Healthcare IT Today Interviews

At the HIMSS 2022 annual conference, I was able to sit down with Amato Amarain, CFO, Medical Group at RWJBarnabas Health, and Nora Lissy, RN, BSN, MBA, VP, Healthcare Consulting and Implementation, SME at Dimensional Insight, to talk about the problem of combining data across disparate systems and how RWJBarnabas Health has worked to solve this problem and be able to leverage that data to ben...

Prior Authorizations are the bane of doctors existence and they affect the patient as well. Recently, I was able to sit down with Joe Anstine, CEO, and co-founder of PriorAuthNow , a company that is working to ease the tensions and difficulties of prior authorizations, to dive into this topic.   Learn more about PriorAuthNow: https://www.priorauthnow.com/   Find more great health IT cont...

While many are still calling to #axthefax, the reality is that fax is here to stay in healthcare for the foreseeable future.  If there was a better solution, we'd have moved there already.  However, fax is the most interoperable part of healthcare and healthcare organizations send and receive thousands of faxes every day.   What does need to disappear is legacy fax infrastructure an...

While the EHR has solved many problems (remember doctors' handwriting?), healthcare still faces the ongoing challenge posed by paper and manual processes.  This is what Stephanie Lahr, M.D., CHCIO, CIO and CMIO at Monument Health, and her team faced.  Thousands of faxes were still being sorted manually which took up too much of her staff's precious time.  To address this problem she...

We all know in life that there are some things that are just better than others.  For example, name brand corn flakes are just better than generic ones.  Turns out, the same is true with health IT software and more specifically legacy application and archiving solutions.  That’s the experience Dave Lundal,  CIO at Children’s Minnesota, and Dave Skordahl, VP Business Development...

It's a massive undertaking to write a health IT book.  Of course, leave it to Prashant Natarajan,VP of Strategy and Products at H2O.ai, to author not just one, but two very popular healthcare big data, machine learning, and AI book.  Readers of the site will likely be familiar with his best selling book "Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare."  Now, Natarajan has...

At the HLTH conference last year, one of the most amazing people I met was a lady named Effie Parks.  She was attending HLTH to receive a WEGO Health Award for her work on the Once Upon a Gene podcast.  I learned so much from her and was so touched by her story that I knew I had to have her on the Healthcare IT Today Interviews podcast.   What makes Effie Parks special is that she’s...

As we work to understand how chronic care management continues to evolve and mature, we sat down with Curtis Gattis, Co-Founder and CEO of LeadingReach and Dr. Jeff Bullard, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Product Strategy Officer of Catalyst Health Group.  We ask them if we’ve finally turned the corner on proactively addressing chronic conditions and the state of chronic care management...

If you've worked in the world of EHR and health IT, then you're likely familiar with EMRAM (Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model) which was developed and maintained by HIMSS.  It's their flagship maturity model and if you haven't heard of it, you may have heard a hospital talk about reaching Stage 7 adoption with their EHR.  That's the EMRAM model and one that's been used by many a C...

Now that COVID changed so many perspectives when it came to virtual care, we’re going to spend the next couple years figuring out the details.  And there are a lot of details and nuance when it comes to virtual care.   One company that was a bit ahead of the curve on this is Omada Health.  As a provider of healthcare services, from the beginning they started with a virtual-first app...

Healthcare needs more automation, but not the kind that just robotically repeats a process over and over. That would just lead to factory medicine. Instead, what healthcare needs is deep automation that can adapt in real-time to changing circumstances and that helps to personalize the care for each individual patient. Deep automation reduces the burden on clinicians and improves the overall patien...

It is the responsibility of Chief Digital Officers to lead healthcare’s digital transformation. They must align the C-Suite, frontline staff, and the ecosystem of technology suppliers so that there is mutual benefit as they collectively march towards the health system’s digital goals. According to Raj Aggarwal, Chief Growth and Strategy Officer at Panda Health, this makes them as important as the...

Each day in healthcare, data becomes more valuable, more useful, and more important to a healthcare organization.  It’s easy to see that the future of healthcare rests on the back of data.  The problem is that data in and of itself isn’t useful.  We need clean, usable data that we trust to really make a difference in healthcare.   This was the topic of discussion in a recent in...

CorroHealth has brought together 7 separate companies to form a single organization that is looking to transform the RCM space through Automation and AI. They are taking a realistic approach - not claiming to replace coders but to help them do less of the mundane work and more of the higher skilled tasks. We hear from company leaders about their journey so far and where they are going next.  ...

FINN Partners, a leading marketing agency acquired Medika. Life, an online publisher of medical-related content. How will FINN navigate being a PR partner to its clients AND remain a trusted source of health information? Gil Bashe sits down to give us the inside scoop on the company's plans to keep Medika. Life independent and non-commercial.    Learn more about FINN Partners: https://ww...

One company that’s working to address diabetes with nutrition is Fruit Street.  To learn more about how their diabetes program works, I sat down with Laurence Girard, Founder and CEO at Fruit Street.  To kick off the interview, I ask Girard if we can really prevent diabetes.  He suggested that they’d modeled their program after a CDC effort that has been show to produce those result...

As I search to better understand medical malpractice laws, I had a chance to sit down with Stephan Landsman, Co-Author of “Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm,” to dive into how technology has changed the medical malpractice landscape.  He shares how telehealth has created new legal and medical malpractice challenges.   Check out the book: https...

When I first heard about a cybersecurity company, CloudCover, using their security technology to build a cybersecurity insurance platform on blockchain, I was fascinated by the intersection of technologies and what this might mean for healthcare organizations.  Plus, I really wanted to better understand more about the future of cybersecurity insurance and what technologies and solutions could...

Legacy applications have served Healthcare organizations for years; however, these applications are causing problems executives must address. Some of these issues include licensing, support and reliability, enhanced data retention requirements and security problems.  Sunsetting these applications is not simple and straightforward though and several factors must be considered when identifying...

Christopher Frenz, AVP of IT Security at Mount Sinai South Nassau and Brian Russell, Co-Chair, Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Internet of Things (IoT) Working Group have released a new Medical Device Security Incident Response playbook through the Cloud Security Alliance.   To better know how healthcare organizations can use this playbook, I sat down with Frenz to talk about the medical device...

A randomized controlled trial across 8 acute care hospitals showed that patients in the group that used Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) after surgery, were 5.3% less likely to be readmitted, were 13.9% less likely to report pain 7 days after surgery, and were 24.2% safer because medication errors were detected. Hear from two leaders of this groundbreaking study: Dr Michael McGilion and Dr. PJ Deve...

While primary care investment is high and we’re likely to see changes to primary care as we know it, I was intrigued by Spora Health which is offering virtual-first primary care to people of color.  While this is another example of how innovation in primary care is happening today, Spora Health’s focus on people of color offers something unique that was worth exploring and understanding bette...

One of the most experienced healthcare lawyers I know is William F. O’Toole, Jr., Founder of O’Toole Law Group. Having started as an in house lawyer with MEDITECH, he got to see first hand the creation of the health IT industry and associated laws and contracts.  Plus, a decade ago he left MEDITECH to go out on his own where he’s brought his extensive experience to a wide variety of clients i...

At the HIMSS conference earlier this year, I talked with one of the makers of a connected health hub, Sid Kandan, CEO at Stel Life Inc.  What was great was that he had his first generation connected health hub and his 2nd generation device.  Along with describing how his connected health hub works, he also shows how the product's form factor has evolved.  We also dive into whet...

At the recent Medical Practice Excellence Leaders conference in San Diego hosted by MGMA, I had a chance to sit down and talk with Dr. Halee Fischer-Wright, President and CEO of MGMA.  We've been lucky to talk to Dr. Fischer-Wright a number of times over the years and she always offers great insights into what's happening with medical practices and what's going to impact them going forward.&n...