“Healthcare IT is always evolving,” said Shahzad Fakhar, HCA Healthcare, Vice President Field Operations – Information Technology Group. “The desire of innovation comes internally to make things better in the way we perform them, but externally to deliver better care for the care providers and for our patients, also.”
Shahzad Fakhar joined the CereCore Podcast with Phil Sobol, Vice President of Business Development at CereCore, and discussed innovation and how healthcare IT leaders can help their organizations adopt a mindset of constant innovation, break down silos and leverage partnerships.
As healthcare IT leaders seek to make delivering healthcare easier for care providers, Shahzad shared his thoughts on areas of opportunity for innovation. Read an excerpt of the conversation and stream the full episode below.
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Sobol: Looking at the future, what are some big areas of opportunity for innovation that you see today and what do organizations need to be paying attention to?
Fakhar: Definitely a lot to be done in patient care documentation. I think that is front and center of accumulating information and then digesting it and presenting it back to all different stakeholders. So, what does it mean to the caregiver? The documentation provides insights from one caregiver to another. It is very critical that we do an efficient job of documenting the care so it can carry the patient to different care settings, but also provide a lot more comprehensive longitudinal record of their care, which caregivers can look and compare to and make clinical decisions on.
Also, the patient is a very well-educated patient within this new consumer world. So, what does it mean to them? For them, it is providing their care episode information in a more meaningful and easy to digest way. Whether it could be providing them dashboards from their one visit to another, or whether it could be the detailed reporting that they can read through on their own. But the accessibility of information is critical also for them. So, the documentation leads into how you keep the consumer, or the patient, informed of their journey also.
At HCA we are investing a lot in modernizing our EHR system to make this a very efficient process in documenting. So, we have invested in MEDITECH Expanse, and CereCore is our critical partner in this journey.
But documentation takes it so far, and I think innovation also leads into the automation of these back-end processes. And some of these key processes, which require automation, we have done great, but we have got a lot more to do. Such as patient billing, scheduling patients efficiently and in a timely basis from all different care settings. Patient communications — how do we inform them and keep them connected to all their care episodes and scheduling.
As I mentioned, we collect a lot of data in the patient care settings. How can we present that information and analytics around them back to the patients and the care providers? What are the key success criteria that we can present to make efficient, timely, and impactful decisions in their care?
I think all those things lead us to saying — hey, prevention, what are we doing for prevention? Because it is important to the care givers and then to the patients also. The AI applications, which we are leveraging these days to prevent medical errors and demand forecasting for our own staffing, really provide better care for our patients.
All these things lead into, or are part of the big automation efforts, and that leads to a lot of different areas of automation and innovation, serving each other hand in hand.
More Q&A from this conversation with Shahzad Fakhar
- What is your philosophy on innovation?
- How can you create an organization or culture of innovation? How can you guard against becoming static?
- As a healthcare IT leader, how do you encourage collaboration – which is so vital to innovation – when you have so many different teams, stakeholders, and partners?
- What are some examples of innovation that you are proud of that HCA Healthcare has put into practice?
- What advice do you have for others in IT? Any lessons learned?
- What should healthcare IT leaders be thinking about to set themselves up for success in the future?
Listen to the full episode
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