Digital Health Transformation Report

On November 2nd, 2021, healthcare technology company Philips partnered with HIMSS to deliver the virtual Executive Think Tank, Leading the Journey to Digital Health Transformation. The session brought U.S. IT leaders together with facilitator Lisa Caplan, Executive VP, Technology and Innovation, HIMSS, and guest speaker Shez Partovi, MD, Chief Information & Strategy Officer, Philips, to offer expert insights on how far their organizations have come – and, more importantly, how far they need to go.

COVID-19 Quickens the Pace

The leaders shared how they launched new projects or accelerated existing initiatives to meet the demands created by the pandemic.

“COVID-19 put innovation on steroids because we really had to find new ways of doing things,” Caplan said. “HCOs went from 1,500 video visits a week to over 200,000 during COVID-19 because it was really the only way, other than emergency care, that we could continue to see our patients.”

The pandemic also prompted HCOs to shift into high gear. “We spun up essentially a fully functioning COVID-19 dashboard within an afternoon, because that’s what the organization needed,” said the CMIO of a Pennsylvania-based health system. The dashboard is specifically designed to collect more mature data assets that enable the HCO to better serve COVID-19 patients. With a more sophisticated data approach in place, the HCO now can draw on useful insights to better direct care.

The CMIO believes using this data enabled the organization to move beyond the “kitchen-sink” approach healthcare systems around the world were forced to adopt early in the crisis: “With better data, we could have discovered that hydroxychloroquine is completely ineffective [early on] rather than muddling through some of the travails that we went through.”

COVID-19 prompted another large health system to improve existing digital vaccination processes. “We immediately challenged ourselves to be able to give a patient a vaccine within two minutes in our electronic health record and we are now actually able to do that in about one minute, 30 seconds,” the CMIO at the Pennsylvania-based provider organization added.

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