Hello PULSE Blog readers! Let me introduce myself. I’m Don Woodlock, the new vice president of HealthShare.
I joined the InterSystems team this summer after nearly 30 years of working in the health IT industry; so while I may be the new kid on the block, that hasn’t stopped me from quickly getting up to speed on everything InterSystems. In fact, within weeks of starting my new position, I was whisked away to beautiful Palm Desert, California to attend the annual InterSystems Global Summit. Not too shabby for my first month on the job, right?
Sunshine and palm trees aside, the summit was an exciting and enlightening experience. I was able to immerse myself in all aspects of the company and hear firsthand from our customers around the world how HealthShare helps them do some pretty amazing things. I also had the opportunity to join a few roundtable discussions during the Healthcare Leadership Conference, where our customers shared insights and personal experiences with some of the “hottest topics” in healthcare technology today. The discussions were an open dialogue of learning and sharing what healthcare organizations are doing to succeed in healthcare, with the goal of helping one another to implement better systems of care, overcome business and data challenges, and prepare for the future of value-based care [or of sustainable healthcare or population health management].
As my first official PULSE blog post, I wanted to share some of the top takeaways I gathered from those discussions, and why I’m so excited about what’s still to come:
- Interoperability of patient data must happen. There are certainly barriers of standards, organizational incentives, and technology but we all must remain committed a patient’s information flowing in real-time. As patients move around the community, their information should already be there.
- Information sharing must be straightforward and beneficial to all parties involved. To effectively employ value-based care, you must implement a technology strategy to support it.
- Aggregation of patient data across all the systems in a community into a clean normalized, de-duplicated patient data can be an innovation platform for our customers to enable analytics, population understanding, and many community workflows.
- The ability to incorporate analytics into end-user workflows is critical to success. As solutions developers, it is important for us to remember to “meet them where they are.” We must enable the patients and care-givers in the most natural and empowering way possible.
- Real-time access to relevant data for clinicians enables them to do their jobs better by providing higher quality care. We need to focus on delivering the exact information that they need, directly within their workflow.
Patient engagement is all about supporting patients across their care journey and beyond.
- Global population health trends teach us that regardless of where you are in the world, it is critical to provide for our communities in an accessible and cost effective manner; and the only way to do that is with community approach.
In the weeks ahead, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into the specific conversations and overall takeaways from both Global Summit and the Healthcare Leadership Conference, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for more to come. Can’t wait? Then be sure to check out our good friend Lygeia Ricciardi at Clear Voice Consulting, LLC’s recent post on her top takeaways from the patient engagement roundtables for a sneak peek on what you can expect to see from us here on PULSE.
Let me end by giving a big thank you to the InterSystems team for the warm welcome. I look forward to all the exciting things ahead. I hope to see many of you at our Global Summit in 2018—in San Antonio, Texas!