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62 INNOVATION 5 healthcare innovation trends to keep a close eye on By Katie Adams A s healthcare's digital transforma- tion continues, new trends arise each year. Below are five innovation trends to which health systems' innovation leaders have been paying especially close at- tention in 2021: Investments in digital health startups Digital health startups raised $14.7 bil- lion in the first six months of 2021, which means the sector has already surpassed the $14.6 billion it raised in all of 2020. e five categories that received the most funding during this period were telemedicine, well- ness, mHealth apps, analytics and clinical decision support. Cleveland Clinic, Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, Oakland, Calif.-based Kai- ser Permanente, St. Louis-based Ascen- sion, and Renton, Wash.-based Providence are among the largest health systems that have invested in digital health startups in 2021. One particularly noteworthy exam- ple of digital health investment came in May, when Kaiser Permanente and Mayo Clinic struck a joint strategic investment in Medically Home Group, a Boston-based tech services company that powers hospi- tal-at-home programs. AI for clinical decision support Hospitals are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence-powered tools to support clini- cal decision-making. Digital health startups focusing on clinical decision support raised $1.1 billion in the first half of 2021. Still, not all patients are sold on the technol- ogy. Some hospital CIOs think patients could warm up to it, though. Zafar Chaudry, MD, senior vice president and CIO at Seattle Children's, said many AI-powered clinical decision support tools "have been shown to perform with expert-level accuracy." Myra Davis, chief information innovation officer at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston said AI "will result in better informed decisions that will, if applied properly, improve pop- ulation health." Health data-sharing Health data-sharing has gained prominence as an innovation trend because of its poten- tial to support healthcare workflows, data acquisition, patient records interoperability and patient identity and control over data. One example of a health data-sharing ad- vancement came in June, when former Ath- enahealth CEO Jonathan Bush created Zus Health, a digital health platform that lets de- velopers create tools and applications using a shared data record. Another example came in July, when Ama- zon made its healthcare data lake available to providers. e HIPAA-eligible service is designed to identify critical information and data and structure it into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard format to support health information sharing be- tween providers. Hospital at home e pandemic accelerated "hospital at home" programs, which use remote monitoring and telehealth technologies to provide patients with hospital-level care without the risks and costs associated with hospital stays. "What excites me the most about hospital at home is, in a word, innovation. Our teams are continually looking for ways to trans- form and improve access to and delivery of healthcare services across our communities, including home-based care. By applying a personalized and compassionate strategy to emerging technology, we're enabling seam- less, easy access to care when and where it's needed," said Eduardo Conrado, Ascension's executive vice president and chief strategy and innovation officer. Wearable monitoring devices Hospitals have been paying more attention to wearable health devices, as they can col- lect real-time patient data. Such devices' re- mote monitoring capabilities can help track patients' recovery, keep symptoms in check and/or point toward a diagnosis. A key example of health wearables' advance- ment came in December when Amazon made its Halo device available to the gener- al public. Halo uses sensors to collect health data including temperature, heart rate, sleep and fitness activity. It is integrated with Cern- er's EHR solutions, which allows device users to opt in to share their health data directly into their EHR and with care teams that use Cerner. San Diego-based Sharp Healthcare is the first Cerner client to participate in the collaboration. n Penn Medicine to launch health informatics center By Jackie Drees P enn Medicine will launch a health informatics center this fall that will focus on health data projects across the Philadelphia-based health sys- tem's innovation and information services departments, the health sys- tem said July 26. The Center for Applied Health Informatics aims to develop the information infrastructure that Penn Medicine needs to become more of a high-reliability organization, or an entity that operates in high-risk environments with very little error. In addition to Penn Medicine's information services and healthcare innovation center, the health system's following groups are also set to collaborate with the new center: clinical effectiveness and quality improvement, center for evi- dence-based practice, EHR transformation team, biomedical informatics cen- ter and Penn Computer Science. "Establishing this center is another bold step forward toward making advance- ments in patient care and accelerating research efforts," Penn Medicine CIO Michael Restuccia said in the news release. "One exciting prospect is the cen- ter potentially being able to leverage its unique clinical informatics resources in combination with valuable genetic data for the benefit of our patients." In its first year, the center will focus on two main projects: telehealth expansion and Penn Medicine's evolving needs in its pandemic response. n