HIMSS Annual Conference Pushes Immediate Patient-Centered Change

By Shana Tachikawa

We have all heard the saying, "the customer is always right." Consumers should drive how a business functions, next steps and where the industry is headed. In healthcare, it is no different. Patients expectations are raising higher standards in technology, experience and outcomes. The providers who fail to recognize the patient-centric culture forming will struggle to stay competitive.

HIMSS Annual Conference brought a multitude of insights to over 45,000 healthcare IT professionals on how to provide better patient outcomes. Technology is booming in healthcare, but adoption still lags behind other industries. Here are four themes from HIMSS to competitively propel healthcare providers:

• Consumerism is here to stay. Patients are looking for a patient experience built on consumer preferences, personalization, flexibility and clear communication. This can include digital options for registration and billing, better ways to share EHRs digitally and personalized physician-to-patient interactions. Providers must use patient communities as an eye toward the next direction of their organizations.
• Healthcare is moving from diagnosis and treatment to anticipation and prevention. Start looking at technology abilities not only as a tool or data storage, but to analyze and predict. Smart data enables insights toward physician care decision making, patient experience improvement, readmission reduction, population health management and prescription monitoring. The latter comes into play with the country's opioid crisis, as prescribing systems are now working to flag addiction patterns and medication discrepancies.
• Artificial Intelligence is the name of the game. AI has been introduced before, but its presence is finally in practical application in healthcare. Artificial intelligence will allow healthcare professionals to analyze the healthcare data they already have stored, alarm physicians of things that should be noted and let physicians better focus on patient experience while the machines look for gaps in data. The next step though is to make the technology accessible in practice at the point of care without adding workflow burden to end users.
• Disruption is key. Healthcare organizations must focus on the consumer and how technology will evolve their abilities. Some say that health systems will be known as tech companies with a healthcare focus considering all of the technology advances leading to the future of healthcare.

HIMSS elicited many insights for the future of health IT. After all, it is not every day that you get to talk about machine learning detecting cancerous tissue. Then again, HIMSS brought up many tactics applicable to any healthcare organization despite differences in budget, patient communities, region or specific EHR. The conference teases what's on the horizon for care possibilities but also grounds us with consideration of where reporting, CIO pain points, physician burnout and standardization need to be addressed.