Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/977748
44 CIO / HEALTH IT Amazon expresses interest in health tech for the elderly: 7 things to know By Alia Paavola A mazon's secretive healthcare team, which has been referred to internal- ly as 1492, is reportedly interested in developing healthcare technologies for aging populations, according to CNBC. Here are seven things to know. 1. Since 2015, Amazon has been meeting with the AARP, a lobby that supports older Amer- icans, to discuss various collaborations and share research. In those meetings, Amazon expressed interest in designing technology for aging populations. 2. A person familiar with the Amazon and AARP meetings told CNBC the secretive healthcare team asked questions about the size of the market, sought answers to wheth- er elderly populations trusted Amazon over other vendors and inquired about the tech- nology needs of this group. 3. While Amazon has kept quiet about its ventures into the healthcare arena, Babak Parviz, Amazon's vice president of special projects, spoke openly about its plans to de- velop technologies for the elderly at an event hosted by Klick Health in February. 4. "Something ... we've been building for some period of time and we deeply care about ... relates to what happens to older people," Mr. Parviz said at the event, according to CNBC. "We have looked at the older population in the context of health ... and we know this group has a lot of issues and unmet needs." 5. Even though Mr. Parviz spoke about Am- azon's intention to develop technologies to help the elderly, no specific details have been released. 6. A 2016 Technology Market Overview Report estimates the market for technology to assist aging adults will reach more than $30 billion in the next several years — a trend that may have swayed Amazon to disrupt the market. 7. Mr. Parviz, who formerly worked at Google X, heads the secretive team at Amazon that is dedicated to exploring opportunities in the healthcare space, including applications for Amazon Alexa, EMRs and telemedicine. n Mayo Clinic uses 'ambient intelligence' to find actionable EHR data in ICUs: 5 things to know By Jessica Kim Cohen R ochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic rolled out an ap- plication to flag actionable data for clinicians working in intensive care units, three of the health system's physicians wrote in an article for Harvard Business Review. EHRs contain a variety of important medical data, includ- ing diagnoses, observations, treatments and lab results. However, when treating critical care patients, this informa- tion can become overwhelming for physicians. To combat this challenge, Mayo Clinic assembled a team to integrate "ambient intelligence" into clinical workflows. Ambient intelligence, according to the authors, is a "set of decision-making tools powered by data on and insights into clinicians' goals, work environments, strengths and performance constraints." The goal of the program was to create a tool that delivers the right information to the right clinicians at the patient's bedside. Here are five things to know about Mayo Clinic's ambient intelligence application. 1. The team built an EHR interface for clinicians in the ICU, called Ambient Warning and Response Evaluation, or AWARE. The application offers a real-time overview of every ICU in the Mayo Clinic system, including represen- tations of each patient with notes on required tests, scans and procedures, to inform clinicians' decision-making. 2. The AWARE application notifies clinicians of poten- tial omissions after analyzing the patient's condition. For example, the feature "Sepsis Dart" monitors patients in ICUs to determine whether a physician is implementing timely and accurate best practices for diagnosing and treating sepsis. 3. To create the application, Mayo Clinic assembled a mul- tidisciplinary team of clinicians and researchers to design clinical informatics tools. The team identified ICU clinicians with a "very high mental, or cognitive, workload who con- tinuously have to filter important information out of the cluttered environment," according to the authors, and con- ducted 1,500 interviews during a two-year period. 4. The clinical informatics team applied insights from these interviews to determine roughly 60 pieces of pa- tient information that proved "crucial" for patient care. These 60 items were selected from tens of thousands of pieces of data that came through the EHR, according to Harvard Business Review. The most important informa- tion included vital signs, alongside observations such as cough strength. 5. Mayo Clinic deployed AWARE in its Rochester, Minn.- based ICUs in 2012, and expanded the application to its Phoenix, Scottsdale, Ariz., and Jacksonville, Fla., campus- es in 2014. Since then, officials at the health system have determined the application saves clinicians three to five minutes on chart review per patient each day, along with improving patient outcomes in the ICU. n