In this episode, Tom White, Founder and CEO of Phynd Technologies discusses why digital front door technologies and interoperability are the key to the healthcare delivery ecosystem. He also talks about the company’s evolution and the marketplace needs they address.

Digital front door technologies are being adopted extensively by healthcare systems and are practical and useful for the industry, especially in the current pandemic situation. Tom believes that 80% of healthcare should be driven through digital means and 20% through phone calls, unlike the current situation.

Phynd Technologies’ platform focuses on the provider data, defined as people, places, and services, and simplifies provider data management for healthcare systems.

In this episode, Dr. Ram Raju discusses how the global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Northwell Health and how in future healthcare delivery systems will change in response to the crisis.

Northwell Health is one of the largest health systems in New York and has been a telemedicine leader for the last five to six years. Dr. Raju believes that storing data in the EHRs and EMRs is going to be very different in the future – more video clips than text notes will be used. This means the final interoperability rule will take a different tone in terms of who gets to access the patient information and who finally owns it.

Dr. Raju also believes that healthcare systems will need to evolve and change their workflow as more and more people will be seeking care through virtual technologies. Primary care will probably shift to virtual technology, shifting face-to-face medicine to virtual medicine, and specialty care will stay in the hospitals.

In this episode, Seth Hain and Dr. Sam Butler discuss how emerging technologies like video visits will become an integral part of healthcare in the future and how the current COVID-19 pandemic is proving its effectiveness. They also discuss how health systems are advancing their virtual care technologies in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Epic observed 2.5 million video visits in April. Seth states that the changes we are seeing in the industry due to telehealth is not only convenient to the patients but also preventing the exposure of providers and clinicians on the front line. He further states that the effectiveness of technologies, like contact tracing, will be driven by broader adoption and will need to be augmented to fully account for the whole population.

Sam believes that in future physician’s schedule would be 50% face-to-face and 50% non-face-to-face visits through video, telephone, and an asynchronous electronic visit back and forth. He further states that video visits are here to stay and hopes that these visits will be associated with appropriate reimbursements models.

In this episode, Russ Branzell, CEO of CHIME discusses their role in the healthcare industry and how COVID-19 will impact health systems. Russ also shares his thoughts about the final interoperability rule and FCC telehealth investment program.

CHIME supports its members in their transformation and growth journey by assisting them in their professional development and be the best leaders in the healthcare industry. Russ states that we may see mergers and acquisitions accelerate in the industry due to the current pandemic. He also believes that the technology impact due to the COVID-19 crisis, whether intended or unintended, will accelerate digital activities in health systems.

In this episode, Amit Zavery, VP & Head of Platform and Aashima Gupta, Head of Healthcare Strategy & Solutions discuss how Google Cloud is helping healthcare organizations with digital transformation and operational efficiencies. They also discuss the new Cloud Healthcare API and how it will accelerate the healthcare industry.

In the context of healthcare, Google Cloud is providing API connectivity by applying AI/machine learning algorithms and making it accessible for the industry. The company’s new Cloud Healthcare API solution is built to ingest complex data from different industry-standard sources and provide a unified access to it for a meaningful usage. Google Cloud offers the whole lifecycle governance, policy management, security, tracking, delivery, and ease of use over time so that more value and real-time capabilities can be built around it.

To help the healthcare industry during the current COVID-19 pandemic, Google Cloud is taking targeted solutions to the market like helping researchers with cloud credits, helping with Kaggle competitions, and enabling healthcare-focused chatbots with their Cloud AI platform. They are also enabling the healthcare organizations with digital triage that can treat patients remotely and can reduce in-person visits through telemedicine.

In this episode, Karen Kobelski, VP and General Manager of Clinical Surveillance of Wolters Kluwer Health, discusses their new offerings that are helping clinicians respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. She also discusses how health systems are adopting the new interoperability rule and how it will result in better healthcare outcomes.

At Wolters Kluwer Health, the mission is to bring the latest evidence-based medicine to the benefit of clinicians, learning communities, and patients. Their infection surveillance system and pharmacy surveillance system are helping hospitals and health systems respond and cope with the current Covid-19 crisis. Karen believes that with the new interoperability rule in place, patients can be treated in a lot of different ways if they have access to their health records. She further states that telehealth will stay with us for a long time, and traditional visits to hospitals will be replaced by virtual treatments, just like everyone is working virtually today.

In this episode, Will O’ Connor, Chief Medical Information Officer of TigerConnect discusses their company structure, the marketplace they are servicing, and challenges healthcare enterprises are facing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. TigerConnect is a clinical collaboration and communication platform and serves around 6000 customers across the world.

Due to the ongoing crisis, healthcare providers are witnessing a massive uptick in telehealth and virtual care. Dr. O’Connor states that in the last 2-3 weeks there has been 10 to 15 years of advancement in telehealth both in terms of policy and in practice. The company saw a growth in their messaging platform from 5 million to 6 million in just ten days.

Dr. O’Connor hopes that after Covid-19, care delivery will undergo a permanent sea change. The notion of delivering quality of care to patients who can be managed remotely will stay with us for a long time. Take a listen.

In this episode, Sara Vaezy, Chief Digital Strategy Officer of Providence Health, the first health system to confirm a Covid-19 infection in the U.S., discusses how the organization has come together in a coordinated way in response to the crisis. Providence was one of the first health systems to enable patients with a set of FAQ’s and assessment tools by reconfiguring their chatbot, Grace, which was developed over two years ago. In addition, the digital innovation group has helped Providence Health significantly scale up virtual visit capacity by redeploying and training clinicians in their same-day care operations to provide telehealth consults.

Providence Health has also successfully launched creative efforts to crowdsource PPE such as the 100 million mask challenge to ensure adequate availability of PPEs to protect the caregivers at the frontlines. Take a listen.

In this episode, John Kravitz, CIO of Geisinger Health, one of the largest health systems in the country, speaks about how the organization’s leaders have been “blown away” by how technology has stepped up to help address the covid-19 crisis. Geisinger’s IT organization has kept up with a 500% increase in telehealth visits and a doubling of remote workers to 13,000 employees and minimized disruptions to operations. John believes this crisis has created a new awareness of the opportunities with digital transformation. It’s a remarkable story.

In this episode, Diana Nole discusses Wolters Kluwer’s healthcare business and how they are building expert solutions for insights and evidence that are more deeply embedded into clinical workflows. She also discusses how digital transformation is much more than digital front doors.

Wolters Kluwer Health has invested significantly in digitizing their products and offerings over the past few years. They now use advanced technologies such as AI and NLP to enhance their heavily curated content to provide quick and easy-to-find answers for evidence-based clinical decisions. They are also enhancing the delivery of their content with emerging technologies such as voice-recognition. Additionally, they are also improving the user interface by delivering smaller nuggets of curated information customized for individual patients and caregivers. Diana and her team are using voice-enablement to enable clinicians to learn in a setting that’s more interactive and stay updated on the latest practices and clinical knowledge.

Diana believes in evidence-based data to enhance user experience with the latest available technology. Their focus now is on getting patients to engage more, especially those that need stay on very good pathways for their own health.

In this episode, Angela Yochem discusses how Novant Health, a $5.5 billion nonprofit integrated healthcare provider network based in North Carolina, focuses on improving care quality for consumers through advanced technologies. She also discusses her current role and responsibilities at the organization and how digital health is much more than digital front doors.

At Novant Health, digital care is not just about new models of care delivery using digital tools. It is also about enhancing traditional models of care delivery through digital means. Angela, along with her team, provide advanced digital capabilities to improve the quality of care for patients and community members and ensures increased access to care through digital means.

Angela believes that healthcare organizations must adopt contemporary methods and technologies to improve patient engagement and care delivery. However, this opportunity is closing rapidly due to the emergence of unconventional entrants in the healthcare ecosystem. In the podcast, she discusses how she and her team have developed approaches to identify and rapidly onboard innovative digital health solutions for high-impact areas such as stroke care. She advices health systems leaders to bring in people from outside of healthcare for diverse perspectives to solve the most complex problems.

In this episode, Paul Black discusses the next wave of opportunities for Allscripts and how digital transformation is shaping the healthcare sector. Paul also discusses emerging technologies and how Allscripts has embraced cloud adoption for many of its solutions. He believes that emerging technologies such as AI, Blockchain, and voice recognition are improving patient experience, driving better healthcare outcomes, and substantially enhancing the physician’s life.

In the context of the ongoing debate about patient data access and the proposed ruling by the HHS, Paul states that Allscripts strongly supports legislation or regulations that address information blocking in healthcare. He suggests that health systems, looking to harness innovation, must bring together outside help with industry experience and their own organizational knowledge from a clinician standpoint to accelerate transformation.

In this episode, Dr. Peter Tippett, a pioneer in developing commercial antivirus software, discusses how careMESH is providing easy and secure communication and collaboration between clinicians locally to share digital patient records. Peter also discusses the issues related to information security in healthcare.

Healthcare, like in other industries, is transitioning to digital communications in all aspects of care including care coordination, patient safety, unnecessary ER visits, and analytics. To address this marketplace requirement, careMESH provides a set of secure services that helps health systems easily share patient records from their own EHR to any outside physicians/ clinicians, reducing the time consumed by traditional means of communication such as phones and faxes.

In this episode, Seth Hain, Vice President of R&D and Sean Bina, Vice President of Access and Patient Engagement at Epic discuss the next wave of opportunities for Epic and how the company has evolved by focusing on patient experience and advanced analytics.

At Epic, the focus has always been on providing patients with access and tools to view and have control over their data. Epic works with over 300 health systems today to help them manage their data. Over 160 million consumers have or are using its MyChart patient portal which has been around for nearly two decades. The company uses advanced analytics such as AI/ machine learning and monitors how they are performing on different populations before embedding it into workflows, be it clinical-facing or patient-facing.

Epic has lately started focusing on providing transparency around healthcare costs and has been working on creating accurate estimates for patients so that they have price transparency at the point of care.

In this episode, Daniel Barchi discusses the current state of digital transformation in healthcare, their goal to bring cutting-edge technology, and focus on delivering outstanding patient care.

According to Daniel, a good technology is one that saves clinicians and caregivers time without getting in their way. He believes that healthcare technology is “80% people, 15% process, and 5% technology.” He further cautions that while using advanced technologies such as AI, health systems need to be thoughtful, careful, and respectful of the way technology interacts with patients.

The healthcare system as a whole has very low thresholds for measuring progress in adoption rates for digital health tools such as digital front doors. Digital health startups have a lot of brilliant ideas; however, they are years away from being integrated into core EHR systems. Daniel advices startups to get deeply embedded with their clinical partners to develop innovative solutions for healthcare.

In this episode, Mudit Garg discusses the evolution of Qventus and how they are applying AI to help hospitals and health systems in managing their operations with real-time predictions for improved care delivery.

With a focus on patient flow automation, Qventus helps hospitals and health systems in reducing the length of stay and other operational metrics. Based on early insights that machine learning models and prediction scores can be confusing to users in the absence of an accountability engine, the company has developed an interdisciplinary approach, augmenting AI with behavioral science principles to drive sustained improvements in healthcare operations.

In this episode, Graham Gardner discusses how his company, Kyruus, targets patient access issues in health systems. Inspired by the Moneyball concept, Kyruus uses advanced analytics to understand patient needs and put the right providers “to bat” where they are most likely to do well, thereby reducing or eliminating variations in the quality of care.

Graham discusses the challenges of introducing digital innovation in healthcare and provides some counterintuitive advice to other digital health startups looking to overcome challenges in sales cycles and achieving enterprise-wide adoption for their platforms.

In this episode, Leah Sparks discusses how she founded Wildflower Health in 2012 as a digital health platform to help women in their pregnancies, after experiencing the difficulties of navigating the healthcare system during her first pregnancy.

Leah believes that digital adoption in healthcare often needs to start with simple use cases with near term returns (the short story). Although technology risks are high in healthcare, Leah encourages health systems to remain focused on the long story of needing to transform healthcare by investing in the right opportunities to create a healthcare experience that is personalized for consumers.

Wildflower Health has raised venture capital from leading health systems such as Providence Health and is considered a leading “FemTech” startup. Leah points out that while women are primary users of her platform, they are also the Chief Health Officers of their homes and influence 80% of all healthcare decisions for the entire population.

Steve Miff, Chief Executive Officer of PCCI discusses how Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI), a non-profit organization, has developed advanced machine learning algorithms to understand the role of social determinants of health in vulnerable and under-served communities.

PCCI operates with the assumption that health begins “where we live, work, play, and pray.’ The key aspects of PCCI’s journey have always been to partner with organizations, locally and nationally, who share the same goal and understanding. Steve discusses the success they have had in improving the lives of their communities and reducing the costs of care through their machine learning-based approach. He highlights the importance of a robust data management and infrastructure environment for success with predictive and prescriptive analytics in healthcare.

David Quirke, Chief Information Officer at Inova Health System, discusses his new role, their technology environment, high-level priorities, and the mission to provide world-class healthcare with every patient interaction.

According to David, successful organizations always put patients, quality, and the outcomes first and everything else follows. Technology at Inova is taken as an enabler to the patient experience. Inova Health’s approach to patient experience and digital transformation is focused on a suite of technologies rather than focusing on a specific technology.

David shares his thoughts on building high reliability within information technology and how the underlying infrastructure is a critical enabler for digital health solutions.

John Glaser, former CIO, Partners Healthcare, discusses EHR systems at length, the burden on physicians from poor design and workflows, the issues with interoperability and the confusing landscape around information blocking legislation.

He discusses the “tyranny of a large number of good ideas” which often leads to increased workloads for physicians and increases the overall costs for the health system with little or no business rationale for implementing many of those changes.

John notes that big tech firms are laying down the infrastructure to surround consumers with healthcare offerings based on online behavior and preferences, and how technologies like voice recognition and AI will dramatically change our healthcare experience in the future.

Nader Mherabi, CIO of NYU Langone Health talks about digital transformation and its current state in the healthcare delivery space.

At NYU Langone Health, digital transformation means taking an enterprise approach to care delivery that is integrated, smart, and intelligent. Their vision is to provide a connected digital health service that is convenient for patients and their families, close to where they stay or work. The health system sees technology and digital as a great enabler and strategic asset to propel the organization forward in its mission.

Nader also believes that making the foundational technology work is critical for enabling the organization to build the digital capabilities of the future.

In this special 25th episode, Ed Marx discusses his personal experience with two major health events over the past twelve months, and how information technology played an important role in both events.

At Cleveland Clinic, where Ed is leading an enterprise digital transformation strategy, ‘digital’ means leveraging technology to produce seamless experiences. Recognizing the need to support legacy environments while advancing the enterprise digitally, he suggests that CIOs and digital leaders must be “bimodal” and be able to show progress and success despite constraints.

Digital transformation is not a solo trip; Ed stresses the importance of global partnerships, and aligning with the right partners can help achieve wonderful things.

In this episode, Giovanni Monti discusses his current role and how the digital healthcare innovation group at Walgreens is focused on bringing new and sustainable innovative solutions to consumers.

Innovation at Walgreens is to have consumers manage their healthcare in a convenient and cost-effective way with great outcomes. It is all about delivering care to consumers when they want it, how they want it, and where they want it. Some eight million customers walk through a Walgreens store every day. Through their recently released Find Care app, Walgreens has started providing a range of personalized and localized healthcare services to consumers. Going well beyond the traditional e-prescription function, the app is a digital front door that delivers services from a curated set of 30 partners that can be accessed anytime anywhere with price transparency.

Giovanni’s current role at Walgreens is to focus on extending these partnerships by working with the right innovators at the right time in their product and market growth.

In this episode, Sylvia Romm discusses her role as the Chief Innovation Officer at Atlantic Health System and how her prior experience in pioneering telehealth adoption influences her views on digital transformation.

Most healthcare organizations are reactive today as opposed to being proactive. Digital transformation is off to a slow start but disruption will be here before we know it. According to Sylvia, innovation at Atlantic Health System starts with developing internal innovation and standardizing it across the health system. It also means developing external partnerships to build an innovation pipeline. However, she does not believe in investing in “shiny new things” that do not help their health system move forward.

Sylvia believes that digital transformation is not simply automating or digitizing all the current workflows. It has to go beyond replacing in-person visits with one-on-one virtual visits and look at reimagining patient and caregiver experiences.

In this episode, Karen Murphy discusses her role as the first Chief Innovation Officer and the Founding Director of the Steele Institute for Health Innovation at Geisinger, and how they are working towards lowering the costs and improving quality for the overall welfare of members and patients.

Innovation at Geisinger means taking a fundamentally different approach to solving a problem that has quantifiable outcomes. According to Karen, focusing on specific problems like price and quality will move the needle in a meaningful way. Currently, the innovation team at Geisinger is developing a new care model that leverages AI and machine learning, along with remote monitoring for a more holistic approach towards patients.

Karen also believes intelligent bots will help decrease overall cost of care as they are more efficient. However, while adopting new technologies we need to be careful and prevent increase in the total costs of care due to technology.

In this episode, Tom Grote discusses how Aetna and Banner Health’s relationship evolved from an ACO into a new commercial joint venture – Banner|Aetna – and how with a shared vision they are improving the primary care model to transform the healthcare market in Arizona.

The collaboration between a leading regional health and a national health insurer in a 50:50 joint venture helps develop and deploy new technology solutions to improve healthcare outcomes while focusing on keeping costs low. Tom believes that joint ventures such as Banner|Aetna can also accelerate the shift from the fee-for-service model to value-based care. He discusses the incremental benefits of Aetna merging with CVS, their approach to strategic technology partnerships, and sharing of best practices among JVs of Aetna with other health systems.

Tom advises ACO leaders and Chief Population Health Officers to focus on relationships and try to align with partners who share a common vision and believe there is a better way to transform the whole healthcare system.

In this episode, Aaron Martin discusses his role and responsibilities as the Chief Digital Officer of Providence St. Joseph Health, and covers a wide range of topics including patient engagement, the innovation model they follow, and the portfolio of digital health startups that he manages as the head of Providence Ventures.

For Providence St. Joseph Health, digital is all about moving consumers from an offline to an online relationship. The focus of digital health innovation is about prioritizing problems and identifying “needle-moving” solutions that can have a big impact. He believes that entities that deliver convenience, access, and personalization will win and keep patients in future.

He advises startups to have a “small story” which addresses the here and now of delivering returns to investors, as well as a “big story” which addresses the larger impact of the solution over time. More in the podcast.

In this episode, Manu Tandon discusses how Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School-affiliated academic medical center, is working towards their mission to bring in innovations that are happening outside of healthcare.

Digital innovation is an applied science; it is about finding new ways to solve existing problems through emerging or sometimes through traditional technologies as well. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a core part of the overall technology stack is their homegrown EHR system. BIDMC is the only health system in the country to run their own EHR system. In this podcast, Manu Tandon discusses the many benefits and challenges that arise from having a homegrown EHR system.

BIDMC is in the process of migrating their existing services substantially to the AWS cloud platform; this has opened the gateway to new and innovative technology solutions for BIDMC’s digital transformation journey. Tandon advises digital health startups to focus on workflow integration and points out that creating new, technically smart solutions is not the only way to achieve success with digital health solutions; people and process matter as much as technology in the journey of digital innovation.

In this episode, health IT veteran John Halamka discusses how the Health Technology Exploration Center, incubated within Beth Israel Lahey Health, is testing emerging technologies in the digital health innovation ecosystem.

In the world of digital health, we are seeing an explosion of apps, cloud services, wearables, etc. Knowing how to integrate them into the workflow where they are helpful to the patients, providers, and payers is the next big step.

With over 23 years of experience as a CIO, John Halamka now mentors young colleagues and faculty at the Harvard Medical School. He advises health systems executives coming into CIO roles to be agile, take risks, and keep experimenting with new technologies.

In this episode, Mike McSherry discusses how Xealth is helping hospital systems deploy digital health solutions at scale and making the solutions easily consumable for patients and caregivers.

Clinicians need a “digital formulary” that they can easily prescribe to patients. However, there are significant challenges in onboarding, integrating, and implementing digital health solutions at scale. Xealth attempts to address these challenges through a cloud-based “plug-in” that operates within EHR systems. Xealth, which was incubated within Providence St. Joseph and spun out recently, just completed a $14 million funding round with strategic investors such as Cleveland Clinic to help develop the platform and drive growth.

Digital health startups often struggle to gain traction, partly due to the lack of a reimbursement model. Mike, a successful serial entrepreneur, advises digital health startup founders to pay attention to who is paying for the solutions and work closely with providers to help build scalable solutions of the future.

In this episode, John Sculley discusses how there are opportunities for many companies in healthcare to innovate and disrupt.

Unlike Facebook in social media and Google in the world of search engine and advertising, healthcare is a giant industry where there is plenty of room for many companies. Incumbents, health tech innovators, or brand-new startups they are all going to make significant investments to innovate in different aspects of healthcare – patient engagement, care delivery, telehealth, prescription drugs, diagnostics, and more.

In this Podcast, John discusses what digital transformation means and how he sees it playing out in healthcare today.

Neil Gomes, Chief Digital Officer, Jefferson Health speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc. on how Jefferson Health is generating value for the institution and consumers by anticipating consumer needs and providing superior digital experiences.

John M. Kravitz, Chief Information Officer, Geisinger Health speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc. on how Geisinger is standardizing their platforms to be more efficient and cost-effective.

Dwight Raum, VP and Chief Technology Officer, Johns Hopkins Health System speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc. on digital transformation, precision medicine, and big data at Johns Hopkins.

Colt Courtright, Director, Corporate Data & Analytics, Premera Blue Cross speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc. on how they’re empowering their members with data and transparency

Edward .W. Marx, CIO, Cleveland Clinic speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc. on how Innovation is everyone’s responsibility

Dr. Toby Cosgrove, Former CEO and President, Cleveland Clinic speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc.

Greg Silvesti, Head of Digital Health & Innovation at AbbVie speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc.

David Chou, Chief Information and Digital Officer for Children’s Mercy in Kansas City speaks with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc.

Dr L. Patrick James, Chief Clinical Officer of Quest Diagnostics, discusses the findings of their third annual survey on the shift towards value-based care. The complete report can be found at http://quanumsolutions.questdiagnostics.com/2018survey.

Sheila Colclasure, Global Chief Data Ethics Officer of Acxiom discusses with Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO, Damo Consulting Inc.about ethical data use and the impact of GDPR on healthcare data

Dr. Albert Chan, Chief Digital Officer of Sutter Health, shares with us on how digital is about opportunities to enhance the experience for patients

Lidia Fonseca, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Quest Diagnostics talks to us about how blockchain can solve the 2 big problems for healthcare today.

Dr. Keith Dunleavy, Chairman and CEO of Inovalon, talks to us about their recent acquisition, data and analytics, and Inovalon’s growth strategy in 2018 and beyond.

Neal Singh, CEO of Caradigm, discusses data, analytics, and population health management

Ed Marx, CIO and Chris Donovan, Executive Director of Enterprise Information Management & Analytics at Cleveland Clinic discuss how the Clinic operates on the mantra of putting patients at the center of analytics and IT-led innovation programs.