With technology playing a bigger and bigger role both in how healthcare is delivered to populations as well as where it is delivered, AHIP Institute 2012 will present a general session at 10 a.m. Thursday called "Brave New World of Health Care: At the Intersection of Science, Technology, and Delivery System Transformation" to help attendees better understand how emerging technologies are transforming the face of the industry.
Presented by industry thought leaders Louis Burns, CEO, Intel-GE Care Innovations; Jeffrey O. Henley, chairman, Oracle Corp.; and Robert Margolis, MD, managing partner and CEO, HealthCare Partners, the session will provide examples of real world successes in implementing technology to effectively provide better care at lower cost.
"One of the things that is hyper-critical is that people understand technology itself doesn't solve anything," said Burns in a conversation previewing his presentation. "If you don't use it right, you might get a worse answer. Innovation is really about change management."
One example of an organization that has successfully leveraged technology, Burns noted, is the Veterans Administration, which has effectively changed its process and the method on which it delivers care in order to care for more of its population in the home setting, which then allowed the technology solutions it implemented to be effective.
"The VA has done a wonderful job of reaching out to veterans in their homes and nursing a number of different technologies to do that," Burns noted. "That would be a shining example that needs to get more light."
Burns said he sees the move to finding effective methods of delivering more care to people in the home that allows care givers to effectively monitor and treat more patients per care giver and to focus only on those that need immediate attention based on remote monitoring of the patients as one important change that will continue to gain momentum in the industry.
"If we can get the healthcare industry to move to actually think of the home as a critical part of care, that is a huge change," Burns added. "And once you get to that change, that thought process, a lot of things open themselves up."
Another area for improvement would be for companies to move away from the silos of care that have been developed over the years for individual chronic conditions such as diabetes or hypertension. In the current systems for patients managing multiple chronic conditions, the information is not shared among all the people responsible for that care of that patient, which can make it very difficult for doctors and other care givers to ferret out changes in a patient's condition.
"In the future, what we have to deliver as an industry is the integration of those silos, so that when a (doctor) makes a decision it provides a holistic view of the patient and today that doesn't happen," noted Burns.
Finally, Burns said during the session he will raise the issue of the fact that people are living longer and his view that it shouldn't be viewed as a problem, as it often is, but rather considered a huge success story of the healthcare industry.
That said, with people living longer lives it then becomes incumbent on the industry to solve the complex issues of "what do we do to continue to help people live longer and how do we allow them to live with dignity in a place they want to be in the way the want to be," Burns said.