CHICAGO—As technology rapidly evolves, strategic partnerships will play a key role in advancing innovation in healthcare by not reinventing the wheel, industry leaders said Monday.
And, increasingly, these partnerships should be focus on simplifying technology to remove administrative headaches for clinicians.
Case in point: Royal Philips announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society's global conference this week. Shortly after that announcement, Royal Philips CEO Roy Jakobs joined other health execs to speak on the importance of strategic innovation.
“If you want to work in an open, interoperable manner, we need to also work together as technology partners, whether it's for the electronic medical record companies, whether it's with a big tech company, we need to make sure that we create an open system,” Jakobs said during a panel discussion featuring Intermountain Healthcare Clinical Chief Information Officer Becky Fox, Artisight President Stephanie Lahr, M.D., and Stealth Consulting founder and CEO Nick Patel.
“We need to have different types of partnerships with different ecosystem players and by doing it, we can accelerate the learning impact," Jakobs said during the panel, which was centered on the careful and purposeful use of health tech partnerships.
Jakobs suggested that partnerships not be transactional but multiyear journeys focused on larger issues as opposed to cut-and-dry projects. He pointed to the lingering maintenance of silos between and within organizations, the solution to which would be the design of open systems from the beginning. “We truly believe that we need to make all our solutions open,” he said.
Philips’ announced today that its HealthSuite Imaging solution is now available on AWS. The duo will also be working to accelerate the development of cloud-based generative AI applications to provide clinical decision support.
The technology company’s HealthSuite Imaging solution will help increase image access speeds, reliability and data orchestration for radiologists and clinicians from diagnosis to therapy to follow-up, the companies said. In turn, Philips HealthSuite Imaging will use Amazon HealthLake Imaging to allow easy reuse of images for machine learning and research and reduce medical imaging costs.
“So I think designing for open systems in which data flows seamlessly enriches the handover from one unit to another,” Jakobs said. “Make it simple and intuitive to use technology, to take the burden away from the staff that needs to focus on the patient. That's how you can make their life easier, instead of making it more difficult by adding more solutions. We’re thinking how we can design around collaboration.”
Patel, former chief digital officer at Prism Health, began the panel discussion by listing staggering statistics on provider burnout from the Mayo Clinic—34% of nurses will likely quit their job this year, and 63% of physicians are experiencing burnout.
The top specialties experiencing burnout are emergency medicine, OB-GYN, internal medicine, pediatrics and family medicine. “A lot of them serve as primary care providers,” Patel said. The top three reasons, according to Patel, were completing too many administrative tasks, not having enough time with patients, working too many hours and keeping up with patient demand.
On the side of health systems, only 13% of health systems in 2021 reported negative operating margins, according to Patel. So far this year, 63% of health systems are reporting the same negativity with the largest patient demand in history.
When asked how to address these cascading challenges, Fox said the solution is not to pile on more tech but simplify the tech that already exists and optimize its uses.
“We're all designing in conference rooms,” Fox said during the panel. “The best design happens in conference rooms but the reality happens when the rubber meets the road. Now is the time to go slow and really simplify things. Remove redundancy, remove ridiculousness and really make things a lot simpler.”
Fox referenced a new program Intermountain is piloting where patients who have back pain can get a direct appointment with a physical therapist as opposed to being referred to an orthopedist and then to PT. Health systems also should be willing to kill pilot programs faster if they aren't producing results, she noted.
Earlier this month, Intermountain announced that it was expanding its partnership with Kyruus’ ProviderMatch platform. By using the online scheduling solution, the health system increased online appointment volume by over 20%.
Fox looked to nursing documentation as a prime area for winnowing down and streamlining labor.
“We have millions of nurses clicking millions and zillions of times how many patients are at risk for falls,” Fox said. “I don't need a score to tell me that the 90-year-old patient with comorbidities is at risk for falls, we know that. And most importantly, our AI or data can tell us who is at risk.”
Patel wrapped up the panel with yet another jarring statistic. When a health system changes its electronic health record system, there’s a 30% reduction in productivity. When asked how to respond to what the statistic revealed, Lahr noted that parties on every level are trying to address the same problem by throwing new tech at old problems.
“Right now we're all working on a lot of the same thing and we don't have a great way to share it,” Lahr said. “So we're wasting a huge amount of time and resources that none of us have. Partnerships mean we don’t need to reiterate or reinvent but can just jump in and make some change.”