03-04-13 | Blog Post
Online Tech is exhibiting our HIPAA hosting solutions for the healthcare industry at HIMSS 13 in New Orleans this year! Tune into our Twitter and follow our blog for updates on the latest HIMSS 13 news. If you’re at HIMSS 13, visit booth #1369 to say hi or schedule a free one-on-one consultation with a panel of health IT experts.
HIMSS 13 is hosted at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center this year!
A view from the HIMSS 13 lobby.
Keynote speakers at HIMSS 13 include 42nd President, Bill Clinton and many others.
When the teleprompter fails, sometimes paper makes due … ironic start to HIMSS13, but handled gracefully by HIMSS Board Chair Willa Fields.
Willa also announced the new 12,500 sq ft HIMSS Innovation Center in Cleveland OH, combined w/ another 12,500 exhibition area in the newly named Global Center for Health Innovation.
More good news to share: Mount Sinai saved $20 million so far w/ health it.
HIMSS 13: Keynote with Warner Thomas
Warner Thomas, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ochsner Health System
As the CEO of Louisiana’s largest health system, Warner Thomas leads Ochsner in addressing the changes prompted by the Affordable Care Act and health insurance reformation. He continues his focus on best practices and quality care for this thriving health system while working to provide healthcare solutions to employers facing the challenge of rising healthcare costs.
“Improvement never ends: everyone needs to be perfect at getting better.” – Ochsner Health’s CEO, Warner Thomas, HIMSS 13 Monday morning keynote.
We have a choice in our perspective. Optimism must prevail over pessimism.
Healthcare needs to look to the innovation of other industries to improve and lower costs. Compared with the airline industry – the business model on the front end has changed. Flyers are doing the work to book flights, choose seats, print boarding passes, check flight status etc.
In the same way, healthcare can enable patients to book their own appointments, check their test results, engage in proactive communication with providers.
Harvard Business Review recently published an article about Big Data. There are 2.5 pedabytes of data generated every hour by Walmart customer – that’s roughly 20 million filing cabinets. What will healthcare do with big data?
The airline industry uses big data to analyze weather conditions, flight schedules, and other factors contributing to idle crew, delayed arrivals and departures, to optimize their workflows and eliminate wasted time.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos knows the following about his customers:
What do our patients want? Safe, high-quality healthcare as the baseline. Just like the base expectation when getting on a plane.
They also want easy access to their information, care that is coordinated and informed, and affordable health care.
Our challenge (Ochsner):
1. Care for our patient comes first – provide an experience that patients always want to come back to and improved clinical outcomes.
What do we need to meet the challenge? Partnerships.
1. Partnerships with vendors – not just buying and selling. We need partners who understand our business. Our partners were the first ones to help us during Katrina.
2. Partnerships with payers. Payers have access to big healthcare data. We need to work together to coordinate better outcomes.
Keys to success for Health IT Leaders:
1. Ensure systems provide better, safer patient experiences; optimized the use of our systems to their full potential be proactive – this how our systems can solve and improve upon what our patient wants and needs. Improvement is a joint responsibility – not just IT, not operations, not physicians, but EVERYONE.
“Improvement never ends: everyone needs to be perfect at getting better.”
Lessons Learned: Meaningful Use Attestation Using Integrated Cloud-based EHR
Jocelyn Piccone, COO of Wright State Physicians and Wright State University School of Medicine from Dayton Ohio shares lessons learned from a cloud-based EMR implementation and attestation.
Factors that led WSP to go to a cloud-based EMR system:
When you’re spending time training new medical professionals, you need to make sure you’re on the cutting edge to help them be competitive and successful in their careers.
Benefits of an integrated platform:
Users at the front desk could see as much info as the nurses in the back end, so when a patient asked anyone a question, staff were able to research and help answer the patient’s question without sending them somewhere else. This helps patient satisfaction because all of the staff are enabled to answer questions effectively without giving patients the run-around. It helps with cross-training too, which is important because one of the biggest costs in healthcare is labor. When WSP moved our offices, we moved all 23 offices to the cloud. Even though the transition was hard, their AR dropped from over 60 days to about 45 days and really helped our cash flow.
One of the biggest concerns from the doctors was slowing down the workflow. The next one was, who’s getting the money? Does 100% go to the physicians, to the hospital, the department, or some combination?
The vendor partnership was key for WSP.
WSP/WSU opened up a patient portal to let patient access their clinical summaries. Clinical summaries distribution was one of their most challenging pieces prior to implementation. The adoption rate of the patient portal has been extremely high, increasing from 8% in May 2011 to 96% in Dec 2011.
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari kicking off the ONC townhall!
