At the historic Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Texas, I joined the HMS Momentum 2018 conference on Wednesday to share my thoughts on the latest advances in healthcare technology and data analytics with the 300 senior executives in attendance. The conference, a combination of thought-leadership and user-experience offerings, focused its attendees on opportunities to “Move Healthcare Forward.”
In my keynote address, I tried to separate hype from reality, focusing on three solutions already making a difference today and two that could move the needle in the future.
3 Healthcare Solutions That Meet Or Exceed The Hype:
- The electronic health record (EHR). Although time consuming, the EHR is essential to providing physicians with all the information they need to effectively treat patients. These digital tools equip doctors with the info they need to ensure individuals get preventive services they need and avoid preventable complications from chronic disease. Studies show that comprehensive EHRs set the highest-performing healthcare providers apart. Those that use and apply comprehensive data on patients at every point of contact have been shown to reduce deaths from heart disease, sepsis, strokes and colon cancer by more than 30%.
- Data analytics. Computers can follow the progress of thousands of hospitalized patients and notify doctors as to which ones are likely to deteriorate in the future. Similarly, data analytics can warn doctors in the ED as to which patients are likely to come back for admission over the next few days. In both circumstances, the embedded algorithms prioritize those at greatest risk, minimize the potential danger, improve clinical outcomes and reduce mortality.
- Telehealth. Video technology allows doctors to manage patients with chronic illnesses more continuously and more often, with fewer and less-time-intensive interactions. Digital solutions connect physicians with each other and bring increasing expertise to doctors in the ED, hospital and office. In the future, I believe video will replace 30% of today’s office visits.
Two Healthcare Solutions With Great Potential That Have Yet To Match The Hype:
- Artificial Intelligence. Computer applications are becoming better than doctors at making diagnoses through pattern recognition. This proves true and tremendously useful in diverse areas, including radiology, pathology, ophthalmology and dermatology. Rather than relying on heuristics to make diagnoses, computers “learn” through hundreds of thousands of samples and apply those learnings consistently. Although patients remain cautious about the applications of AI and health, I believe change is inevitable as the intelligence gap between people and smart-software grows.
- Wearable devices. Retailers manufacture and sell dozens of devices that can track vital functions. These so-called “wearables” can monitor heart rhythms, blood pressure, pulses, oxygenation and blood sugar. Unfortunately, as of yet, none of these gadgets do what doctors need them to do: provide expertise to patients. Physicians don’t want to receive hundreds of digital “cardiac rhythm strips” or thousands of blood glucose readings because they don’t have time to review them. Instead, what medicine needs are monitors that can let patients know if they are OK or in need of medical care. In that way, management of chronic illnesses could evolve from intermittent to continuous. Physicians, rather than seeing patients every three to six months, would evaluate them as soon as the wearable/application detects a problem, whether that’s tomorrow or a year from now. In the interim, it would provide continuous feedback based on the physician’s treatment plan. Unfortunately, the large companies that could manufacture such as device today aren’t willing to assume the associated liability.
I had a great time at the HMS Momentum 2018 Conference, which featured a bevy of notable healthcare figures, such as CNN political analyst and president-whisperer Paul Begala, healthcare futurists and author Ian Morrison, and HMS’s own chief medical officer Gary Call.
I concluded my comments this week with a lesson from “Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong.” The book’s underlying theme is that context (not objective information) shapes human perception and changes behavior.
Consequently, patients place tremendous trust in physicians and view them as almost perfect, despite the objective data that demonstrates a massive gap between American healthcare and the outcomes achieved in other industrialized nations – or even the gap between the best U.S. health systems and the rest. In contrast, as humans, we’re not yet comfortable with machines and software applications dictating our care, even when research demonstrates their superiority in a growing number of areas over the clinical skills of today’s physicians.
That will change. As technology becomes more prevalent in our lives, be it the advances of self-driving cars or the next generation of Siri/Alexa, we will become more comfortable with relying on technology for portions of our healthcare. And we will be healthier for it.
Dr. Robert Pearl is the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, the nation’s largest physician group. He’s the bestselling author of “Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Health Care–And Why We’re Usually Wrong” and a Stanford University professor. Follow him on Twitter @RobertPearlMD.
