March was busy for Bright.md and others in the health IT space, with both HIMSS and ViVE bringing leaders in the industry together in Florida. We were thrilled to have a presence at both to discuss the value of asynchronous telehealth and the critical role this care continues to play in organizations’ digital transformation efforts.
In addition to digital transformation, speakers at both conferences covered many topics like interoperability and the importance of data sharing, consumerization of care, health equity, and more. Check out our round-up below of the top news and key themes to keep an eye out for this year from HIMSS22 and ViVE 2022.
- Value-based care. There’s a new emphasis being placed on value-based care as telehealth’s popularity continues to hold strong post-pandemic. According to David Chou, CIO for a public academic health system and author of this HealthcareIT News piece, now is the time for CIOs to shine and “lead the way in developing a set of tools that can deliver care anywhere, anytime,” he wrote. Virtual care options, map route optimization, and remote patient monitoring are all areas to explore.
- Interoperability. Physicians need data aggregated across multiple sources to best create a holistic view of a patient, wrote FierceHealthcare’s Rebecca Torrence in her coverage of HIMSS22. Interoperability has been a “hot topic” for a while, with the industry increasingly turning toward digitals solutions for everything from patient data to claims and billing. Although recent regulations have helped progress efforts towards interoperability that were once slow-going, the transition to value-based care models—as outlined above—is demanding an even greater push for open data exchange.
- Consumerization of care and retail health. Executive moves are being made within the industry, prompting MedCity News writer Stephanie Balm to note the impact of consumerization on healthcare. As system execs leave for companies like Amazon, Balm writes the influence of the retail giants are part of the push to transform healthcare. The relationship between technology and care quality is growing stronger, as providers look for ways to streamline tasks while retail giants want to deepen their understanding of the industry.
On Twitter, CEO of Damo Consulting Paddy Padmanabhan summed up this ViVE22 key theme as well. “Consumer behavior change is driving digital health,” he wrote. “Amazon and Walmart are real players in the emerging health care model of the future. Everyone has a story about how they are uniquely addressing consumer expectations.”
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- Digital transformation…or lack thereof. The last two years have welcomed a rapid growth of virtual care options, including remote patient monitoring, text applications, and asynchronous telehealth. But, the adoption and acceptance of these applications hasn’t exactly been linear, writes Dr. Caroline Yang for MobiHealthNews. Yang covered a HIMSS22 session in which panelists discussed findings from the HIMSS22 State of Healthcare report. All panelists agreed that although priorities may be different, technology alone isn’t a “sufficient solution” for digital transformation. Instead, there needs to be active buy-in and engagement of all stakeholders.
According to the study cited, which polled 250 health executives globally, 99 percent of respondents said digital transformation was a priority. However, the majority of respondents said they were still “stuck” in the planning and pre-implementation phases. In addition, 60 percent said their organization doesn’t have the structure in place to support digital transformation.
- Digital health maturation and health equity. Lastly at ViVE, healthcare executives discussed widespread adoption and scaling of virtual health since the onset of the pandemic. According to speakers, the industry has moved past the point of these ideas as simply concepts limited to academic medical centers. Instead, digital health implementations are leading to real-world results with regard to care access and health equity. Leaders at ViVE also recommitted to improving health outcomes for those in underserved and rural communities, including work like improving health outcomes for pregnant women to efforts to address specialist access in underserved, rural communities.
