Stories about: healthcare IT

Under the hood of healthcare innovation: Gajen Sunthara and leveraging EHRs

Posted on by Greg Weintraub
Posted in Information technology, Innovation, People
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Gajen Sunthara
(Photo: Greg Weintraub)

What does it take to be an innovator changing our healthcare system for the better? This two-part series profiles two digital health innovators at Boston Children’s Hospital who were named among MedTech Boston’s 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators for 2017.

Gajen Sunthara, MSc, has two innovation passions: healthcare policy and electronic health records (EHRs). With professional experiences spanning technology, business and government, he finds himself in a position to effect change in a way that few others can.

“Gajen’s passion for healthcare is evident from the moment that you meet him,” says Farhanah Sheets, a software engineer at Boston Children’s Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) who reports to Sunthara. “No matter how big or small the idea, he brings a level of excitement to each project that is contagious.”

As director of Innovation R&D for IDHA, Sunthara is leading significant efforts around EHR interoperability — the ability of healthcare information systems to exchange and use each other’s data. He’s also focused on creating applications that can easily be integrated into any EHR system. …

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Moving one step closer to smartphone-like, interoperable EHR apps

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Information technology, Innovation
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Medical app buttons croppedToday, most people’s clinical records remain siloed at a single hospital or health network. For the most part, health apps can’t tap into these data, nor can medicine learn from them. Also, most electronic health records (EHRs) are unable to import the biometric data people are collecting from their own devices, much less interpret them.

In 2009, Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, and Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital published a manifesto in The New England Journal of Medicine calling for health care information systems to have iPhone functionality. This would entail several key attributes: liquidity of data, modularity of applications, accommodation of both open-source and closed-source software through open standards, and the ability to support diverse applications.

In short, they envisioned a “plug and play” health IT platform. …

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A banquet of tools for health tech innovators

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Information technology, Innovation, Market trends
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Tools-Shutterstock-donatas1205-croppedWant to hack something in medicine? Vendors are increasingly eager to contribute their tools to problem-solving teams, like those who will gather November 14 for Boston Children’s Hospital’s Hacking Pediatrics. Seeing an array of tools presented at a showcase at Boston Children’s last week, I felt excited about the possibilities ahead.

Here are a few tools that can help innovators improve health care for patients, caregivers and providers. …

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My work, my life, my innovations: Ken Mandl, MD, MPH

Posted on by Emily Williams
Posted in Devices, Information technology, Innovation, People
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Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, is used to seeing the world through a different lens. In high school, he began clicking photographs with his camera and developing them in a darkroom in his basement. Now, he frames subjects through the lens of epidemiology and informatics—driving discovery and care transformation through big data, apps and large-scale federated research networks.

Mandl will be one of four panelists discussing The Future of Pediatric Precision Medicine at Boston Children’s Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2015. Read more about his life, work and innovations by hovering over the objects that surround him everyday.

Learn more about the Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2015 and register to attend.

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Show me the money: Reimbursement for medical innovations

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Ethics and policy, Information technology, Innovation, Market trends
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medical device reimbursementDevice developers tend to focus on the FDA approval process—PMAs and 510(k) clearances—while overlooking another major challenge: getting insurers to cover the device. Before approaching investors, and certainly before doing any studies, keep payers in mind, advises Maren Anderson, president of MDA Consulting, Inc., which specializes in reimbursement planning.

In the old days, doctors prescribed, and insurers paid. Under health care reform, that’s changed, says Anderson. …

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Health care in a hyper-connected world: Cisco’s Carlos Dominguez

Posted on by Vector staff
Posted in Information technology, Innovation, People
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Part of a series of videotaped sessions from Boston Children’s Hospital’s Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2014.

Carlos Dominguez is a technology evangelist, social media maven and a Senior VP at the IT company Cisco Systems, Inc. In this animated keynote presentation, he poses the question: how can health care organizations innovate in a world transformed by the web, social media and mobile phones, where “distance is dead,” knowledge is totally democratized and kids are born digital? Innovation isn’t luck, he contends, it’s a discipline that should work its way into an organization’s DNA.

Click here for full coverage of the Global Pediatric Innovation Summit. Videos are also available on YouTube.

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Digital health: The next blockbuster

Posted on by Geoffrey Horwitz
Posted in Devices, Information technology
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(Pyh2/Wikimedia Commons)
(Pyh2/Wikimedia Commons)

Geoffrey Horwitz, PhD, is a business development associate in the Technology and Innovation Development Office (TIDO) at Boston Children’s Hospital. Follow him on Twitter @GeoffHorwitz

At the recent 2014 Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) International Convention, the message was clear: Digital health is the new blockbuster. For the first time ever, BIO spotlighted digital health, with a specific focus on how digital health is influencing the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Also featured was a digital health zone where companies and other exhibitors from all over the world could demo their products and services to thousands of attendees.

In pharmaceutical lingo, a blockbuster is a drug that generates revenues of at least $1 billion. Digital health certainly fits this definition. By 2018, reports suggest that revenues will exceed $6 billion for wearable wireless devices alone. A recent McKinsey study found that 75 percent of consumers surveyed, of various ages and located throughout the world, would like to use digital health devices. …

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Can telemedicine deliver value for home-ventilated patients?

Posted on by Lisa Fratt
Posted in Information technology, Pediatrics
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A clinician's-eye view of a patient with spinal muscular atrophy during a telemedicine visit.
A clinician’s-eye view of a patient with spinal muscular atrophy during a telemedicine visit.

The jury is still out on telemedicine. Proponents and many patients appreciate its ability to deliver virtual patient care and to extend the reach of experts beyond the brick-and-mortar setting of a hospital. But the real question about telemedicine is: Does it make it difference? Does is it improve care and if so, in what circumstances?

TeleCAPE, a small pilot project at Boston Children’s Hospital, inches the dial toward “yes” for some patients—in particular, home-ventilated patients.

Home-ventilated patients require an inordinate amount of health care resources for even minor conditions. Costs for a simple urinary tract or viral respiratory infection that might be managed without hospitalization can reach up to $83,000 because the child’s complex medical needs require ICU admission. …

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Population health: Bringing together medical, public health and payer communities

Posted on by Scott Howe
Posted in Information technology, Market trends
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The people who deliver care are starting to think in terms of population health.
The people who deliver care are starting to think in terms of population health.
A growing number of health care professionals are looking at their patients not just as individuals with unique concerns but also as members of larger groups with common problems and needs. This broader, population-based framework could lead to better health outcomes for more people, according to Jonathan Finkelstein, MD, MPH of Boston Children’s Hospital.

“The health care system is changing from one that’s more reactive to illness—you come see the doctor when you’re not well—to one that’s more responsible for the promotion of health for defined groups of people,” he explains. While individual patients will always be treated as, well, individuals, the concept of population health can help providers “figure out the most appropriate services within a set of limited resources for specific groups.” …

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DisCo: Keeping in touch with families after discharge

Posted on by Kelly Dunn
Posted in Devices, Information technology, Innovation
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Mom & child receiving a text-ShutterstockKelly Dunn, a pediatric nurse practitioner in Medicine Patient Services at Boston Children’s Hospital, is primarily focused on helping families with hospital discharge and improving patient throughput.

A child hospitalized on 9 East, a general medical floor at Boston Children’s Hospital, was nearly ready to go home. The discharge order was written, and prescriptions were sent to the pharmacy. The staff nurse and I completed discharge teaching, competing with a very wiggly toddler for her tired mother’s attention.

Before this family went home, I had one more question: Would you like to receive a text message or email to check up on you once you are home?

Within a minute or two, I had entered the mom’s contact information and her preferred mode of communication (a text message to her cell phone) on an iPad. The family left, reassured to have a way of reaching a nurse familiar with their hospitalization should a problem or question arise at home—and pleased to have the option. …

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