Becker's Hospital Review

56 INNOVATION How 9 hospital innovation chiefs want health IT to further adapt to the pandemic By Katie Adams and Jackie Drees H ospitals and health systems across the U.S. have accelerated digital transformation efforts to maintain communication and relationships with their patients while promoting safety amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, nine hospital digital and innovation leaders share how they want health IT to continue innovating and adapting to the pandemic. Question: How would you most like to see health IT fur- ther adapt to the pandemic? Eduardo Conrado. Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Ascension (St. Louis): IT will continue to move into the end-to-end experience space to fully integrate both workflows and data across sites of care with a focus on value-based care and population health accelerating the tools to improve care and lower total cost of care while improving patient experience. ere's also tremendous opportunity to use traditional and non- traditional data, such as personal history of COVID-19 recovery, community syndromic surveillance, consumer time and location data, person-person proximity data surrogates, combined with com- prehensive vaccination data at the individual level, to help under- stand community risk, better anticipate hot-spot emergence and fur- ther refine specific consumer cohorts for vaccination prioritization. ese insights will be important to reducing near-term pandemic burden for individuals and communities as well as sustain and im- prove their longer-term health and wellness. We're committed to delivering personalized and compassionate care for all, especially those most vulnerable among us. Predictive an- alytics can help us with data on social determinants of health like housing, food and transportation to support populations that are less likely to get care they need. Daniel Durand, MD. Chief Innovation Officer at LifeBridge Health (Baltimore): I think we need to harness the power of self-scheduling, mobile patient engagement and at-home testing to help create true scalable solutions that will allow society to meet the great challenges looming before us in 2021. How can we vaccinate the public as quickly as possible? How can we use data on COVID-19 status and immunity to continue to re-open society in a thoughtful fashion that is both in- formed by science but preserves personal liberties? Health IT will be at the center of our answers to both of these pressing questions. Pankaj Jandwani, MD. Chief Innovation Officer at MidMichigan Health (Midland, Mich.): Starting at the bedside, there has never been a greater need to automate data collection and unburden clini- cians with data entry as we face challenges with different types of tests for COVID-19, and now vaccination through health departments and commercial pharmacies. A lot of what is reported by various states and CDC is still entered manually by providers and clinicians — a monumental effort — fraught with inaccuracies and wasted healthcare resources. I look forward to seeing improved maturity of ambient sensing technologies, integration of remote monitoring and various point-of-care devices into the EMR. We need to help our cli- nicians reduce screen time and reduce burnout related to data entry so they can spend quality time with their patients. Claus Torp Jensen, PhD. Chief Digital Officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York City): We live in a next normal where change is a constant. Finding the right balance between excel- lence, experience, safety and speed is the challenge of our generation. I am confident that we are up to the task. Sara Vaezy. Chief Digital Strategy and Business Development Of- ficer at Providence (Renton, Wash.): It's less about adapting to the pandemic and more about leveraging our learnings to further the health systems mission to serve all patients in a more effective, scala- Story continues on page 57 How 5 hospitals are spending innovation investment dollars By Jackie Drees H ere are the hospitals and health systems that have distributed innovation funds to startups, internal projects and venture funds in January and February. 1. Ohio State University and Nationwide Children's Hospital, both based in Columbus, joined a new $1 billion innovation district in Columbus focused on virus, pathogens, stem cell therapies and cancer research. Ohio State will invest $650 million, Nationwide Children's Hospital will invest $350 mil- lion and JobsOhio will invest $100 million in the project. 2. Little Rock, Ark.-based Baptist Health and Mercy Fort Smith said Feb. 9 they will invest $1 million in a health- care sciences innovation center for students in the Fort Smith, Ark., area. 3. Baltimore-based LifeBridge Health partnered with Healthworx, the innovation and investment arm of Car- eFirst BlueCross BlueShield, to launch a new incubator, dubbed 1501 Health, that will provide startup compa- nies developing healthcare technologies and innova- tions with up to $100,000 in investment. 4. Cleveland Clinic is launching an infectious disease research center through a $500 million innovation col- laboration with the city of Cleveland and JobsOhio. Cleveland Clinic will put up $300 million in funds while JobsOhio will invest $200 million. 5. Automated virtual care and communication platform Conversa increased its series B financing round Jan. 19 to $20 million, up from $12 million last June, led by Northwell Health Ventures. Northwell co-led Conversa's series B financing round alongside Builders VC. Univer- sity Hospitals' venture arm is also an investor. n

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