In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Salman Naqvi, MD, CMIO of Allscripts.
Dr. Naqvi will speak on a panel at Becker's Hospital Review 7th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable titled "Striking the Balance Between Financial and Quality Initiatives" at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 13. Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago.
Question: What keeps you excited and motivated to come to work each day?
Dr. Salman Naqvi: The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, whether through new treatments, diagnostics, clinical trials or the use of information technology. At Allscripts, I'm in a continuous learning mode to adapt to these changes. Currently I'm most excited by the work we are doing to remove barriers to early identification of sepsis. Our focus is on using first-level alerts, incorporating new research on biological criteria to identify and grade the threat, as well as using analytics to find trends in care processes themselves. At the same time, I am now getting to advise health systems to become more data-driven than committee-driven. It's rewarding to see more and more hospitals embrace this approach.
Q: If you could pass along one piece of advice to another hospital executive, what would it be?
SN: Find ways to transition from simply collecting and reporting data to becoming a data-driven hospital. Analytics strategies can seem overwhelming, but there are many simple paths to start from that show positive impact on the health of your patients, providers and pocketbook. Leaders at some successful hospitals have opened their business intelligence tools directly to end users and are letting users do their own reports. In other cases, they are using out-of-the-box tools meant for meaningful use requirements to help end-users see quality measures. Success is not about the number of reports you can build, but the number of report requests you can reduce by opening analytics use to more constituents.
Q: What's one conviction in healthcare that needs to be challenged?
SN: That value-based care can somehow be described as a 90-day episode with positive outcomes from a clinical quality and cost perspective. Not only is this premise short-sighted, as it does little to prevent the need for care at a population level, but it also fails to recognize the longevity of value a patient may care about. When healthcare leaders do describe value at a population level, as extending from birth to death, and expressed in patient-reported terms, we would have truly moved toward lowering cost per capita while increasing the populations' quality of life.
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