Top 3 Wish List From HIMSS16

Flexible, modern database technology will play a crucial role in the advancement of integrated, consumer-centric healthcare delivery.

In my last blog post, I discussed my plan to attend the 2016 HIMSS16 conference in Las Vegas. I wasn’t disappointed. This year’s HIMSS event, like those of the past, provided an energetic and educational platform for patients, physicians, payers and Health IT professionals to explore and evaluate the technological advances of today and on the horizon of the healthcare market.

With the coming together of 40,000+ Health IT experts, clinicians, executives and vendors from across the globe, one thing was made clear at HIMSS16 – change is coming!

For me, this year’s event was both compelling and edifying – covering an array of topics around current challenges and solutions in Health IT, including mHealth, outcomes-based payments and patient self-service portals. But, of all the subjects addressed, the three I found most interesting were in relation to the critical role of data in:

• Advancing cost-saving, integrated care
• Delivering a consumer-centric, retail-like healthcare experience
• Facilitating flexible patient data sharing both inside and outside the organization

Integrated Care

Today’s sophisticated healthcare consumers (patients) want the same type of engaging, seamless, retail-like shopping experience they get when buying the latest digital device or purchasing car insurance online. Though healthcare organizations remain hard-pressed to deliver this higher level of knowledgeable, integrated service with efficiency, the adoption of modern database technology will both simplify and advance the development and delivery of a fully integrated healthcare experience that meets the consumer’s need to sit firmly in the driver’s seat of their own care.

Consumer-Centric Healthcare

Successfully providing integrated care not only requires providers and payers to think more like retailers, but it also relies heavily upon consumer engagement and the basic tenet that these consumers – be they patients or members – come first. Patients actively engaged in managing their health tend to have better outcomes, spend less and cost the system less. Thus technologies and processes that promote and facilitate patient engagement are key. Also of acute concern, the security of patient data (i.e., EHR) looms equally large in the mind today’s healthcare consumer. With Forbes estimating the occurrence of data breaches in healthcare encompassing 112 million records in 2015, it’s important that a healthcare organization’s data environment is fluid but at the same time able to ensure the security and privacy of patients records.

Flexible Processes

The pressure is on for providers and payers. Much of the talk at HIMSS16 was around leveraging data to create insightful, actionable intelligence that leads to streamlined processes and better patient outcomes. At a time when healthcare organizations are under mounting pressure to cut costs by reducing unnecessary testing and procedures, and greatly reducing hospital readmissions – information transparency and process flexibility are vital. It starts with breaking down data silos and ends with cost-effective, highly scalable solutions and patient engagement tools accessible via cloud and mobile.

A Future Forged by Flexible Database Technology

Healthcare organizations need to use all their data to develop tools and solutions to keep up with consumer demand for a more transparent, engaging healthcare experience. As the world’s experts at integrating data from silos, MarkLogic’s operational and transactional enterprise NoSQL database platform empowers our customers to leverage a unified, 360-degree view of their data to build next-generation integrated health applications. In fact, M*Modal, leverages our new generation database technology to provide services that improve satisfaction of both physicians and patients in over 1,000 hospital systems. Built entirely on MarkLogic, M*Modal’s advanced cloud-based speech recognition and data analytics empower clinicians to use mobile technology to capture the context of their patient narratives and utilize that data to streamline their documentation efforts and improve quality of care.

Flexible, modern database technology will play a crucial role in the advancement of integrated, consumer-centric healthcare delivery. According to Rob Lawrence, MarkLogic Director of Strategic Programs for Healthcare and Life Sciences, “When our healthcare customers start delivering projects on MarkLogic for a fraction of the cost of RDBMS, they stop thinking about what they can’t do and start thinking about what they can.”