Healthcare IT Today Interviews

Consensus Cloud Solutions has added Natural Language Processing capability to its offerings which will make it much easier for healthcare organizations to turn unstructured documents into a rich source of information. Their added capability means that clinicians will now have additional context when providing care to patients, which can lead to better outcomes and reduced costs.  Learn more a...

There is little doubt that the top challenge facing healthcare in 2022 is staffing. Healthcare organizations around the country are feeling the effects of shortages and workforce instability with both frontline workers and administrative staff. Ironically, organizations are looking to artificial intelligence to help with the situation - a technology once loathed because of fears of job loss. &nbsp...

It’s impossible to put a value on the trust your patients place in your organization to protect and safely store the data created in the course of caring for the community. Hospitals and health systems have more to lose than organizations in other sectors when it comes to the impact of hacking activities and patient data is highly sought after. As a result, the healthcare industry is hit significa...

There is little doubt that a good patient experience leads to better outcomes. A “good experience”, however, is a moving target that is shaped by consumer experiences in other industries like retail, banking, and hospitality. Patients are beginning to expect more personalized care. NTT DATA Services believes it can be delivered if healthcare is willing to use new approaches and technology to engag...

At the HIMSS 2022 conference, I talked with Kelli Bravo, Vice President, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Pega, to learn about the changing expectations of patients due to the pandemic.  Plus, she shares how healthcare organizations are becoming more patient (and member) first in order to meet these changing expectations.  One of the areas she talks about is how technology can bring more...

As healthcare continues to grapple with staffing challenges, organizational leaders are more keenly interested in technologies that will reduce staff workload and frustration. Companies with established track records in staff efficiency, automation, and communication are well positioned to help. TigerConnect, for example, is seeing success with its new scheduling products that leverage the company...

When it comes to HIEs, every one is so different.  They often have different missions and many states have multiple HIEs trying to approach the problem from different directions.  In Arkansas, they're lucky to have one HIE for the whole state which is focused on helping patients.  They leverage things like ADT notifications, real-time alerting, and have created real partnerships wit...

In order to understand how much the EHR workstation space has changed and how it can help reduce burnout in a healthcare organization, I sat down with Kevin Bridges, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Enovate Medical and Doug Gallacher, VP of Sales at Enovate Medical.  Having been in the workstation-on-wheels business for 22 years, Enovate Medical knows the ins and outs of optimizing...

One of the banes of healthcare is prior authorizations.  Just mention of the phrase makes the hearts of doctors and their staff break.  While every doctor and medical staff I know hate prior authorizations, the payers have a good reason for them.  They want to make sure they're paying for the proper care.  It's a tough balance that we certainly haven't figured out yet and so ma...

Some of you who read this may not have heard of Tegria.  However, it's very likely you've heard of one of the many companies that were combined to make up Tegria.  Tegria came out of healthcare giant Providence in Seattle where they combined a number of existing investments and acquisitions into one company.  In order to better understand the bigger vision behind this now combined c...

Coming out of the HIMSS conference, one of the top topics at the conference was cybersecurity.  Maybe it was the lingering impact and effects on ransomware incidents that hit so many healthcare organizations or maybe it was the growing complexity of IT systems that are being deployed, but cybersecurity seemed to be on everyone’s mind.   Troy Ament, Healthcare Field CISO at Fortinet, was...

New government regulations never stop in healthcare.  It's just the nature of the business and that's unlikely to change.  However, the reality of this is that some rules get more attention than others.  One rule that I think some have missed is the Patient Right of Access rule.  For those that may have missed some of the details, we asked Rita Bowen, Vice President, Privacy, C...

In a recent conversation with Zafar Chaudry, MD, MS, MIS, MBA, Sr. Vice President – Chief Digital & Information Officer at Seattle Children’s, and Sunita Pradhan, VP Customer Success Hospital and Health Systems at ELLKAY, it was impressed upon me how important a healthcare organization’s work in data management is to an organization and more importantly their patients.  Doing it wrong can...

As healthcare organizations continue to consolidate, one of the big challenges these healthcare organizations face is what to do with the data from all of these systems.  One of the most important pieces of data you have to ensure is handled properly is medication history.  No one wants to check multiple systems for medication history and consolidating patients' medication history across...

Remote patient monitoring devices from different manufacturers rarely talk to each other. There are standards for device data exchange, but no incentives or penalties for device makers to adopt them. Instead, most manufactures pair their devices with their own proprietary smartphone app. MedM wants to tear down these walled gardens with their platform that acts as a universal connector.   I h...

As someone who did IT support for a pharmacy in my early health IT career, I saw how pharmacists were an incredibly valuable piece of healthcare and also an underutilized resource.  Over the last decade, many of come to realize the value pharmacists can provide population health efforts that goes well beyond counting pills, delivering medication usage instructions, and providing convenient va...

When we talk about cybersecurity, we often like to talk about the financial elements of a breach.  No doubt the financial impact is extremely important and can cost an organization dearly if they’re not prepared.  You also often hear about the reputation impact a breach has on an organization when the breach hits the local news and their organization lives in infamy on the HHS wall of sh...

Long time followers may remember that we covered the announcement of a French company, Synapse Medicine, launching their Medication Reconciliation and Pharmacovigilance solutions in the US.  I always find it exciting when the US can benefit from technology and solutions that are already having an impact internationally.  At the HIMSS 2022 conference, I was able to sit down with Dr. Cleme...

Patients want to be treated like they are as consumers in the retail and hospitality world. Healthcare is coming around, but slowly. To accelerate the transformation to a more patient-centric system, experts recommend something simple – listen and learn from patients. That is exactly the advice from Windstream Enterprise and Akumin, who partnered to create exceptional patient experiences at Akumin...

At the HIMSS conference, I had a chance to interview Pouria Sanae, Co-founder and CEO at ixlayer, to learn about their solution to the problem of at home lab testing.  ixlayer provides a white labeled at home lab testing solution for provider organizations, biopharma, governments, employers, and population health programs.  Sanae shared with us how the challenge of lab testing in the hom...

After understanding the importance of clean, usable data, the next key is to learn about data quality and how we solve the problem of garbage in leads to garbage out.  For this, I chatted with Mike Noshay, Founder and Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Verinovum, who shared about why data is so important and what the ramifications are of poor quality data in healthcare.   Noshay a...

Healthcare organizations have been improving their "Digital Front Doors". The goal, for most, is to make it as easy as possible for patients to find and book appointments through online channels like websites and apps. Piedmont Healthcare, however, didn’t stop there. They have rolled in wayfinding, call centers, and in-person electronic registration as well. Why? Because they are driven to meet pa...

If the future of healthcare is built on the back of data (and I assure you it is), then it is extremely important to know what a healthcare organization looks like that has access to clean, high quality data.  A man with deep experience cleaning healthcare organization's data so it can be trusted and used is Mark McCurry, President and CEO at Verinovum.  We sat down with McCurry at...

While at the HIMSS 2022 conference, I sat down with Bob Rogers, AI Expert in Residence Center for Digital Health Innovation at UCSF, and Sri Ambati, CEO & Co-Founder at H2O.ai, to learn about a really interesting project that Rogers was working on at UCSF.  When he started the project, he asked a number of experts about how to solve the problem and they said that it wasn’t possible. &nbsp...

The shift to work-from home and COVID disruptions forced a range of industries to deploy next-gen technologies at an accelerated rate without a commensurate increase in spending. Healthcare organizations were on the frontline of these developments and had to adapt rapidly to deal with the medical emergency effectively and efficiently.  This was the topic of discussion at the Dell Technologies...