Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1058375
37 CIO / HEALTH IT WakeMed CMIO Dr. Neal Chawla's team goals for 2019: Training, analytics & patient functionality By Jackie Drees N eal Chawla, MD, chief medical in- formation officer of Raleigh, N.C.- based WakeMed Health & Hospitals, discusses his plans to improve patient care in 2019 and how some of healthcare's biggest needs require little technology. Editor's note: Responses are lightly edited for clarity and length. Question: How did you become a CMIO? What is your background and what advice do you have for aspiring CMIOs? Dr. Neal Chawla: I became a CMIO aer 10 years of doing IT work — from the clinical care side and from a systemwide standpoint — using data to make both clinical and oper- ational decisions. Starting with an informat- ics fellowship and formal education, I slowly shied my focus from clinical care to IT. It was helpful to learn some concepts, but the adage that you learn a lot more by doing still rings true. My advice to aspiring CMIOs is to grind it out. Get some education on IT and leader- ship, but make sure to also get involved in IT at your organization and work through issues with your teams and co-workers. You may not be compensated much at first, but once you start and continue to prove yourself, the op- portunities will oen follow. Make sure your heart is in it and that you're doing it for the right reasons — better health for patients and leveraging technology to make a positive im- pact. My last, and most challenging, piece of advice is to stay clinically active. It will keep you honest and maintain your street cred among physician colleagues. Q: What is the vision for your team in 2019? How will you approach your role and meeting your goals? NC: I see several important, big-ticket items for WakeMed's 2019 forecast to improve care for our patients. ese are my top three: 1. Training. We have a lot of functionality, but a lot of folks are not aware of all the features they can already take advantage of and access to make their lives easier. We still have some clunky technological aspects to fix, but we can get a lot of mileage out of educating our colleagues about existing tools. It helps everyone be more pro- ficient and, in turn, improves patient care. 2. Analytics. We know there is a lot of data fil- ing through our systems, but are we really tap- ping into the business and clinical intelligence that this data can provide? From the tools to the process to data literacy, there is a lot we will continue to do to capture meaningful and actionable data and create better outcomes. Turn data into action. 3. Patient functionality. We always put our patients first and will continue our focus on tools directed at improving the patient expe- rience and every interaction with our system. We have an oversight group to coordinate these continued efforts, whether it's making it easier for patients to schedule appointments, better understand their discharge instructions or to send us data from outside our walls. As our governance gets stronger, we are build- ing out a three-year clinical road map to guide our focus and keep WakeMed aligned to meet its mission and strategic goals. Q: Where do you see the biggest need for innovation to improve the healthcare system in the future? NC: Ironically, I believe the biggest needs are some of the most low-tech — it's training, en- gagement and change management. Across the healthcare industry, IT teams are develop- ing better engines to put better functionality out there quickly, but for multiple reasons our end users are not able to broadly adopt tech- nology as fast as we can push it out. It would be a huge win to figure out how to make the transition from new functionality to true adoption more timely and effective. Q: Which apps and technologies do you find most helpful, and which do you think will be passing fads? NC: I am a believer in the Gartner Innovation Hype Cycle, and I believe most of the technol- ogy goes through this trend and cycle. Large EHRs are constantly increasing functionality and built-in integration, making these areas tougher to compete with. Apps and technol- ogies in spaces where large EHRs won't be able to develop themselves will have a better chance of being successful. n Digital health VC deals top $3B in 2018, driven by analytics investments By Jessica Kim Cohen T here were 173 venture capital deals in the digital health space during the third quarter of 2018, totaling $3.1 billion, according to a re- port by market research firm Mercom Capital Group. This marks a steady in- crease from one year prior, when ven- ture capital deals totaled $2.4 billion. The first nine months of 2018 have seen 556 venture capital deals, down from 586 deals during the same pe- riod last year. However, funding was 46 percent higher year over year, with digital health companies raising a record $8 billion in venture capital deals in the first nine months of 2018, up from $5.5 billion last year. "For the first time, we saw funding cross $3 billion in a single quarter in digital health, and funding raised year to date has already surpassed all of 2017 with a realistic chance of hit- ting $10 billion this year," Raj Prabhu, CEO of Mercom Capital Group, said in a statement. Here were the six most-funded digi- tal health segments during the quar- ter, according to the report: 1. Analytics: $889 million 2. mHealth apps: $504 million 3. Mobile wireless: $374 million 4. Telemedicine: $206 million 5. Wearables: 149 million 6. Social health networks: $148 million n