Health IT

Some overdue observations from HIMSS

At HIMSS18 Google shared their vision for healthcare, the federal government showed renewed interest in personal health information access with a reboot of Blue Button and cybersecurity, machine learning, remote monitoring were more widely discussed.

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This year at HIMSS, the discussion around artificial intelligence moved off the big stage beyond the realm of IBM Watson Health and settled into the pitch of multiple technology companies. In other words, it was everywhere. The presence of technology companies such as Google and app-driven car services Uber and Lyft which focused on Non Emergency Medical Transport were also a notable shift.

The opening night keynote from Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet who also sits on the board of Mayo Clinic, was also part of the buzz this year. He highlighted a future for healthcare that included voice-enabled technology in hospitals and using machine learning for retinal images to predict cardiac risk factors, as a recent Google Research study had done. Fresh from the launch of Google’s Cloud API, Schmidt talked about its ability to help hospitals address the cybersecurity threat that has affected numerous institutions. He also lamented the health IT industry’s conservatism which would have seemed more meaningful if it hadn’t sounded like a sales pitch.

“My view of the sum of the IT industry is that it’s conservative beyond where it should be. You care about security? The cloud is going to be more secure than your data architecture. You’re worried about your data being stolen by the bad guys? It’ll be safer in the cloud.”

Here were some of the other notable trends and takeaways from the conference:

Your partner may also be your competitor

The interest in cultivating networks and marketplaces of technology capabilities used to be mainly in the interest of large health IT vendors such as athenahealth and technology companies such as Amazon Web Services but smaller companies have been adopting this trend as well. Redox’s recent partnership with long-term care and post-acute care vendor Point Click Care vendor is a case in point. Redox has an API platform that companies and healthcare organizations to support interoperability. Developers are a big part of that community. But PointClickCare also used HIMSS to launch a developer program to support innovative tools for the long-term care market. Technology companies are creating their own ecosystems and they can overlap, which is sure to create some confusion but also some interesting partnerships.

Small AI, not moonshots

Many of the applications for AI on display at HIMSS were less about the ambitious moonshots of putting AI to work to cure cancer and more about solving tangible, practical challenges such as clinical trial recruitment. IBM Watson Health seemed to get the memo and highlighted an assessment of its partnership with Mayo Clinic. The company credited its technology with an 80 percent increase in enrollment in clinical trials for breast cancer and reducing the time to screen each patient for clinical trial matches. Epic President Carl Dvorak said the company is harnessing AI to predict readmission risk and patient deterioration — the kinds of things that are important to caregivers. The bigger picture is that if small AI can succeed at improving outcomes, it will be easier to gain buy-in from the physicians who would be using it.

Improving patient access to data

CMS Administrator Seema Verma used her talk about MyHealthEData initiative, a government program to make patient data more accessible to patients. It is spearheaded by the White House Office of American Innovation, which is directed by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Part of that initiative involved a revamp of the Blue Button program for Medicare patients. CMS Blue Button 2.0 API is designed to help an estimated 53 million Medicare members share four years worth of their claims information with providers, clinical researchers, and digital health services. That data includes drug prescriptions, primary care treatment and cost, plus Medicare coverage.  A recent Ernst & Young survey found that the interest from patients in sharing their data with physicians transcends age. But interestingly the dominant reason why patients are keen to do this is to reduce wait times (61 percent) followed by cost savings (55 percent).

Could IQVIA evolve into a pharma company?

This was an observation shared about one company which is fairly unique. It is the relatively new name of IMS Healthcare to reflect its acquisition of CRO giant Quintiles in 2016. The data the company possesses combined with the drug research and development resources of the CRO could position it to be a pharma company. Given how machine learning and analyics tools will increasingly be part of the process to identify drug development targets, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. We could see more companies that own vast amounts of patient data taking this path.

Image: Getty Images

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