Cloud-based technology company Candescent Health announced its partnership with Cleveland Clinic today. At the Clinic’s Medical Innovation Summit, CEO and founder Scott Seidelmann appeared to discuss how healthcare is delivered and the critical aspect of efficient radiology workflow.
The company’s goal is to make a radiologists job easier by reducing the time and energy that goes into collecting and utilizing data. As we previously reported, the company’s RadPerform platform integrates with current hospital EMRs and PACS systems and organizes the radiologists work in an intuitive, efficient way.
In respect to how things are functioning at the time and the underlying problem Candescent is trying to solve, “It’s not that the data is not there,” Seidelmann said in an interview, “It’s that it’s not well organized and presented at the time they need it in an easy-to-understand fashion, and it’s not often times presented to the right specialist.”
As far as the partnership with Cleveland Clinic, Seidelmann said goal number one moving forward is putting the entire enterprise under one common platform to have a better understanding of how the clinic is actually performing and then start to optimize to make a radiologist’s job easier and make care more consistent.
The panel at the Medical Innovation Summit that Seidelmann was a part of included Dr. Jeff Hersh VP, Chief Medical Officer at GE Healthcare, Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, Chief Scientist at IBM Research as well as Dr. Christoph Zindel, General Manager, Magnetic Resonance at Siemens Healthcare.
Seidelmann got a laugh at the conference when he joked with his fellow panelists that they should be scared of smaller companies like Candescent. He went on to more seriously address his key takeaways from the panel including how working with startups can help to solve real problems in the industry.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“One of the takeaways [from the panel discussion] for me is that the industry is so focused on the shiny new object, which is machine learning and cognitive computing, and it is incredible,” he said. “It’s going to change so many things. [But] I think often times in the industry we’re missing the problems that are currently solvable, which is the fact that Cleveland Clinic and big academic institutions do a really good job delivering specialized care…but the vast majority of community hospitals and patients don’t have access to such specialists. There are some real problems we can solve in the short term that are going to be important.”
