CMIO/CIO at Compass Medical

Dhrumil Shah

For starters,Technology needs Platforms, Platforms need Processes, Processes need Workflows & Workflows create or deliver User Experience.

As a system over last decade plus we have moved from High Trust & High Touch Healthcare to High Tech & unfortunately Low Trust environment today. COVID19 Pandemic exposed all the major fault lines of our US healthcare system, but at the same time we have seen new era of healthcare emerging post-pandemic which gives us glimpse of what our future system ought to be. I refer to it as “High Touch, High Tech & High Trust Healthcare”

One of the major challenges we are seeing now is that decision makers in healthcare are now realizing their past investments are lagging on value creation or at times completely missing the mark. We continue to see the trend towards ongoing growth investments in MedTech space but at the same time there seems to be a convergence happening between medical devices, Digital Health platforms and Healthcare services. We are continuing to see mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations as common exit strategy in the market. Of course, ever growing cybersecurity threats continue to impact MedTech innovations.

Ability of healthcare system to engage and deliver on rapid access innovation opportunities and crisis management services during this pandemic amazed many of us, leading our respective stakeholders’ engagement within and outside our organizations. Despite this promise which cultivated us to ‘Change’ when faced with ‘Challenges’ we have never seen before, our familiarity with resilience and culture of medicine keeps me up at night. We are seeing stakeholders’ sense of urgency and desire to challenge their own culture & governance is slowing down as we reach post pandemic phase of this accelerated transition towards connected health.

"Healthcare has no shortage of Problems, and Problems need Solutions. There are series of dependencies Healthcare Technology Solutions must navigate to create value"

Race to Value continues to be on the strategic priority list for most if not all stakeholders within healthcare. In my role as Chief Medical Information Officer at Compass Medical, I have worked on many projects including care delivery redesign and redeployment during the pandemic. Projects span from implementing virtual enterprise solutions in weeks to re-engineering patient access to meet requirements for pandemic response. Latest project which we are working on is all about enabling ‘Care at Home’ & delivering ‘Always on Healthcare’. These words may sound cliche at times, yet there is a powerful message and mission behind what it takes to deliver this model. We implemented many different platforms and solutions in last couple years to meet the needs of our providers patients and community, but now we are truly harnessing our resources and working on opportunities to converge these care delivery projects into an experience of care which truly helps us deliver value-based care.

For example, our chronic care management program provides high touch healthcare services for our patients with chronic conditions to improve self-care and during the pandemic we accelerated this program by implementing telehealth, remote patient monitoring, transitions of care from Emergency room or hospitalization and few other care management programs. Previously we would design multiple programs and depending on the risk profile of the patient he or she would transition from one program to the other, sometimes navigating conflict between programs as well. Now we are focused on designing an experience for all patients which moves with the patient and adapts with changing needs and risk bearing encounters. New Diabetic patient who is coming next week to see me as Primary Care Physician is already able to not only create patient portal account and communicate necessary data elements, but also connect their CGM continuous glucose monitoring device with their healthcare application and provide appropriate glucose trends for me to make most informed clinical choice when giving recommendations. All our patients over last 2 plus years have access to 24/7 Telehealth providers and at the same time they’re able to send me a secure message through healthcare application while they are in the hospital for better clinical care coordination or to get help on any patient relationship challenge. We all know and should acknowledge that our healthcare system is broken, and we need to continue challenging ourselves and everyone around us to make it better.