This Week in Health Tech

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of This Week in Health Tech, first episode of 2022, Vik and Jimmy welcome Jared Johnson, from Healthcare Podcast Rap. Vik and Jimmy discuss hybrid healthcare or consumer first healthcare in this episode. Jared starts with explaining discussing what hybrid healthcare is with an example of 23 and me. He also mentions examples of Best Buy buying healthcare companies or even Walmart. How do you adapt as a CEO / CIO / CMIO of a traditional healthcare organization? Jared mentions that the margins are already lower in healthcare and how do you part w/ the little margin and partner w/ consumer brands. The group then discusses digital transformation and impact on consumer driven healthcare. Jared indicates that this is still the very beginning of consumer brands in healthcare. But as a healthcare executive, empathy will help understand the change of consumer driven healthcare. Vik then says that consumers are getting used to on-demand with example of uber and banking apps, so why not in healthcare. This is where asynchronous telehealth could also benefit consumers. The group then discusses machine learning and AI, and how it is becoming more accessible, and this allows more entrants or developers in healthcare. Plus w/ FHIR APIs, it allows app developers access to their own data. Jared mentions that partnerships w/ consumer brands in healthcare is still slow but it is happening. Vik mentions the example of the meditation app Calm and how it could be part of person's healthcare.Also Apple Health is connected with thousands of healthcare organizations and collects daily health information through apple watch.  Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimGuest Information:Linkedin: Jared Johnson Health Care Rap Podcast on Apple Podcast Mentions: Calm AppApple HealthSupport the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this emergency episode of This Week in Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy discuss the big news of Oracle buying Cerner. The biggest purchase Oracle,  Big Tech, has ever done for $28.3 billion dollars.Vik and Jimmy first talk a little background of Oracle and Cerner.  Vik talks about Oracle products: cloud infrastructure, integration, oracle dbms, developer network, and more. Jimmy said this sends a huge signal that there is massive potential in healthcare.  Stock price has dropped initially because people are still trying to make sense of it. Plus there have been massive failures in the past like Microsoft HealthVault and Google HealthCloud. Vik thinks there will be growing pains in the beginning but over time once they figure out the best way to integrate Oracle and Cerner products. Vik thinks that one of the big opportunity is analytics and AI. Oracle will obviously use their cloud but the hidden opportunity is making sense of Big Data and use AI to make processes for health systems efficient and realize significant ROI. This could present a good opportunity to Cerner clients. Also sends a signal to Epic EHR, the EHR with biggest market in healthcare. The other thing is Oracle knows how to make products available to a developer network. Jimmy brings up the point that Cerner CEO is quite new and has been CEO only since Aug 2021. Maybe he was the right person to complete the deal. Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimSupport the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of This Week in Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy invite Dr. Laura Purdy, CEO and CoFounder of MD Integrations, All in One Telehealth solutions company. Dr. Purdy is a 15 year army veteran and started her career in military medical school and as a hospitalist in military. She realized early on that telehealth will be the future of healthcare for simple things such as poison ivy or pink eye. In the old days of telehealth, there were a lot of challenges from technical challenge to scheduling patients. Jimmy asks about asynchronous use of telehealth. Asynchronous is offline dialog and not real-time communication. Direct to consumer telehealth companies are at different stages of development. All of these companies have to deal with the same technical challenges including the portal and integration. This is where MD Integrations has an API which is designed for asynchronous telehealth.  One of the biggest pain points of telehealth is EMR. Today's EMRs are not designed for telehealth service, they are still designed for core brick and mortar services. Jimmy asks the question if asynchronous telehealth will increase over synchronous visits because patients do not prefer face to face visit if possible similar to other industries. Dr. Purdy explains the differences between the two and does think that asynchronous visits will continue to increase over face to face telehealth visits. The numbers are showing decrease in synchronous or real-time telehealth visits. On-demand healthcare is the future and asynchronous is able to assist w/ the same. Dr. Purdy provides examples of asynchronous use and why face to face call does not always make sense. Vik then asks why there are so many niche telehealth companies springing up when there are telehealth giants such as Teledoc and Livingo.  Dr. Purdy explains in detail the reason behind need for niche telehealth companies and why this market does not need to depend only on the telehealth giants. The group then jumps in the integration challenges related to Telehealth and how to overcome challenge of access to data from health system, clinic, telehealth portals. Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimGuest Information:LinkedIn: Dr. Laura PurdyWebsite: https://mdintegrations.com/Support the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this Halloween special of This Week in Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy discuss digital transformation and AI with guest Shelby Sanderford, CEO of Docpace. Shelby shares her story of how she got started in healthcare IT working in a hospital. They are on a mission to eliminate wait times for patients and eliminate need for waiting rooms. The group dives into the conversation w/ impact of the pandemic on digital transformation in healthcare. Shelby notes that last few years healthcare organizations have been switching to electronic health records and applications, but in the last couple of years, it has been the acceptance of those applications. All these applications have almost become a necessity instead of a luxury. Vik agrees and adds that there is also an increased expectation from patients to use digital apps for personal healthcare. This is why Tido Inc.'s digital team is increasingly working w/ healthcare organizations on app strategy and management. Jimmy asks the question what kept Shelby going with all the challenges of pandemic. Shelby answers that the main reason is the justification that the problem exists so even with all the challenges, it helped to know that Docpace could solve some of those issues with wait times. Vik adds that some of these expectations are related to "On Demand" expectation of consumers. Shelby adds that healthcare is shifting to more proactive care instead of reactive care. Pre COVID, most consumers and healthcare organizations were okay with status quo but Post COVID, healthcare organizations are realizing that they need to meet the new expectations from consumers. Vik notes that executives are now realizing that they need to be prepared for this coming onslaught of apps because the basic patient portal is not enough and does not provide a customized experience for consumers. Shelby adds that the seamless integration will definitely be the key for healthcare organizations to take advantage of the innovation and new applications. Vik agrees that with FHIR interoperability, it will enable on demand healthcare with easy and secure pull of the patient information. The fragmentation in healthcare is gradually going away and FHIR APIs will play a crucial role in reducing fragmentation in healthcare. The group then moves to discussing AI in healthcare. Shelby explains the difference in automation and AI. Vik notes that lot of times the details about underlying algorithm, comparison data used etc. is unknown. As Dr. Oliver, CMIO, Baptist, said in the past episodes, lot of times the AI functionality is a black box and could affect the trust factor of an application. Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimLinkedIn: Shelby SanderfordSupport the show (http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.com/)Support the show (http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.com/)Support the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of This Week in Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy discuss healthcare systems monitoring and integration. In today's healthcare, we are still dependant on users to identify and report system issues. This is a big patient safety issue. Vik explains the issue in detail using an example. Patient arrives in emergency department, and based on the patient state, physician orders few different tests. In this case, physician orders lab, cardiology, and radiology tests. Lab and Cardio tests are processed successfully, and are visible to the users in those respective departments. PACS system however is experiencing some issue, and even though the order messages were received successfully through the interface, the orders still did not show up in the PACS system. So after close to an hour, the emergency department calls up radiology to find out the status of the tests and when the procedure will be done. This is when PACS admin or user realizes that there might be an issue and they will contact IT department or open a task using online task reporting system. This is when the IT help desk contact integration analyst to look into the issue, but this example show the reliance on manual intervention to find system issues is very risky and could lead to adverse patient events.This is where end to end systems monitoring comes into place. If the health system did have end to end systems monitoring in place, the active monitoring would have detected the exact location of the fault and cut down time to find and diagnose system issues. Plus it prevents reliance on users to report issue. With digital transformation number of systems and applications will continue to increase, and CIOs-CMIOS should really consider active monitoring to improve patient safety and prevent unscheduled downtimes. It is about being active instead of being reactive when dealing w/ system issues.Also, with Tido's Systems end to end monitoring, it does not stop at flagging and diagnosing the issue, but there is also well defined notifications mechanism to alert the appropriate staff members of a system issue. Jimmy asks the question, why health systems have not considered this until now? Vik explains that EHR and more electronic systems have been implemented everywhere only in the last 10-15 years. Plus applications have matured and reliance on electronic systems in health systems has increased and it will continue to increase. So it is the right timing now to implement active end to end systems monitoring. Vik then explains the end to end systems monitoring architecture and software: how it works with interface engine and EHR and downstream systems. There is also significant ROI from using automated end to end systems monitoring. All the time saved by staff members not spending their time dealing with system issues and instead of focusing on patient care is huge savings for a health system. Plus it improves patient outcomes. Tido has a deal for 6 months free end to end systems monitoring for health systems. Claim this deal by visiting tidoinc.com: https://tidoinc.com/contact-tido-inc/ and include E2E in your message. Tido's solution uses Microsoft Azure cloud for end to end systems monitoring.  Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: Support the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this jam-packed episode of This Week in Health Tech, we welcome Dr. Brett Oliver (Chief Medical Information Officer, Baptist Health) to dive into several fascinating topics, such as the future of telehealth, digital transformation, interoperability, cultural change across the industry, and much more.To kick it off, we discuss the latest COVID situation in Kentucky and the strain that it’s putting on healthcare. Jimmy asks Brett about remote monitoring and remote visits with patients. Brett indicates that Baptist is improving remote visits, with multi-specialty appointments now possible with better technology. Baptist has also been able to expand clinical content and recommendations that are provided to patient.Patients are ready for this cultural shift to eVisits and online healthcare experiences—so healthcare organizations need to adapt fast, and the culture change discussions have to happen now. Yet this new technology also needs to be user-friendly for patients. If not rolled out properly, the industry could go from a very basic experience to a very overwhelming experience—where patients have to choose from hundreds of different digital options. This would defeat the purpose of digital transformation: to make things better and more simple for patients.Additionally, the challenge of data silos is where interoperability is still one of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Patients own their healthcare data; however, it is still not easy for patients to access and share their data with new providers or health systems. CMS / ONC are pushing for better interoperability, which will definitely help overcome these data silos in healthcare.Vik and Brett then close the podcast by discussing how conversations with executive or physician teams are essential for effective digital transformations, as well as some final thoughts about the status of artificial intelligence in the healthcare sector.Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.com Linkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimLinkedin: Dr. Brett OliverTido's Integration PackagesSupport the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of TWIHT, Vik and Jimmy comment on HIMSS 2021 Conference that just ended Aug 12. This year the conference was in person in Las Vegas and was also available digitally online. Number of participants was low this year because of the pandemic, and it seemed like instead of the usual 50 to 60 thousand registrants, 2021 conference only had about 18000 registrants. Many of them attended digitally. Vik explains the importance of this conference and what it means for the healthcare information technology conference. Vik mentions that he attended the conference digitally this year and experience of attending digitally did not compare well to in person. Jimmy asks about the digital experience, and Vik explains that even though the app tried to facilitate the communication through the app, the experience could have been much better. Number of digital sessions were limited and there were fewer opportunities to connect in digital sessions. There was a way to view the directory of participants and reach out to people, however, that is probably not the best way to connect with people. Vik then answers Jimmy question about which topics were really the hot topics in this year's conference. Vik comments that the biggest topic was interoperability because of digital transformation in healthcare. The president of HIMSS indicated that with value based care and personalized care, it made sense for organizations to invest in the right strategies and technologies to enable integration between EHR, hospitals, and  innovative applications to provide the best experience for patients. Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimTido's Integration PackagesSupport the show (http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.com/)Support the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Digital Transformation acceleration with APIs, Vik and Jimmy discuss the basics of API and its impact on digital transformation in health systems.The biggest factor for talking about APIs in healthcare is digital transformation. COVID has accelerated digital transformation in healthcare, it started with telehealth, but it is way beyond just telehealth: increased use AI and machine learning, patient or provider facing mobile apps, analytics, and remote monitoring. As a CIO or CEO of a health system,  you need to be ready for digital transformation.Healthcare has been working on digital transformation however COVID has expedited and pushed health systems to make changes, plus the government is also pushing digital transformation with CURES Act.Vik and Jimmy use examples from other industries to show user experiences are way better compared to healthcare.From a CIO standpoint, it starts with strategy, to enable digital transformation, you need to make it easier for data sharing for AI, Machine Learning, mobile apps, remote monitoring. And API is the way to go compared to the traditional way of integration. Vik and Jimmy then dive into specifics about strategy and use a practical example to explain how APIs need to be implemented.APIs also help realize significant ROI (return of investment) over traditional integration because of reduced resource time for implementation.Vik and Jimmy then dive into on-premise vs cloud for API implementations. Vik explains using FHIR specification for healthcare APIs.Vik explains the competitive advantage of having APIs to enable better user experiences.Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimSupport the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of TWIHT, we discuss how to actively monitor hospital systems data integrity. It is a big challenge to monitor hundreds of systems in a health system to ensure workflows and data are working as expected. This prevents having to rely on users to report issues and prevent extensive downtime. Vik describes a typical scenario in how most issues are dealt with today in a health system. He uses an example of an ED system. A user in emergency department places a lab order and if there is an issue with getting the result back, after waiting for 20-30min, the user then will report the issue to information technology help desk. Help desk will then message the integration team so they can check if the issue is with the result interfaces. Integration engineer will check the interfaces and then determine if there is an issue or not. By this time it is already 45-60min. Once integration team determines it is not an issue with interfaces, then they will open a task with the ED system vendor because at this point it is clear that there is some other issue with displaying the result in the ED system. This example shows that in health systems today, there is no automated process to prevent system issues and prevent long unscheduled downtimes which affect patient care. With an automated hospital systems data monitoring, within a min, an issue can be identified, and process of notifying the right parties can start immediately. This way a fix can be in place as soon as possible to minimize system downtime and avoid adverse patient events because of system issues. This problem of avoiding system issues has been in place for a long time, and it is challenging to actively monitor workflows and data integrity within 100s of hospital systems, however, our team at Tido Inc. has developed an active monitoring application to help identify issues instantly. Relying on users to report issues in all electronic systems is a very frustrating issue for care providers and instead of focusing on patient care, they are having to deal with system issues.  Vik provides another example where because of a workflow change in the EMR system, how it can affect downstream systems. EMR and hospital systems test automation can help avoid these issues (check last episode for more details), however, even test automation cannot guarantee avoidance of issues in live environment. This is where active systems integrity monitoring can catch issues before they turn into longer downtimes or affect patient care because of missing critical data. Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.comTwitter: @TWIHT1Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/Music Provided by Soundstripe.comLinkedin: Vik PatelLinkedin: Jimmy KimTido Inc. The Trusted Tech Partner for Healthcare. We use technology to deliver better outcomes. Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of TWIHT, Vik and Jimmy continue the series about testing and test automation in healthcare, specifically EMR and health systems test automation. We start out with the difference between web test automation that we discussed in the last episode versus EMR and health systems test automation. Vik explains that the biggest difference would be that web applications may or may not have patient health information however EMR and all hospital systems all have patient health information (PHI). So the impact of system errors with EMR and hospitals systems (PACS, Pharmacy, Laboratory, Cardiology, ambulatory, etc). is way higher as it could lead to critical adverse events. Vik explains that with EMR and other hospital systems, changes are being made in those systems based on the feedback from clinical staff for workflows and then there are also application updates that are also happening continuously. Vik then explains the traditional approach for testing of changes in healthcare organization. In most cases it is a manual testing. He explains the traditional manual approach in detail using an example. But it is definitely a challenge because all the staff members involved in this testing already have competing deadlines and testing of the EMR and other hospital changes becomes secondary.Jimmy shares a testing story from video game industry and  Vik mentions Apple's Mythic Quest show and how there are only 2 testers for a very complex video game. Just shows that testing is not always a priority. But the impact of software issues in a video game versus EMR or other hospital systems is very different. It is actually a life or death difference in hospital systems.  Jimmy and Vik then discuss what can be done better for testing in healthcare. Vik indicates that to cover all the testing required for continuous changes happening in hospital systems, on average, it will probably take about 50,000 hours to cover all the testing required. And if we average out the hourly rate of staff members to $50/hour, that means it will take $2.5 million dollars per year to do all testing using manual testing. The way around this is to use the right technologies to automate the testing. Vik indicates that depending on whether the system is web or desktop, selenium or appium framework can be used for test automation scripts. The other thing to consider is that there are lots of different devices used in a hospital environment i.e. desktop, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. This is where using a real device cloud in automated testing to ensure the system works as intended on all devices is very important. Vik explains the process used by test team at Tido Inc. for test automation. Initially once assessment is done to capture all the different workflows and downstream systems used, the team then develops test scripts. They also use integration framework since all the information to downstream systems going through the interfaces can be used to cross check information between EMR and downstream systems. Once the test scripts are developed they can be run continuously or on-demand for regression tesTido Inc. The Trusted Tech Partner for Healthcare. We use technology to deliver better outcomes. Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showListen to all This Week in Health Tech episodesVik Patel - LinkedInTido Inc. - WebsiteTido Inc. - LinkedIn