Some of the speakers at CONVERGE offered a few different takes on what healthcare would look like in the future. Medtronic’s director of IT Innovation, Paul Thompson, talked about the hospital of the future and Jefferson CEO Dr. Stephen Klasko illustrated what teaching hospitals will look like and how they will function in 10 years’ time.
But GE Healthcare’s Jeff Terry, the general manager for solution development, offered a viewpoint that combined the stark reality of consolidation with hospital command centers that will use planning and productivity tools to make hospitals function better. Instead of 300 health systems, Terry said, it will be more like 85 super regional systems providing 80 percent of care.
He illustrated how hospitals can use technology to visualize ways to improve coordination between teams around a hospital through a command center. The idea is to improve scheduling and avoid long waits for patients for procedures and to reduce risk.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
The AutoCAD tools are intended to make it easier for hospitals to fix workflow and productivity problems so they can spend more time on tackling bigger, more complex challenges, particularly around more complex patients.
It was intriguing to see how some of the logistics issues hospitals experience in moving patients and data around could be so easily fixed on a computer. But I couldn’t help wondering how long it takes health systems to resolve some of the issues in practice beyond the instant gratification of a mouse click.
