The annual global conference of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is the place to be for the exchange of healthcare technology ideas, processes, products and policies. Each year, themes emerge around key talking points in the industry and 2019 is no different.
The substance of those themes, however, is not as predicted.
While cybersecurity has been much discussed, and artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and government policy have shared the spotlight, they haven’t formed the thread running through multiple sessions and conversations at HIMSS19. The focus more often has been on information – its reliability and application in clinical settings – and people.
The latter is a central talking point at a conference dedicated to developing technology that will allow humans to do more with less in healthcare settings.
Technology is Just a Tool
In an interview for USF Health Online’s The Health IT Beat, HIMSS Director of Professional Development Kerry Amato said workforce would be a major topic at the conference. The World Health Organization has estimated the global healthcare industry has a shortfall of more than 7 million workers – a number projected to balloon to 12.9 million by 2035.
Technology often is touted as the key to countering that shortage, which is compounded by the rapid aging of the world’s population. But, as industry leaders note, human commitment and interaction also are required.
Picked up theme for #HIMSS19 so far: culture over technology. Focus on shifting fundamental perceptions and interactions between people, not just use of tools.
— Matt Fisher (@Matt_R_Fisher) February 13, 2019
New rules issued by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) address information exchange and putting patients in the driver’s seat when it comes to their data. Those guidelines are worded in a way designed to encourage viewing healthcare as a human process.
In her HIMSS19 speech on interoperability and patient engagement, CMS Administrator Seema Verma described healthcare of the future as “a world where everyone, everywhere, has access to a health ecosystem for wellness, with humans at the center of it.”
Across healthcare, workloads are increasing and clinicians are experiencing burnout at alarming levels. HIMSS19 education sessions on healthcare analytics have spotlighted how change in care settings will be influenced more by people and process than by the choice of a specific technology vendor. Meanwhile, adopting the appropriate analytical view of those processes will allow for them to be refined and optimized.
In a session titled “Structuring Data for Value-Based Care,” Dr. Hee Hwang said IT systems must account for human variation.
“For the last 15 years, we tried to get physicians to use some sort of structure for information entry. But IT systems should allow physicians to do their work in their own way,” said Hwang, who has led initiatives to increase interoperability and efficiency in hospitals across South Korea.
Making Information Count
A prevailing sense around the conference’s halls and sessions is that the industry has as much information as needed to spark innovations that can transform how healthcare is delivered. The question now, simply put, is: Where to start?
Making data applicable in clinical settings requires not only tools, but people who can analyze information and distribute recommendations in clear and actionable ways. At the 2018 conference, a common theme was how to get that data into the right hands and establishing a technical framework to drive innovation through open APIs.
Through high-profile initiatives such as Blue Button 2.0, more than 1,500 developers are working on consumer-facing applications aimed at helping patients use their health data to improve health outcomes and increase their engagement with healthcare providers.
This is also happening at the organizational level. During a session titled “Redesigning Clinical Care with Analytics,” Paul J. Lampi, Director of Technical Services for Memorial Hermann Health System, discussed efforts to create a data-driven culture and redesign care across a system of 16 hospitals and 267 care sites.
The goal was to “standardize the care we’re providing so that everyone is following the same clinical pathway.”
Memorial Hermann focused on developing visualizations that tell stories anyone can understand, no matter where they are in the process. Stories can be related to any aspect of care, but in the case examined during the session, they centered on four keys:
- Care variation – designing standardized care pathways
- Care progression – reducing stay times while ensuring discharge readiness and proper post-acute care placement
- Clinical documentation – increasing accuracy of documentation to ensure appropriate reimbursement for care
- Case management – improving care coordination through each step
More than 130 professionals throughout the health system were trained to build dashboards, ensuring a focus on functional design that allows clinicians to gain value from data. Selected dashboards were vetted by analytics professionals before teams of up to 80 people across the continuum of care determined key performance indicators and measures that would be taken to influence those KPIs.
“If you tell me you want a dashboard, but you can’t tell me what insights you want or what problem you want to solve, we’re not going to bother building it for you,” Lampi said. “It takes culture change at every level. It takes a village to think data and actionable insights on specific things you can impact. You can’t boil the ocean. Crawl, walk, run is how you want to think of it.”
Memorial Hermann, a 26,000-employee not-for-profit serving the Greater Houston area, projected savings of $40 million from its efforts. Actual savings hit $44 million, illustrating how information can be used to spark change that benefits patients, providers and health systems.
This message of using information wisely was driven home during another HIMSS19 session, “Driving Physician Engagement and Outcomes with AI.”
“You have to take stakeholders on a journey as to why they need to trust your tools and models,” presenter Dr. Dipti Patel-Misra, Chief Data and Analytics Officer for Vituity, told the crowd. “Data scientists and engineers have plenty of data and opportunities to build AI/ML models, but the key is to provide the right models at the right time in the right way, so physicians use the tools to drive value.”
Read more of our HIMSS19 coverage and connect with us live at the conference. USF Health Online is at HIMSS 19 on University Row, booth UR12! Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to stay tuned with what we’re doing at HIMSS 19!
