First off, it's important to bear in mind that the conference is US healthcare focused. Hence not too many developments
The future of healthcare is digital and it’s app-ening The 2017 conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) took place recently in Orlando in the USA. MediSwitch ME Andrew Brown shares what he learned about the future of healthcare…
“HIMSS is a global, cause-based, not-for-profit organisation that leads efforts to improve healthcare through IT, specifically in terms of engagements between professionals and patients, and care outcomes. Its annual conference is a massive event. This year, more than 40 000 health IT professionals, clinicians, executives and vendors from around the world converged in Orlando for a week of workshops, thought leader sessions, roundtable discussions, networking and product demonstrations. It was mindboggling to experience a conference this big dedicated purely to healthcare information systems. First off, it’s important to bear in mind that the conference is US healthcare focused. Hence not too many developments showcased there can be applied immediately and directly to our market. However, the value of the conference is the window into the future it gives us. That sense of what is to come as far as healthcare IT is concerned, is invaluable for our business. It was interesting to see that despite all our differences, South Africa and the USA share some common healthcare themes. There, as here, it is expected that government’s role in healthcare will expand, despite President Trump’s threats to repeal the legislation that gave America Obamacare. In South Africa, we all heard the finance minister allocating more funds to NHI in the budget speech, and the Department of Health is currently running primary healthcare NHI pilot projects. Another common theme is relentless affordability pressures, and the need to manage escalating costs. It was not surprising, therefore, to see a great number of IT solutions that focus on efficiencies, effectiveness and taking costs out of the system, by improving admin processes and doctors’ methods. It was good for the MediSwitch team to be exposed to systems that provide those kinds of solutions.
A large chunk of the conference’s time and energy was spent on innovations in care and the digitisation of healthcare. Some of what was discussed – notably tailoring care to an individual patient’s DNA – was fascinating in that it is driven by cutting-edge technology, big data analysis and artificial intelligence. The biggest trend we picked up on, is the consumerisation of health. The app-driven consumer behaviour that is mushrooming in banking and retail, as well as online bookings, is spilling over into healthcare. People want to interact with their doctors like consumers, not patients in the traditional sense of the word. As a result, they are increasingly expecting the same kind of convenience and interactivity they enjoy in other sectors of the economy. For example, people want to be able to compare prices across providers, book appointments on the fly, get reminders and rate their experience and their provider. Hospitals or clinics should look and feel like a hotel lobby – a far cry from the often dire health sector experience with plastic chairs, old magazines and rude receptionists. In addition to mobile apps that meet the consumerisation need, we saw interesting examples of digitisation that could transform the way we think about delivering care. The CIO of Kaiser Permanente, a managed care consortium in America, spoke about their installations of large video screens inside hospital rooms. The screens have a linked-in video camera facility, allowing a nurse to have an impromptu videoconference with a specialist if he or she needs to check anything. There and then, the nurse, patient and specialist can have a three-way discussion, instead of the nurse making a note on the patient chart and the specialist picking up on it during ward rounds the next day. In fact, there is a big drive in general towards videoconferencing consultations. Several corporates, for instance, provide private booths in their offices where GP consults can take place via video. And if you need medication, the doctor completes an e-script and the pharmacy delivers the prescription to reception. It’s like Uber for healthcare – and it makes a lot of sense for those non-serious niggles. Another development related to digitisation is the drive to provide patients with solid, verified information about their health conditions. Instead of leaving consumers in the hands of Dr Google, physicians spend more time online to put peer-reviewed information at the disposal of patients to help them make decisions about their health. It is exciting to see how the knowledge gap between patients and doctor is being closed.
My final observation from the conference serves as an early warning for us here in South Africa. One of the pillars of the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) was the digitisation of healthcare records. Currently, more than 80% of health interactions are captured electronically; the downside is that patients now have digital records everywhere because different service providers have different systems. Healthcare IT in America now has to find a way to integrate and coordinate all this data. We need to learn from this state of affairs, given that we are only now starting to adopt electronic health records.”
