John Halamka, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) is opening up a health tech exploration center led by the hospital’s Chief Information Officer John Halamka. The goal of the new facility will be to study and evaluate emerging technologies such as blockchain, telemedicine, the Internet of Things, and machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence.
The center is described as being modeled on incubators supporting healthcare startups:
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HTEC’s primary focus is on exploring new technologies, assessing which ones are scalable, and then sharing successful platforms with the rest of the world. Technologies will be tested in house with BIDMC’s proprietary, one-of-a-kind dynamic database of de-identified patient data that is HIPAA-compliant and mitigates compliance issues for rapid testing.
Under Halamka, the center will look at how to improve patient education through natural language processing, optimize data analytics for clinical decision support, and help patients use mobile health apps to manage their health. It will also explore ways to enlist technology to improve physician-patient communication. Given past collaborations with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, Halamka could also use his new role to attract other collaboration partners to the incubator. It could also create another avenue for healthcare startups to work with BIDMC
Halamka said in a news release that the work undertaken at the center will help BIDMC use new technology to evaluate and share all types of data with both clinicians and patients to improve care delivery.
“The center will also create a base of knowledge and focused expertise that connects technology advances with clinical care and research to further accelerate innovation,” Halamka said.
The launch of the center comes at a time when hospitals are keen to evaluate applications of emerging health tech, particularly how they can benefit their patient population, troubleshoot for potential problems with the technology infrastructure of their institutions, and how it can fit into clinical workflows.
Photo: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
