by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | February 08, 2019
From the January/February 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCB News: What are the main challenges facing HIMSS members today?
CR: I think the challenges start with daily operations, including safety, security, privacy, affordability. Given the complexity of our industry, for most of us, it’s a big deal just to have everything work well every day. Healthcare on the provider side has gone from mostly paper to mostly digital in about 10 years, and we’re just absorbing that as an industry. There are new regulatory challenges, horizontal and vertical mergers in healthcare, pressures on reimbursement, an aging population in most countries – a lot of demands.
At the same time there are exciting new challenges that come from applying modern technologies to healthcare. Things like cloud operations, software-as-a-service generally, advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Plus, on the clinical side, there are new patient technologies in imaging, laboratory medicine, precision medicine, and other domains, and a whole new generation of mobile and implantable devices. Finally, there are new entrants in healthcare coming from Silicon Valley and consumer products and services companies who have new and potentially disruptive and popular ideas.
Leaders of technology in healthcare will be hard-pressed to find the right balance between maintaining steady operations needed for patient safety and affordability, and the need to innovate and disrupt, sometimes while “in flight”.
HCB News: What initiatives are you championing as chair?
CR: This is an important transitional time in leadership at HIMSS with a relatively new CEO in Hal Wolf, and a brand new chief of the Americas in Denise Hines. The first job of the board, and the chair, is to help HIMSS leadership make good decisions about initiatives and programs for the benefit of HIMSS members and others in the HIMSS community.
I’m very focused on maintaining the HIMSS Vision – Better health through information and technology. Last summer I was diagnosed with a stage 3 cancer, and I’ve been on a very personal journey through healthcare. It’s given me a new perspective on what works and doesn’t work for caregivers and patients. As chair I want to champion our focus that we are doing all of this in the interests of the patient, and to support the clinicians who care for them.
HCB New: Is there any federal policy work HIMSS is currently pursuing?
CR: With the HIMSS mission focused on how health IT is enabling healthcare transformation, our work with federal agencies and Congress covers a lot of ground across our entire community of providers, developers, innovators, and patients. HIMSS was integral in securing enactment of the groundbreaking 21st Century Cures Act in late 2016, which was focused on modernizing our healthcare innovation infrastructure. Much of our policy work is focused on implementation and oversight of 21st Century Cures – on issues such as facilitating greater interoperability and data exchange across the care continuum, addressing clinician burden issues to ensure that providers have more time for face-to-face interactions with patients, and developing a broader regulatory framework around health IT. Additional topics that we are working on that are critical to the community are telehealth and the public health infrastructure, access to quality care, and cybersecurity.
