Healthcare IT Today Interviews

Independent clinical practices are in danger everywhere: if they don't go out of business, large hospital chains tend to pipette them up. Bill Lucchini, CEO of Nextech, wants these independent practices to survive. Nextech's EHRs and solutions for practice management and patient engagement software are highly specialized to Dermatology, Med Spa, Opthamology, Orthopedics, and Plastic Surger...

According to Ryan Witt, Vice President, Industry Solutions at Proofpoint, Inc., phishing emails are still the most prevalent and dangerous sources for security breaches. In this video, Witt and Joshua Roth, Chief Information Security Officer at Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), discuss how they protect against breaches through fundamental investments in tools and training. This intervie...

PointClickCare, having promoted interoperability for a long time in a few areas such as senior care, has expanded to include acute care, and particularly to connect it with post-acute care. Brian Drozdowicz is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Acute & Payer Markets. In this video, he and Chief Medical Officer, Hamad Husainy, DO, FACEP, parse the effects of new regulations at both fe...

Rural and community hospitals face the same challenges as larger health systems. However, with smaller pools of talent and fewer resources, they need more help from their digital partners to address those challenges. Altera Digital Health (Altera) is leveraging the cloud to help this important customer segment. Healthcare IT Today had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Pratt, MD – Chief Medical...

In the fast-paced realm of pharmaceuticals, where innovation can mean the difference between life and death, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the landscape of drug discovery and development. Mati Gill, CEO at AION Labs, stands at the forefront of this revolution, pioneering the use of AI to tackle the challenges inherent in the pharma industry. With a unique combination...

When healthcare staff approach a hospital room, it’s important to know basic things about the patient like their preferred language, whether they’re in isolation, or whether they’re not supposed to eat (an NPO order). Traditionally, these facts are handled through physical markers or even buried in the patient record. The “digital white board” and “digital door sign” technologies from eVideon disp...

At HIMSS, we sat down to talk with CommonWell Health Alliance to learn about their passion for interoperability and some of the latest happenings with the CommonWell community. This included an update on CommonWell’s new technical service provider, ELLKAY and their recent designation by the federal government as a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN). CommonWell was formed 11 years from a c...

For Rishi Sarna, MD, Chief Clinical Officer at Backline, communication is central. He points out that communications have lagged behind everything else in medicine, and are holding back progress in patient care and the physician experience. In the video interview below, we sat down with Dr. Sarna and Jackie Rice, VP and CIO at Frederick Health, to discuss these challenges and Frederick Health’s wo...

Healthcare cloud solutions have become much more sophisticated, reliable, and easier to connect. Gone are the days of a single cloud instance that can support all your needs. However, managing the various cloud options can be challenging if you don’t have a thoughtful approach to it and work with great partners. At the HIMSS 2024 conference, we moderated a panel hosted by Rackspace Technology and...

Anyone who has been on a hospital ward, whether as clinician, patient, or visitor, has noticed the continual din of beeps and chirps—it can drive you crazy. It’s notable that one of the simple ways Rauland‘s communication system improves the hospital experience is to reduce noise by routing alerts quietly to the person who needs to handle them. Another key benefit of using Rauland, according to Di...

Grace Cordovano, PhD, Founder of Enlightening Results, co-Founder of Unblock Health, and a devoted patient advocate, says that administrative burdens and failures at data sharing affect more than clinicians and administrators: These glitches in the healthcare systems also contribute to burn-out among patients and their families. Cordovano and Colin Banas, MD, MHA, Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst,...

Health care is not one single system, but multiple systems offering a bewildering variety of diagnostic and treatment options, backed by a plethora of payment systems that vary from patient. According to Krisi Hutson, Senior Director of Solutions at Availity, AI can help administrative staff from the front desk to the billing office negotiate the maze. Hutson points out that the average turnover o...

Healthcare has become a data-driven industry as the volume of data continues to grow and organizations are able to use that data to provide more personalized care. However, data alone won’t advance healthcare. New systems and processing power that can turn data into insights is the key to accelerating discoveries and improving care. At the HIMSS 2024 conference, we brought together an incredible p...

According to Adeel Sarwar, Chief Technology Officer at CareCloud, doctors spend at least 20% of their clinical work time on administration. In this video interview, Sarwar and A. Hadi Chaudhry, Chief Executive Officer and President at CareCloud, talk about their use of AI, and now generative AI, to relieve doctors of this burden and achieve more face-to-face time with patients. Learn more about Ca...

Healthcare has always relied on data. What's changed is the explosion of data in healthcare and the availability of this data to clinicians as well as a whole host of healthcare professionals. Bringing context and meaning to this vast amount of data including unstructured health data is going to be key for every healthcare organization. We sat down with Dr. Paulo Pinho, Chief Medical & Str...

Many factors make revenue cycle management (RCM) a big headache for U.S. health care providers. Aakarsh Sethi, Senior Product Manager at Infinx, lists the forms of "fragmentation" in payments: not just many different payers, but different plans with different coverage at each payer, along with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and other third party managers, and rules that are constantly...

Tombot’s AI-powered robotic puppy companion is more than just an emotional support animal, through an array of sensors it can also remotely monitor patients. The company is planning to have a beta version available soon with full production later in 2024. There were many impressive technologies and digital solutions on display at #ViVE2024, but by far the more impressive (and cutest) was the one f...

The OpenNotes Lab will bring transparency, collaboration, and innovation to the intersection of healthcare AI and patient-centered care. The Lab builds on the organization’s 15 years of advocacy and research. The Lab will apply OpenNote’s expertise in research, advocacy, and innovation to an emerging area of healthcare – AI - to ensure it enhances patient care and is not a burden on clinicians. He...

Health care payers, such as CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, traditionally have only billing data on their patients. That's why Mo Weitnauer, chief product officer at MRO, calls clinical data "the hottest commodity" in health care. Piyush Khanna, Vice President Clinical Services at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, would like to store all their data in a single repository and use it for...

Dan O’Connor, Vice President, Service Desk Delivery at HCTec, says that resolving a customer service call involves a lot more than fixing the problem that the customer bought. You have to leave the customer feeling that you cared about them. Conveying that sense of care might be more important than solving the problem. Furthermore, every call is about patient care, even if it’s helping a staff per...

VBA offers numerous portals to payers and their clients (which include doctors, patients, brokers, and more)—"one-stop shopping" for a large range of services. To ease the user experience with these services, the company has started using generative AI for training on their platform through a tool called VBA Assist. President and CEO Mike Clayton cites their mission to "make the hea...

[Sponsored] Healthcare organizations are increasingly reliant on mobile devices for daily operations. The proliferation of devices brings new challenges including loss, security risks, and a strain on IT resources. Managing those devices not only reduces risk, but also improves workflow efficiency says Dr. Daniel Siegel, CEO of NavvSystems, a company that offers a mobile device management platform...

The ambient voice solution at Medvise. AI focuses on the revenue cycle. According to CEO Gautamdev Chowdary, they have trained their voice-to-text transcription on medical input and made it extremely accurate with full automation. They have also achieved 100% accuracy in billing through a few extra features. If the conversation did not provide enough information to assign the best ICD or CPT codes...

It's reasonable for a company like MRO to have a chief interoperability officer. According to their chief interoperability officer, Anthony Murray, the company has spent 22 years building tools to "exchange data seamlessly" in health care.  This includes much of the healthcare data that's been locked up in free text data in many healthcare systems. In our interview with Murray, h...

Paulo Pinho, MD, Chief Medical and Strategy Officer at Discern Health, highlighted to us that analytics have to be explainable to be trusted. It's not enough to show a correlation, but to demonstrate that the clinical intervention was responsible for the improved patient outcome. Patients as well as clinicians demand explainability (also known as transparency and accountability). Ben Hsieh, Vi...