In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Maulik Purohit, MD, senior vice president and chief medical information officer of University Health System in San Antonio.
Dr. Purohit will speak during the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference on "The EMR and Clinical Operations: A Marriage That Has to Happen" at 9:45 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, and on a panel Friday, Sept. 21, titled "The Evolving Role of CMIOs Today." Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago.
Question: What is the most exciting thing happening in health IT right now? And what is the most overrated health IT trend?
Dr. Maulik Purohit: I would say the most exciting and the most overrated trends right now are automation and augmented or artificial intelligence. Both are very exciting because of what they can offer in terms of predicting schedules, helping with operations, or precision medicine, [among many others]. At the same, they are not where they need to be yet. I would compare it to autonomous driving, which is a very exciting possibility, but it is not to the level that we can trust yet. I think automation and AI are both exciting because of the potential, but currently overrated in terms of what they currently offer.
Q: What's one conviction in healthcare that needs to be challenged?
MP: I think every conviction in healthcare needs to be challenged. If we were to rebuild the healthcare system from bottom up — just redo healthcare completely — would we create the current system that we have? Would we keep the same hodgepodge of insurance, the same fragmentation of care, the same complex financial systems, and so on? I would say that the entire structure of healthcare needs to be looked at in terms of what really, truly makes sense and the way we practice. Convictions come from the framework that is already built, and we need to challenge that framework. For example, let’s take an emergency room visit. A patient gets multiple bills for the same thing, from the patient perspective: They go to the emergency room and they get a bill for radiology, they get a bill from the ER, they get a bill for the hospital facility fee. But all of those bills are for basically the same service, which is evaluation of an illness or pain, or whatever it may be. We don't conduct business in any other industry the same way. If you book a hotel, you don't get charged for the bed and charged for the lighting and charged for soap separately — at least not yet. But we're doing that for healthcare right now.
Q: What's the biggest misconception about health IT?
MP: The biggest misconception is that it has to be painful. There are outstanding products in health IT, and we have to incorporate them properly, but I think that health IT can get to the level of allowing us to enjoy using IT products rather than dreading them. But IT has to be looked on as an investment, not merely an expense.