Driving Innovation in the Healthcare Industry Conference

For those interested in Healthcare and driving innovation within the Healthcare industry, USC is hosting the

2015 Healthcare Conference entitled: “TRANSFORMING CARE: Driving Innovation in the Healthcare Industry”.

This conference will be held on Friday, March 6th 2015 and will feature keynote speakers from Amgen, Mayo Clinic, and LAC/USC Medical Center.

For more information, go to http://uscmarshallhcc.com/.

Aprevita for Healthcare Analytics just raised $18M

Apervita just raised $18M in venture capital funding. Their mission is ambitious: to "make algorithms related to disease and treatment available to care providers in roughly the same way that iTunes makes songs available to music fans." 

The types of analytics Apervita will provide will help providers (as well as pharmaceutical companies) analyze risk and remain in compliance.

On www.apervita.com, the company describes itself as "the secure self-service platform that enables any health professional to connect health datasets, author evidence-based algorithms and measures, share them, and publish to a marketplace."

Barriers to Healthcare Analytics

According to the Copley Consulting Group, although business analytics can help healthcare providers and payers create actionable insights, there are oftentimes barriers to the use of analytics in healthcare.

These barriers include:

• The sheer volume of data
• Culture does not encourage sharing information
• Lack of understanding how to use analytics to improve the business
• Lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Lack of skills internally in the line of business

But as the article states, even with these barriers healthcare organizations that fail to effectively use analytics will fall behind. The massive improvements to clinical and business processes outweigh the barriers of implementing analytics.

Your Very Own "Personal Healthcare Companion in the Near Future?

Imagine a personalized robot with a soothing voice that can diagnose a wide variety of healthcare issues and recommend the best possible care? Sounds like science fiction?  Well maybe not for long.

In case you missed it, the number one movie in America is Disney's "Big Hero 6".  This movie stars a lovable robot named Baymax described as a "healthcare providing robot nurse".  Amazingly, the concept for the movies healthcare robot came from actual research in robotics done at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Personalized Diagnosis from a robot?

Carnegie Mellon had developed an inflatable robotic arm that inspired the design of Baymax.  This use of "soft robotics" (made of soft materials) offer advantages over metallic robots especially in terms of safety when operating near people in a healthcare environment.  For more information about CMU's research in soft robotics, click this link or watch the YouTube video.

How Lack of Metrics Sunk Healthcare.gov

It has been well documented that the initial launch of healthcare.gov was a disaster.  This great article in forbes.com diagnoses some of the main reasons why, focusing on their lack of strong project management.

Error Rate report for healthcare.gov established AFTER launch

The rules of project management broken are as follows:

1. Unrealistic requirements
2. Technical complexity
3. Integration responsibility
4. Fragmented authority
5. Loose metrics
6. Inadequate testing
7. Aggressive schedules
8. Administrative blindness

Usually, just one of these mistakes could spell disaster for a project.  But the 8 of them combined lead to utter failure.

But since this an analytics blog, lets focus on metrics: "The government said in a report released on Sunday that it has made “improvements in the site’s key operating metrics over the last several weeks,” which is a tacit admission that it didn’t initially have adequate ways of measuring progress."

Without establishing these proper metrics from the beginning, how would government officials know that the schedule was too aggressive?  Or that the requirements were unrealistic?  The answer:  they had no clue.

I believe that since these metrics were not established from the beginning of the project, this led to a snowball affect that ultimately led to one of the worst "go-live's" in the history of project management.  Lesson moving forward for healthcare, government, and any complex project:

1. define operating metrics in detail from the beginning.
2. determine how these metrics will be communicated to stakeholders.

Too little, too late, this report was released detailing the newly instituted metrics for healthcare.gov.  If these metrics were prioritized by the project team and instituted from early on in the project, we would be discussing the healthcare.gov launch in an entirely different way today.

IBM Watson to help with clinical trials recruitment

As a project manager who works in clinical research, I know how important patient recruitment is for successful clinical trials. IBM’s recent partnership with Mayo Clinic to leverage IBM Watson’s cognitive analytics abilities to match patients with the appropriate clinical trials is a potential game-changer in the research community where many trials fail due to lack of enrollment.

Clinical trials recruitment is an vital aspect of research. For you statistics nerds, you know that by having a higher "n" (population size), you will have a greater confidence level (better results). Well sometimes, clinical trials do not have the "n" that they would like for their study so need to recruit additional participants.

“Matching is such a hard and cumbersome process,” Sean Hogan, IBM vice president of healthcare told Fox News. For anyone who has worked in clinical trials recruitment, they will tell you that this is a very manual, data-driven process. I have worked first hands with principal investigator's and know that recruitment takes so many man hours that could be better served on actual research. And in worst case scenario's some research studies can fail due to not recruiting enough participants.

If IBM can leverage cognitive analytics to help automate this manual process, this will mean a higher population size for clinical trials and lead to better results. Definitely a good thing as research moves forward into the 21st century.

How the Apple/IBM partnership will impact mobile health IT

How does this partnership impact mobile health?

This summer, both the business and the tech world were buzzing as IBM and Apple announced that they were forming a partnership.  While this obviously means big changes on the enterprise front, how does this partnership (if at all) impact mobile healthcare IT?

1. Security:  EMR's and mobile health have long been plagued by concerns of lack of data security.  With HIPAA compliance and PHI (Patient Health Information) concerns at the forefront, this Apple/IBM partnership could potentially address issues of data security that have stood in the way of the expansion of mobile healthcare usage and development.  The deal calls for IBM to build a suite of platforms and apps that will transport healthcare data securely from the bedside to Apple devices.
2. Epic's "MyChart" App:  Apple has a partnership with Kaiser's EMR, Epic Systems.  This deal will bring data security and potentially increased usage of Epic's mobile application on Apple devices.
3. Apple's Healthkit:  Apple's iOS 8 to be released this fall will feature "Healthkit".  This will aggregate data brought in from fitness apps and activity trackers into one dashboard.  IBM has already been working on building healthcare applications for the iOS.



iOs8 Healthkit

4. Siri + Watson: The marriage of Siri and Watson used in a healthcare setting could potentially give physicians hands free computing and health data analysis as one of the prime applications of IBM's cognitive computing system.

In conclusion, this partnership definitely brings opportunity for dramatic change in the mobile Health IT space.  While we don't know exactly what will be released in terms of health care applications on the mobile devices, we do hope that IBM's increased security will alleviate security concerns of users and lead to increased adoption of mobile health.