We break down a few of the headlines from the first days of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) 2023 global conference that caught our eye (thanks, Fierce Healthcare).
TL; DR
Introducing the Cleveland Clinic Mentor Hospital, the first hospital built from the ground-up with 5G, expected to open this July as a joint venture between Verizon Business and Cleveland Clinic. Leveraging this network infrastructure, the healthcare facility plans to securely pilot digital health advances like patient check-in kiosks, enhanced digital displays, and augmented / virtual reality.
Our Perspective
This move underscores the aspirations and challenges of digital hospital infrastructure. Despite the continued uptick in novel digital health solutions—like CDSS, AR/VR, ambient tech, patient infotainment, etc.—a hospital’s network must be able to handle such digitization, both in terms of speed and cybersecurity.
TL; DR
Microsoft and Epic are collaborating to integrate generative AI (by way of OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model) into Epic’s EHR software, with the goal of increasing healthcare provider productivity while decreasing administrative burden.
Our Perspective
For lack of better words, generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) make a lot of sense in EHRs. We are eager to see how the combination of these technologies will streamline administrative processes and advance clinical decision support systems.
TL; DR
In a keynote panel discussion, executives at HealthPartners, VillageMD, and Best Buy Health opined the future of care delivery. As CEO Tim Barry noted, fee-for-service payment models perpetuate our notoriously siloed system. While optimizing various niches within care delivery may provide a band-aid solution, shifting to a value-based model is necessary to create a truly integrated healthcare ecosystem.
Our Perspective
These executives underscored what, in our opinion along with many others, is a central force behind today’s broken healthcare system: the fee-for-service payment model. Although an all-to-familiar condemnation, we appreciate how these executives framed the problem. Siloes are not just a tangential problem of a fee-for-service system; they are inherent to the very system. Until care is paid for in totality, rather than split into pieces by the exact services provided, our healthcare ecosystem will remain fragmented, no matter how “optimized” those fragments may be.