Innovation Pulse

Interoperability has, well, interoperability problems. Standards are being developed but EHRs are still under-delivering. And once data sharing picks up, more challenges will arise than we can understand today. Multiple tipping points are ahead. 

Speak their language. Don’t talk too deeply about technology. But also remember to pitch the innovative ways that investing in security can improve the business, executives from Henry Ford, NIST, PwC, Texas Children's and others advise.

CIOs and innovation officers point to companies such as Ikea, Lego, Oxo -- and how they have conducted observational studies to effectively understand UX and deliver products accordingly. 

Here’s the rub: $50 billion might be hyperbole, but $5 billion is still a sizable enough market to drive innovations that health systems can harness to engage patients, better manage populations and ultimately improve care and the bottom line.    

With Google, IBM and Microsoft all setting sights squarely on healthcare, and analysts predicting 30 percent of providers will run cognitive analytics on patient data by 2018, the risk of investing too late may outweigh the risk of doing so too soon.

Now the question is whether cyber criminals could someday emulate that approach to access encrypted patient data.

Even though it has felt, perhaps, as if the opposite was true for several years, hospitals and medical practices are captains of their own ICD-10 ships -- a fact that's more apparent now, literally days from shore, than ever before.

The notion of gleaning insights from mountains of health information -- and then applying those precisely to individual patients -- hinges on the confluence of various factors. But it all boils down to one magic word.

Could chronic care management be the new meaningful use? Some entrepreneurs see even greater financial incentives on the immediate horizon.

Around the turn of this century, a saying popped up in certain IT circles: We're all going to agree on specification and compete on implementation. When health IT vendors start adopting and implementing HL7's FHIR spec, things could start to get interesting.