Covering the healthcare informatics beat can be challenging, but it has its perks, one of which is the opportunity to interview genuinely impressive clinical and business leaders who are working to solve some of the thorniest issues in healthcare. I remind myself that I am lucky to be able to e-mail CIOs, CMIOs and entrepreneurs with interview requests and they almost always make time to talk to me. Each December I look back over the interviews I have done and presentations I have seen that year and pull out my 10 favorite quotes. Standing on their own, apart from the context of a full article, they can be thought-provoking.
- Farzad Mostashari, M.D., CEO of Aledade Inc. and former national coordinator for health IT: “I needed to either find or create someplace in healthcare where keeping someone healthy and out of the hospital is more profitable than waiting until they get sick and then treating them. Then we would have the right business model for all the tools I have been working for 15 years to build and get rolled out.”
- Colin Banas, M.D., VCU Health System’s chief medical information officer: “I am reminded of a quote from one of our senior leaders. She even puts it at the bottom of her meeting minutes. It says, ‘In God we trust. Everyone else must bring data.’”
- Boston Children’s Hospital CIO Daniel Nigrin, M.D.: “The platform was burning, and the board of trustees was willing to expend the money to pay for it all. They all of a sudden recognized the risk.” Nigrin was describing how he used the 2014 Anonymous distributed denial of service attack on his hospital as an opportunity to push through four or five key security initiatives when he had everyone’s attention.
- Jonathan Baran, Healthfinch CEO: “When we started, it was a foreign concept to have an app store for the EHRs. Now we have seen widespread adoption of this model across all the major EHRs.They now think about themselves as platforms and open marketplaces where people like us can build technology on top of APIs that allow us to integrate our technology into the workflow.”
- Timothy Peck, M.D., formerly chief resident in the Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess/Harvard, and co-founder of Call9: “We are spending money on hurting patients.” Peck was explaining that the two-thirds of transfers from nursing homes to emergency departments that are avoidable represent about $40 billion in unnecessary spending for something that often harms patients.
- Mutaz Shegewi, research director for healthcare provider IT transformation strategies at IDC Health Insights: “The drive toward ambient interfaces — speech recognition, gesture and sensors — is being driven by the acknowledgment that technology has a role to play, but that it is in the way. Vendors are starting to slowly acknowledge that they need to find ways to have the technology sit in the background. That is where ambient comes in.”
- Stacy Lindau, M.D., a professor of obstetrics/gynecology and geriatrics at the University of Chicago who has helped launch a startup community coordination system called NowPow: “My vision of the health system is one where the caring community, including the growing population of informal, unpaid caregivers, has what they need to operate in their sector, just like every other 21st century economic sector.”
- Laura Heerman Langford, Ph.D., R.N., a nurse informaticist implementing Smart on FHIR apps at Intermountain Healthcare: “We have a vision of tomorrow that is much more plug and play. Imagine if it didn’t matter what vendor you were using in your hospital. Imagine if you had a healthcare app store where you could reliably find an application to help you accomplish what you want to be doing.”
- Grant Wood, a member of the HL7 Clinical Genomics Work Group and a senior strategist at Intermountain Healthcare’s Clinical Genetics Institute: “With so much money put into AI research and development, it might be one of those external drivers to solve the interoperability issue. I am always trying to see how different drivers might emerge to solve the problem and this might be one.”
- Cara Martino, enterprise business intelligence manager at 14-hospital Jefferson Health in Philadelphia: “It is really hard to go from an institution that was not data-rich and had disparate systems and manually collected data to one that has one EHR and a robust business intelligence tool that allows us to slice data in a million different ways. We have to get the data to the right people and educate them about how we are pulling it out of the EHR.”
