Healthcare executives see interoperability and data management as the biggest obstacles to digital transformation.

It is no secret that healthcare is slower in technology and IT adoption compared to other industries. Whereas data exchange between banks is self-evident today, the exchange of patient data among different healthcare institutions is far from that situation.

Listen to the discussion with Half Wolf in iTunes, Stitcher or on Youtube.

How much does interoperability cost?

One of the healthcare systems that successfully implemented an EMR system already ten years ago, is Kaiser Permanente — the largest managed care organization in the United States. In the early 2000s, the organisation started with EHR installation in eight regions. After a failed attempt of internal development, they decided to install the Epic system, for by some estimates $6 billion USD in 6 years.

In 2004, Hal Wolf III, the current CEO of HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the largest global organisation connecting healthcare IT providers), joined Kaiser Permanente in Colorado. His role as the Chief Information Officer for Kaiser Permanente in Colorado was to design end-to-end Information System, architecture, software development and functional enhancements for the Colorado Region of Kaiser Permanente. He believes the EHR implementation in Kaiser Permanente was expensive mainly because it was one of the first large scale healthcare IT implementation. A lot can be done at a lower cost by today, with a wide offer of off the shelf products.

By today, all the healthcare institutions are working digitization. The healthcare IT market had flourished, but in many perspectives not in the best way. Different vendors use different data standards, making the quality of data, data standardization, and interoperability the hot, but frustrating topics in healthcare IT.

The current CEO of HIMSS is optimistic regarding interoperability. Although he agrees that achieving 100% interoperability (semantic, structural to organisational) might be almost impossible, he believes data availability and connectivity could be achieved with new technologies.

How to encourage healthcare IT implementation and adoption?

While having rich experiences in the healthcare industry, Hal Wolf started his career in a very different sector — the entertainment business. He first worked in Sales and Marketing for MTV Networks in the 80s, and later as VP of Content at Time Warner. Understanding the technical side of e-commerce brought him to healthcare 20 years later.

Executives included in the healthcare IT demand survey expressed concerns regarding the emergence of Amazon, Google, and Apple in Healthcare. According to Wolf, HIMSS welcomes new entrants, as there presence and additional competition on the market will force healthcare institutions to become more agile in the era of informed consumers and patient as a customer shift.

“lf the goal of changes is to put an EMR in an institution, you will put in an EMR, but that does not necessarily change how services are delivered,” says Wolf, who likes to illustrate the problem of poorly planned implementations with a formula:

NT+ OO = COO

New Technologies + Old Organisation = Costly Old Organisation

His advice to healthcare executives regarding healthcare IT implementation is to reconsider how processes can be changed before implementing new technologies.

Global healthcare challenges

HIMSS has more than 100.000 members around the globe and is often seen as the global healthcare IT community care-taker. Every year, the global conference in the US attracts more than 40.000 people, says Wolf. The main community members are the established healthcare IT companies, but HIMSS stepped in faster changing digital health startups arena in 2017 with the acquisition of Health 2.0. The move is supposed to help HIMSS become a more agile organisation bridging the gap between established and new technologies, says Wolf.

According to his observations through his travels to the events of HIMSS and Health 2.0 the whole world is facing the same problems: aging population, disease burdens, improvements in identifying and diagnosing diseases, geographic displacement and access to healthcare. People in rural areas are not the only ones underserved, patients in urban areas can live close to a hospital but don’t receive care due to long waiting lines. All countries face funding challenges, increasingly informed consumers, lack of actionable information and staff shortages. Wolf believes digital health is one of the great equalizers to address these issues, because it will increase accessibility of care and enables new, before unseen patient engagement opportunities for further healthcare development.

Listen to the discussion with Wolf in episode 30 of Faces of digital health. Find the discussion in iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher or on Youtube.

Some questions addressed:

• What can healthcare learn from the entertainment industry?

• What is the price of interoperability, what can we learn from Keiser Permanente, where $6 billion USD was spent to implement a unified system?

• What is the role of HIMSS in the interoperability story?

• How has HIMSS changed since the acquisition of Health 2.0 in 2017?

• How to stay informed as a health executive in the era of overwhelming amounts of new information about new technologies?

• What are the global healthcare challenges?