The digital revolution altered the operations of numerous industries including healthcare.
Forbes spoke with Bill Peacock, COO of Cleveland Clinic, and Kevin Churchwell, MD, COO of Boston Children's Hospital, to hear their thoughts on changes in the industry and how digital automation will affect operations at hospitals and health systems in the U.S.
Here are four comments both men made about the future of digital healthcare.
1. "The ability to cultivate mass amounts of data to zero in on cures and new techniques to enhance the speed of healing [is what excites me most about our digital future]," — Mr. Peacock.
2. "The worst possibility would be lacking capital to invest in innovation that will change a child's life ─ to have the knowledge and commitment to make a difference, but not the finances [would be my greatest fear]," — Dr. Churchwell.
3. "Operationally we are developing predictive models to enhance capacity. Based on [analyses] of types of patients, what's happened in the past and how it will affect our bed situation, we can know in advance who will be admitted and when we will reach 90 percent occupancy," — Dr. Churchwell.
4. "In the decade I've served at the Clinic I've watched our use of data migrate from simple financial tracking, to productivity analysis, to supply chain and logistics oversight. Along the way we've integrated those systems with our electronic health record to develop care protocols and drive out variation in how we manage certain cases. To date we've developed over 100 of these 'care paths' and are aggressively pursuing an additional 40. Nearly 15 of them are enabled with data we can mine from our electronic health record. The learning from this experience is immense. The dialogue the data generates between physician colleagues of like specialties builds on the practice of medicine and causes us to have some deep conversations about why we approach cases differently," — Mr. Peacock.