As part of our Impact Sector focus at DevMynd, we’re always looking for ways to stay on top of the health and wellness technology landscape. Last week, the new business team from DevMynd spent a few days at the largest healthcare technology conferences in the country doing just that. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) annual convention is a great place to sample the amazing things going on in the health IT ecosystem each year.
This year’s show did not disappoint. It kicked off with a Keynote from IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about the role that artificial intelligence (AI) will take in healthcare in the coming years. We also saw a wealth of amazing new medical devices, analytics systems, and patient engagement platforms.
The big EMR players (Epic, Cerner, AllScripts, eClinicalWorks) were there in force as well. This year there was a welcome focus on developers and how we can build custom web applications and custom mobile apps that integrate with their platforms. We were happy to engage a few of them in partnership discussions.
All-in-all there were too many inspiring ideas at the show to fit in this post, but a few highlights did emerge for us:
Predictive Analytics and AI
Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence have been applied to healthcare scenarios for some time. But, we’re seeing a significant uptick in the use of these technologies in ways that can directly affect patients. We met with several companies who were using AI to dramatically increase care both on an individual and population health basis.
We saw AI in a variety of use cases at the show:
- To predict potential at-risk patients in hospitals
- Speed the process of genome mapping for oncology patients
- Provide insights into drug interactions for prescribers
- Enhance workflows in Revenue Cycle Management
- Personal health and wellness coaches
We’re already seeing AI-as-a-Service providers becoming mainstream like IBM Watson Health. These platforms make it easier to build complex AI scenarios out of building blocks. We’re really excited about the ways that we will see AI start to influence the products that we build with customers.
The Rise of Connected Care
We view connected care along two dimensions, one connecting providers and patients, and another in connecting providers together around their patients. There is no shortage of activity in this space: telemedicine, remote monitoring, patient portals, Health Information Exchange (HIR) platforms, etc. Almost every part of the patient journey can be enhanced by technology in significant ways.
We heard about challenges in this area as well:
- Legislative issues such as telemedicine restrictions across state lines
- Slow adoption by providers which means patients may have to deal with some providers in their care circle who are not connected to the others
- Poor interoperability between devices and systems despite some common standards
We anticipate huge strides over the next year and will be interested to see how some of our clients in the space tackle these challenges.
Everything Is on FHIR
One very welcome theme we heard about is the emerging Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format that builds on older HL7 standards. Introducing an interchange standard that leverages more modern formats such as JSON and Atom in a RESTful API will help to speed systems integration significantly.
With this new standard, we anticipate a wealth of new use cases for integration across the entire health IT spectrum. One of our newer customers is venturing headlong into using FHIR for a new product and it was good to see at HIMSS that adoption is gaining momentum.
Some advantages of FHIR over legacy HL7 are:
- More granular message types reduce the rigidity and workflow constraints of HL7
- It’s easier for 3rd-party wire data systems to read messages to produce real-time analytics
- Authentication is handled over open standards such as OAuth2
- Because it uses an HTTP-based REST approach, the API can be queried in a more fine grained manner
The AR/VR Revolution Is Just Beginning
Lastly, we saw several companies starting to do really interesting things with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). For example, we saw a prototype system that superimposes a 3D MRI over a patient which might allow a surgeon to view detailed imaging right in the operating room.
While this technology is only in its infancy, we expect to see huge strides in this area over the next few years. There are obstacles to overcome here though including bulky hardware and a design language that hasn’t really evolved yet. We expect to see a lot of new ground being broken in the UX of AR/VR in the near future.
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We’re looking forward to working with more customers in the healthcare space. There is a lot to be done to improve an industry that affects all of us. If you’re in health IT we’d love to talk!
