Reinventing CDS Requires Humility in the Face of Overwhelming Complexity
Paul Cerrato and I have created a new book,Reinventing Clinical Decision Support, our first to be published about Platform thinking. Although it is being published during my tenure at Mayo Clinic, it is not endorsed by Mayo Clinic and represents the personal opinions of Paul and me. Below is the preface.In our last book, on mobile health(1), we wrote about the power of words such as cynicism, optimism, and transformation. Another word with powerful connotations is misdiagnosis. To a patient whose condition remains undetected, it is a source of frustration and anger. To a physician or nurse who has be...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 30, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
An Engineering Eye for the Tie Buying Guy
At the Mayo Clinic, patients always come first. In my few days of volunteering, I picked up on some subtle ways that the culture supports patient-centric values. Office areas are very utilitarian while patient care areas are well furnished and decorated. Everyone is professionally dressed, regardless of their role. For me, that means wearing a tie every day (and retiring my Dr. Martens). Over the past 20 years, I ' ve worn engineered black clothing in my travels around the world. I ' ve not worn a tie and long ago donated all the ties from my youth. Ad...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 27, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Mayo Clinic's First Platform
In my first few days volunteering at Mayo Clinic to meet colleagues, establish collaborations, and better understand the amazing patient services Mayo provides throughout world, I had the opportunity to tour the historic Plummer Building with Douglas Holtan, chair of the Department of Facilities and Support Services. Immediately, I realized the building is Mayo ' s first platform.In my last post, I described a platform as a way to use knowledge and technology to facilitate connections, creating value in the process.How could a building be a platform?To understand that, you need to understand the past, provided ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 19, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
What is a Platform?
This month I ' ll deliver several keynote addresses. In my presentations, I ' ll use terms such as platform enterprises, platform thinking, and platform strategy. But what is a platform?Is it just a collection of standards? If so, is a USB flash drive a platform, since I can transfer a file from my Chromebook to someone else ' s Macbook using it, in a low effort, low cost fashion?Not exactly —in the USB example, there is no agreement about what file types are preferred, what data those files may contain and what security controls will be used to protect the integrity and privacy of the data.I...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 12, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
What's Next?
After nearly 25 years in Boston, I ' m beginning a new journey at Mayo Clinic in the role of president, Mayo Clinic Platform. Many colleagues have asked me about the transition. First, I have profound thanks for my mentors and collaborators in Boston. I could easily fill an entire blog post with the names of hundreds of people who worked with me since 1996 on cloud services, mobile applications, machine learning, connected devices, and data standards.Those innovations made a positive impact on many people. At Mayo, I believe I can scale the lessons learned in Boston to stakehol...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 4, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Remote Patient Monitoring and Self-Responsibility
At HIMSS next week, I ' ll be doing 5 presentations about the future of healthcare IT, focusing on patient directed data exchange, internet of things, and telemedicine. Remote patient monitoring, which combines all three, will be increasingly important.Remote patient monitoring can take numerous forms, and the evidence supporting these tools is mixed. Here ’s another excerpt from our new book—The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine—co-authored by Paul Cerrato that dives into the issues. For those interested in reading the entire book, the publisher is offering a deep discount un...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - February 7, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
What's Next for Healthcare?
Today I had the honor of keynoting at a major announcement from Apple, Aetna and CVS/Caremark. I ' d summarize the message as " Digital Health has arrived and is now mainstream, fully embraced by the major stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem. "Here ' s the upshot.The history of healthcare and payment has been risk pool based and focused on paying for sickness.The future belongs to wellness, personalization, and a team-based approach to keeping you healthy in your home. The announcement of Aetna Attain, a collaboration of Aetna, CVS/Caremark, and Apple, is based on a few key ideas:1. Personalizati...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 30, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Embracing ChromeOS (and the cloud mindset required)
2019 will bring many changes. After more than 20 years as a Chief Information Officer, I will pivot to lead innovation as part of the senior leadership team for the newly mergedBeth Israel Lahey Health on March 1, 2019. Here ' s theBoston Business Journal articleabout it.My innovation role will focus on 5 areas:A front door/liaison to government/industry/academia for digital health collaboration at Beth Israel Lahey HealthExploring new technologies, especially those arising from outside healthcare, to assess their role in provider/patient/payer workflowMentoring startups and internal faculty seeking t...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 22, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Exploring the Connected Medical Home
Over the past few weeks, I ' ve been exploring the combination of internet of things, artificial intelligence, and ambient listening with a focus on how these technologies might improve care management, patient/family navigation of the health system, and wellness.Google, Apple, and Amazon all have ecosystems that include the functionality I ' m writing about. Purely because I ' m spending January investigating the Android/ChromeOS environment, my first exploration has been with Google products. I ' ll explore Apple next.Here ' s my test bed:Unity Farm Sanctuary heating and cooling is controlled by Nest Th...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 17, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Dispatch from India
I spent last week in Bihar, an area of Northern India near Nepal. The best way to describe the journey is in pictures.Our small team visited villages along the Ganges to the east of Patna, tracing the path of patients from seeking care to diagnosis to treatment to compliance to wellness. We met with patients, providers, field officers (think of them as care managers), chemists (pharmacists), and labs. Here ' s what we experienced:The villages had hand pumped water supplies, electricity and 4G cellular connections. Cows and goats were a part of many households.A unique telemedicine program...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 15, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Choosing Effective, Sticky Health Apps (Part 2)
In a blog post last week, I shared an excerpt from the new book that Paul Cerrato and I just completed,The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine. Here is a second excerpt from Chapter 3, “Exploring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Mobile Health Apps.”Even patients who are fully engaged in their own care still need access to medical apps they can trust. The IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science has performed a detailed analysis of the clinical evidence supporting mobile health apps, rating their maturity and relative quality. Its rating scale places a single observational study near the bottom of the scale,...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 10, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
The Meaning of Life (as a CIO)
As I approach 60 and reflect on over 40 years in the healthcare IT industry I sometimes feel that I ’ve transitioned from a rogue upstart to the leader of the status quo - always about to be disrupted. I’m no longer a trouble maker, I calm the troubled healthcare technology waters. If I ’m not careful, that could mean I’ll become a rate limiting step to radical change since I’ve been shaped by a lifetime of experience that started with punch cards, paper tape, and Fortran.The themes I ’ll write about twice a week in 2019 will be about exploring new technology around the world and in a Boston-based lab, th...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 8, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Choosing Effective, Sticky Health Apps
In arecent blog post, I talked about the new book that Paul Cerrato and I just completed, The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine. In that post, we shared the Preface to the book in the hope that it might pique readers ’ interest in mobile health. What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 3, “Exploring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Mobile Health Apps.” Choosing Effective, Sticky Health AppsEven healthcare providers who see the need for innovative mobile apps still face numerous obstacles. Given the human tendency to seek the path of least resistance, identifying the most effective, “stickiest” ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 3, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Embracing Android
Happy New Year! I ' ll be posting blog entries twice a week in 2019, describing my experiences in the healthcare IT innovation economy and international digital health.Throughout my history in the industry, I ’ve tested many emerging technologies and tried to predict future winners. Here ' s a CIO magazine article from 2007 in which I replaced my computing platforms each month to rigorously testWindows vs. Linux vs. OSXIn the late 2000 ' s, I felt that Microsoft had lost its agility and focused on adding features that few people wanted at the expense of usability. I switched to Apple products because th...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 1, 2019 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
The Power of Mobile Health
2018 was a very busy year, requiring extensive international travel —I racked up more than 400,000 miles this fall. But now that my schedule is a bit more manageable, I plan to start posting again to “Life as a Healthcare CIO”. In addition to my travels to China, Japan, Australia and a long list of other countries, I managed to find the time to work with my esteemed co-author Paul Cerrato on our third book, The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine. We wanted to share the Preface with readers and have included it below, along with a link to Elsevier ’s web site for those interested in reading the entire boo...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 14, 2018 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
