The Changing Facets of the Healthcare Space

As the Chief Medical Informatics Officer of Pipeline Health System, Green is in charge of quality, physician management, safety, and patient care coordination. Green is currently working as an emergency physician with a solid 21 years of post-residency experience. He is also a board-certified emergency medicine physician since 2002.

 What are some of the major challenges and trends impacting the healthcare industry?

Security is the most significant challenge that the healthcare sector faces today. Even the most well-protected enterprise CRM platforms are vulnerable to today's advanced threats. To this end, everyone must understand the concept of security. There are several levels of security, and achieving the highest level of security demands a significant amount of resources and effort. The risk of nation-state attack is also looming large in the U.S. healthcare sector.

 The pandemic has also presented a plethora of challenges for the healthcare sector. Many regulatory and internal development projects were supposed to be completed before the pandemic was postponed. These projects will restart now.

What are some of the most recent projects you've worked on?

 As a CMIO, I focus on upcoming regulatory requirements. We have a team that deals with the ever-growing government regulations that set privacy and usage standards for patient data, ensure excellent patient care, prevent fraud, and protect healthcare staff. It's difficult for physicians to maintain quality and regulatory standards while being short-staffed and coping with the pandemic's additional burden.

We are trying to make it easier for them by facilitating clinical documentation in a more timely and effective manner. For example, a condition like Sepsis requires a lot of things to be documented for the patient. To make things easier, we created a template in our voice recognition software that allows Sepsis patients to access all the documents that they need with just a simple voice command. That's one of the projects we are working on. Second, we're developing a unique report that will allow everyone to communicate and highlight concerns. We deploy color-coding to quickly identify patient requirements that need to be addressed and fix those issues while they are in-house. This initiative enables us to collaborate with patients more effectively.

“Security is the most significant challenge that the healthcare sector faces today. Even the most well-protected enterprise CRM platforms are vulnerable to today's advanced threats” 

What do you think would dictate the future of the healthcare industry in the coming months?

Cutting-edge technologies like AI and ML are changing the face of the healthcare industry. But, researchers are still skeptical regarding their game-changing potential. I expect that as more organizations use these technologies in the coming months or years, they will become more cost-effective.

What would be your advice for the upcoming professionals to be successful in this field?

I believe every professional must be able to understand both the technical and clinical aspects of their work. They should understand two sets of cognitive processes: how to think like a clinician and how to think like a programmer. On top of that, they should try to understand every aspect of the business, such as the regulatory, documentation, and quality or safety aspects. Understanding and perfecting one part of the business could take months or even years.