers and the real world needs they face and don’t expect success overnight, said speakers during a panel discussion at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) annual meeting on Jan. 23.
“Startups are trying to understand how they can help physicians, hospitals and organizations become more efficient, with an emphasis on quality of care,” said Polina Hanin, community director at StartUp Health, a Md.-based global startup platform.
But their work should not take place in a vacuum. Entrepreneurs interested in health IT should shadow clinicians “otherwise they will develop technology that sounds right but doesn’t actually work within the organizations,” said Hanin.
The healthcare industry is slow to embrace and implement new innovations. It can take months to set up a hospital meeting and many more to launch a pilot. However, pilots are critical to success, she said.
Entrepreneurs must be pragmatic how rapidly the product will be adopted by the clinical community, said Bijan Salehizadeh, MD, managing director of NaviMed Capital, a Washington D.C.-based private capital firm. “I think it’s important for entrepreneurs to realize that things take a little bit longer in healthcare. Often a lot longer.”
Innovators with great ideas and resources, both financial and technical, need to immerse themselves in real-world scenarios so they can truly understand where the problems are “instead of throwing out solutions and then looking for problems,” added Jacob Reider, MD, chief medical officer, ONC.
Reider urged providers to be thoughtful about the way health IT is implemented so as to minimize risk. “You don’t have to do the Big Bang. You can do iterations of risk, starting in places where there is less patient risk.”
ONC ultimately wants to facilitate, not block, innovation, he said. One way the agency strives to help is by facilitating standards development.
Businesses often do not know about ONC resources and guides that can accelerate development. “They are surprised we are so helpful, and we are surprised that they didn’t know what was buried in a 2,000-page regulation,” Reider said. “They can leverage the standards instead of creating a new way of doing things.”
Salehizadeh added that companies need to pay attention to what happens on Capitol Hill, calling government “the single biggest factor that can positively impact the most companies in the healthcare business.”
He anticipates that health IT innovation will really take off in a few years, when physicians and hospitals are in a better position to take risks. “We’ll reach that tipping point. By 2018, we’ll be there and that moment will be quite dramatic."
During a question-and-answer session, the panelists all weighed in on which area in health IT is ripest for innovation. Hanin said missing from health IT is “a really sticky patient engagement platform that is not too burdensome to the patient but creates true behavior change.”
Salehizadeh sees the biggest single enhancement opportunity as a product that allows physicians and hospitals to take and manage risk. “It would be a company that allows a physician to gauge his or her population for risk, track the patients and all the things in the community that happened to them, and understand how to intervene at the right moments,” he said. “It is a hairy audacious goal.”
Reider thinks the next great idea is development of an infrastructure for scalable clinical decision support. “I don’t think anyone has figured out how to make a football field-sized dataset consumable by an EHR and make it actionable.”