The CareFwd Conference

Yesterday, I joined a panel at the CareFwd conference discussing the innovations needed in healthcare today.

I highlighted 5 areas:

1. Meaningful Use Stage 2
Need novel patient engagement tools - existing healthcare business to consumer web and mobile products lack a value proposition and are hard to use
Need healthcare information exchange capabilities - data liquidity is increasingly important for care coordination
Need quality measurement innovations - modern EHRs must provide decision support at the point of care to ensure quality measure criteria are met

2.  ICD-10
Need Computer Assisted Coding - no clinician can remember 170,000 codes
Need Clinical Documentation Improvement - in an ICD-10 world, a clinician needs to include enough information to justify a highly granular diagnostic code
Need to seamlessly link the problem list, the documentation and the bill - surviving future audits will require a level of integration that auto-populates the problem list and suggests an appropriate billing code, all based on interpretation of what the clinician documents

3.  HIPAA Omnibus Rule
Support for enhanced security including identity management, network access control, security information and event management - these components are foundational to a mature security program
Need BYOD solutions - personal devices are here to stay.   We need to manage them centrally with minimal user impact
Need novel breach detection - inappropriate internal access can be a more significant risk than external threats

4.  Affordable Care Act
Need novel business intelligence approaches that leverages unstructured data - more than half of the typical medical record is text.   We need to be able to use it for decision support
Need prospective and retrospective reminders - turning data into information, knowledge and wisdom is the only way to achieve gains in quality, safety and efficiency
Need care management and population health - we need to achieve wellness and continuous preventative care, rather than episodic illness care

5.  Secure cloud computing resources in general
Need to sign business associate agreements - cloud solutions must include indemnification for privacy breaches
Need third party audits - we need to understand the physical and logical protections in place at cloud hosting sites
Need 99.99% reliability - the cloud has been described as "your mess, outsourced, with less reliability".   We need high reliability

To all the entrepreneurs out there - these are products and services I'll be buying over the next year.

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