This year I have the privilege of attending the HIMSS (Health Information and Management Systems Society) as a social media ambassador. The opening keynote was former CEO and current adviser to Google Eric Schmidt. Conference organizers were smart because who better to inspire a group of health technologists and stakeholders than the CEO of Google? Also juxtaposing his talk with attending talks about the barrier and opportunities of care coordination technology was an interesting exercise.
Mr. Schmidt opened his speech talked about the idea of “Dr. Liz”. An interface that you would use voice technology to interact around medicine. He said that this use case it not that far away and laid out ways and reasons why. First and foremost his advice was to “Run to the cloud… and fast”. That cloud computing has become an effective tool for other industries to aggregate information in a quick way so that it can better inform decisions. Not only that but it is a more secure way to do it.
"If you invite me back 10 years from now, I will bring the equivalent of Liz on stage with me" @EricSchmidt Former Executive Chairman of Alphabet, parent company of #Google on stage at #HIMSS18 keynote @HIMSS pic.twitter.com/c5FqqFXLMq
— E.G.Nadhan (@NadhanEG) March 6, 2018
He discussed the opportunities of technology like natural language processing, AI, and cognitive computing to accelerate and assist healthcare with decisions and workflow management… Sounds great right? To have computers come along and learn from the data we enter. He highlighted Google’s recent success in using retinal scans to detect heart problems.
His talk, although inspiring, felt like it was missing something. Mr. Schmidt’s argument is that Healthcare was far behind compared to other industries in there use of information technology. It was a great call to action as a “run to the cloud and do amazing things” message was important. It felt like there was missing something.
Rewind to a talk I attended earlier in the day about the opportunities and barriers of putting mental health and substance abuse into an Health Information Exchange (HIE). There exists a regulatory burden about coordinating and substance abuse care… The dreaded “42 CFR Part 2” requiring a separate release of information for substance use treatment. ((Here is a quick primer on the issue and the latest) This is often a barrier to coordinating care, especially electronically.
To aggregate information in this area can be a challenge and behavioral health and substance abuse would not be easily integrated into Mr. Schmidt’s view of the world. However I was encouraged but the work for CORHIO in Colorado; they are doing excellent work building more behavioral health and substance abuse info into a health information exchange. They created a campaign as part of the HIE to educate patients and providers about the how they can share behavioral health information on an HIE. It is called “Choose To Care” and you can find more information about it here.
So Mr. Schmidt asked “What is taking so long?” to accelerate Health IT. There exists a regulatory burden it becomes easy to sit on our hands and do nothing about it. Seeing mental health and substance abuse in it’s own technology silo is frustrating. It would be easy for me to dismiss his argument and say “hey that might work for Google but in the real world it …” The hard part is putting our heads together and coming up with a solution. I look forward to learning more solutions.
I also captured his talk in this twitter moment..
