In November, I had the pleasure of joining Oracle Health President David Feinberg, MD, for an engaging discussion during Becker's 10th Annual CEO and CFO Roundtable. In our session hosted by Brian Zimmerman at Becker's Healthcare, we explore key topics related to the evolution of the healthcare IT industry and the future of technology in healthcare. As we look ahead to the new year, it is critical that we address, improve and execute on the following topics we discussed during our roundtable.
EHRs Should Encourage Collaboration, Not Isolated Data Sources
As physicians, we have both leveraged electronic health records (EHRs) in our careers. David made a great point during our roundtable: it's easy to overlook the importance of EHR. By digitizing medical history, patient records are no longer left at home or locked away in the doctor's office, and we have solved handwriting problems. EHRs have revolutionized the delivery of care and the sharing of health information. This provides patients with visibility into their health like never before and gives physicians unprecedented insights into patient care.
Although a transformative technology, the EHR often provides a cumbersome user experience and creates administrative burden that plagues many providers and administrative staff. The EHR experience is not necessarily intuitive or easy to use, simply because it was never designed with the end user in mind.
Instead of focusing on producing better care, for years the priority of EHRs was adding more functionality to the digitized record. Over time, EHRs have given rise to silos: disparate data collection systems that limit interoperability and increase administrative workloads. In fact, investigation sample Doctors spend almost twice as much time on administrative work as they do dealing with patients.
This must change if we hope to improve the health of everyone involved. These staggering numbers only serve to highlight the critical need to prioritize EHR usability. By doing so, we can better enable patient-centered care, streamline workflows, reduce clicks, and improve provider, administrator, and patient experiences. When EHRs are easier to navigate, it is easier to manage an efficient healthcare system and share this digitized data with patients to enable informed decision making.
Within the healthcare sector, there are countless systems that capture and process valuable health-related data. In addition to EHR, we can include human capital management (HCM), inventory management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and finance, among others.
This data is isolated and problematic. Because while we may have great reporting just for our health system's clinical data, or just for our health system's financial data, as we look to the future of healthcare, it's essential that we add this information: clinical, financial, operational, etc. โto obtain better knowledge. In this future state, isolated and disparate data sources will no longer be sufficient.
It's time for intuitive and predictive technology
Hospitals and health systems are under extreme financial pressure, facing an ongoing workforce crisis, and, as noted above, are tasked with reducing physician burnout. More intuitive and predictive healthcare technology can solve these problems through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business process automation.
For example, hospitals can review records from the previous year's flu season to make predictions about when this year's peak will occur and how many staff should be on a shift. But what if we could do better? Can we leverage these algorithms and automate them to more easily understand how many nurses will be needed on the floor today versus tomorrow and tomorrow versus next week?
Advanced technologies can help staff better understand supplies and staffing resources, leverage voice recognition software, and streamline reporting and analytics to automate administrative work and enable providers to make better predictive decisions. To evolve as we look to the future of healthcare, we must consider how we can make existing historical data work today and how we can leverage new data generated every day and make it work tomorrow.
There is an immense opportunity to learn from other industries, including finance, retail and manufacturing. Like healthcare, these consumer industries are incredibly complex as they also use unstructured data. But unlike healthcare, these industries discovered and implemented consumer-centric tools and strategies 10 or 20 years ago that have greatly improved the consumer experience. Your patient portal likely won't be as intuitive as your banking app, and it probably won't be as seamless as consumer websites that understand customer preferences before they even start shopping.
Consumer experiences are now expected, but healthcare is lagging behind. We can do better. Now is the time to identify ways to leverage these learnings to make things better for providers, patients, and employees.
Evolution of technologies in an industry.
Healthcare is not lacking data, but how do we use this information? At Oracle Health, we are building a cloud-based healthcare platform that brings together disparate data sources from across the ecosystem: EHR, SCM, HCM, claims processing, clinical trial software, etc. The operating system will provide intelligent information without multiple interfaces interrupting the flow of data. We will leverage predictive analytics and algorithms to identify real-time trends and evolve the healthcare experience, ensuring usability is a primary focus to deliver a seamless, human-centered experience for providers, administrators, and patients. Lastly, we will address issues within the deep platform and infrastructure layers so we can reduce the cost of ownership while delivering reliability, security, and performance.
As David said during our session, we are now much more than an EHR company; We are an open, intelligent and interoperable platform that connects data across disparate systems to provide a comprehensive experience for patients and their caregivers. That is our vision and we are prepared to execute it.
