Good health outcomes depend on a wide range of factors, such as the medical team that cares for the patient, and the facilities and technologies that the providers have access to. Another important piece of the puzzle is the way health care systems communicate with each other and with patients, that’s especially been true during a pandemic that’s changed the way we all communicate with each other.
On this episode of HealthChangers, we’ll hear more about efforts to streamline the way the health care industry accesses, exchanges and interprets data between systems with a goal of improving health outcomes for everyone. Our conversation features Kirk Anderson, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Cambia Health Solutions. He’s joined by Steven Kassakian, who at the time of the interview was the Associate Chief Health Information Officer and Assistant Professor at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) and has recently transitioned to a new position at Humana as a physician and informaticist.
Kirk Anderson (KA): You've had such an interesting background. You've been a primary care doctor, you've been an academic. We've done a lot of work together in interoperability. Can you tell us about your background for our listeners?
Steven Kassakian (SK): Yes, sure, absolutely. As you mentioned, first and foremost, I'm a primary care physician, so I see adult patients, general internal medicine. Then, I, at some point, got super interested in how health care is put together, why it's the way it is, and what we can do to kind of improve it, and found myself in the field of informatics.
From there, I have an operational role primarily as the Associate Chief Health Information Officer at OHSU. I'm responsible for helping set the strategy and then implementing that in terms of how we use our clinical information systems to do all the work of health care and help patients improve outcomes and help us do a better job as well.
KA: Steve, you mentioned that a lot of your work is keyed off of clinical information systems. Can you just talk a little bit about how complex that environment is today, and what are some of the challenges that you've come across working with clinical data?
SK: Good question. That's kind of the big question ‒ why is it so complex and what makes it so hard? The reality is the health care system is really complex, with many different sets of stakeholders with different interests and abilities to participate.
A lot of the work that I'm focused on is how do we deliver health care, and how do we do that better for both the patients and for both the health care system and society at large. One of the big challenges is since we've kind of gone into the EHR (Electronic Health Record) age, we've produced an incredible amount of information. How do we take that information and present it to the right person at the right time to help them make better decisions? That could be the patient, that could be someone in the health care administrative space, or it could be the clinicians and providers themselves.
One of the things that it requires is diving deep into all the problems. There's a lot of what I'll call excitement, and maybe others might use the word hype, around things like big data and analytics. Those are important spaces. But, at the end of the day, you need to dive in and understand who are the actors in the system? How are they participating in the process? Who's looking at information? Who's producing the information? Who's making the decisions? Are they the right person to make decisions? It requires a lot of deep, thoughtful kind of process or workflow examination and design. So, that's a lot of what I do.
KA: Steve, you mentioned how a lot of focus has been on things like big data and big analytics and how, while that's super important, there is a need for us to be able to use data for more real-time and interactive workflow improvements. Whether that's to reduce the burden on providers, to be able to allow them to focus more on delivering care, or to be able to engage and guide patients through their health care journeys. Are there any projects or initiatives that you're particularly proud to have been a part of that are driving that patient through health care experience in a way that is more person focused?
SK: I think that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity there and a lot of interest. I would say I do think we're kind of still in early days, right? The pandemic has brought a lot of challenges for us, but one thing that we have experienced is we have been much more public facing with our information technology tools.
How do you schedule the entire country for an appointment in the same kind of series of weeks or months? That's been a tremendous challenge. What are the tools that work for some patients? What are the tools that don't work for others? I think that's been a big learning experience.
The other piece is the telemedicine, right? It's been tremendous. COVID happening was essentially the burning platform. We had a telemedicine initiative for ambulatory video visits. I was the medical director of it. We did a lot of arm-twisting and cajoling, trying to convince providers to do it and patients to do it. It never really caught on because your particular primary care provider maybe only saw video visits once every other Tuesday and the convenience just wasn’t there. Then COVID happened and we needed a solution, and everyone sort of joined on with it.
I think that has been tremendous for us, and just understanding more kind of how to work with the patient population and the community at large and what are their needs, and how do they want the system to work? I think health care has had a model where it's been more provider-centric than we'd all like it to be. I think the telemedicine acceleration that we saw during COVID was really, really powerful and moving it to the place where I think we all want it to be, which is much more patient-centered.
The evidence we've seen so far is that there is a disparity in both a racial and age usage of telemedicine in general… If you look at the modality of use, whether it's telephone versus video, there is, again, an age and a racial disparity and some language disparity between those that use it.
KA: Absolutely. You mentioned some of these innovations that the pandemic has really brought forward. These are things we've been talking about doing in health care for a long time. And I think one of the silver linings of this pandemic, if you can find one, is that it's brought the future more to the present out of necessity.
Can you share some specific examples of companies or organizations you've worked with to improve the process that medical providers use to engage with either their patients or with other players such as insurance companies or others in the health care ecosystem, because of COVID?
SK: There's a tremendous need to sort of communicate with the patients, right? Our kind of main tool to do that is something we call the Patient Portal, so that's an extension of the electronic health record. We thought we had a good adoption rate before COVID, and that adoption rate has gone through the roof. The universe of people we would consider patients has gone through the roof as well.
We've leveraged that tool from our vendor where we're a customer of Epic Systems. We've also used our SMS texting vendor a lot more, so that vendor provides us the ability to text message patients. A lot of patients, they don't pick up the phone anymore when the number is blocked, or they don't know what it is.
We can't reach them that way. People get tons of junk email, but people read texts, right? We've had a really good adoption rate in leveraging texts to basically say, "Hey, this is OHSU, you're now eligible for a COVID vaccine, you can go ahead and log in here and get that done." That's been a tremendous ability for us.
Before we used it just kind of sparingly kind of here and there for appointment reminders and things. We weren't sure if it was working because people who didn't show up didn't tell us, "Well, I read your text, but I decided not to show up anyway." But for this, we had a really good acceptance rate.
KA: That's great. I think we're seeing the improvements that you've touched on, there are also concerns about social determinants of health and equity barriers, given that not all of our population are comfortable with telehealth, maybe they don't have the access to broadband that others do. In your opinion, what are some of the things that we can do as payers or providers that can help ensure that these new ways of interacting with the health care system can be accessible to everyone? Any thoughts on that?
SK: Yeah, extremely important question. I think for those of us kind of right out in front of this issue, this was of concern kind of immediately during the transition. I think there is a recognition, more recognition than there has been in the past, although I think those of us inside health care have been aware of it, that there are serious inequity issues within health care, and there have been for some time.
I think the concern kind of coming out of the gate as telehealth sort of became the go-to solution for just seeing your provider during the pandemic was, was it going to help alleviate the existing inequities? Was it going to keep it status quo? Or was it going to make it worse?
The evidence we've seen so far is that there is a disparity in both a racial and age usage of telemedicine in general. When you break it down further, some analysis that we've done shows that if you look at the modality, if people are using telephone, which some people have a hard time calling telemedicine, but in the industry, it's generally considered telemedicine as well. If you look at the modality of use, whether it's telephone versus video, there is, again, an age and a racial disparity and some language disparity between those that use it.
I think to kind of borrow a phrase that's used in the common vernacular, the first step is to recognize there's a problem, right? I think we have done that at my institution, and there's also been a number of other folks who've kind of published on that as well. I think that's really important. I think the next step is sort of trying to understand what those barriers are.
There are some good studies looking at kind of the Medicare population. One survey shows that 25% of the Medicare population does not have a smartphone phone or internet-enabled computer to facilitate video. What happens in the future if health care systems move more towards video, what happens to those patients who already maybe had challenges physically getting there? Are they going to be at a loss because now a large percentage of appointments are going to be pushed towards telemedicine? They won't be able to access those. There's a diminished amount of in-person office visits.
I think a lot of attention into the issue needs to be paid. Part of the challenge is these issues of inequity are not ... they're not specific to health care, they're kind of part of larger society, right? People have talked about, should social determinants of health include access to broadband? Many people have said, “Yes, that is a social determinant of health. If you do not have access to broadband, you will suffer kind of structurally worse health outcomes.”
I think there are issues that the health care systems need to be aware of to make sure that they're not exacerbating them and working towards doing what they can on their own to alleviate them. I do think that they are reflections of larger societal issues, so I think working through kind of policy levers is probably the most effective way to go about that.
Some just interesting things that I've heard that people have done. There was a group in New York that noticed early on in the pandemic a lot of their most vulnerable patients weren't being able to be seen. They identified their locations, and many of them were actually in some of the shelter systems. They went and extended their wireless network into the shelter systems. I know some other folks who've been in kind of risk sharing arrangements, have said, "We think it's a net benefit for the patients to be able to connect to us over video, so we as the health care provider and the payer are going to partner, and we're going to provide them enabled devices so that they can do just that work."
I think those are some of the solutions that people are looking at and how they do that. I do think, again, just because these are really challenging kind of societal level issues, the policy levers are going to be some of these long-term sustainable solutions from my perspective.
KA: Sure. I noticed that in President Biden's infrastructure bill, some of the things that you're talking about, things like access to high-speed bandwidth are being considered core infrastructure. It's not just bridges and highways, but things that we can invest in at a national level that can have an impact.
We think about them not always in the context of health care in particular, but certainly as you've pointed out, that's going to remain a barrier that will prevent segments of our population from taking advantage of some of this innovation that the pandemic has brought into the present.
SK: Yeah, absolutely. I think the common quip in the past was that this community has no primary care doctor. They have no specialists. They have no hospital. I think the state now is you can say the same thing, this community has no internet, right? If it doesn't have access to broadband, not only the decreased access to health care services, but all those other pieces of the economic engine that they need to be successful.
Then, there's the more challenging problem, which I think a lot of us tend to gloss over, which is semantic interoperability, which is the idea of how do you, as a user, understand the information you're getting?
KA: Going back to big data, Steve. Certainly your career, you've been focused on getting value and insights and predictive analytics out of clinical data from the hospital systems that you've worked with. I know from my experience in Project Da Vinci and the providers that we've engaged with there, that there's also a great desire for those clinicians to have a 360-degree view of patients, that includes nonclinical data, specifically claims data from insurance companies.
Can you just talk a little bit about your perspective on that and what is the value for a clinician to be able to see a complete picture of their patient that extends beyond just their system's clinical interactions?
SK: Great question. I think if you asked most clinicians, I think they would resoundingly endorse the idea that they would love to see all the data on all their patients. They would ask a very reasonable question, “How come I can't do that right now? It seems like we've spent a lot of time and money on this thing called the electronic health record and you guys promised a whole lot of results. Where are they?”
I think everyone agrees with the underlying idea of it and the need for it, and it's hugely valuable. I mean, there's a lot of evidence that the idea that, in the health care system that the costs are staggering and unsustainable. That's kind of commonly accepted knowledge. And there's a lot of belief that there's probably a lot of unnecessary repeat testing and over-treatment because of a lack of access to information and being able to make the right decisions. People understand the use case, they understand the need.
The reality is when we think about the problem of having access to all that data, whether it's the clinicians who don't have their claims data or that the payers don't have the clinical data, it all goes into the chapter on interoperability. I wouldn’t call it a buzzword, it's kind of a fundamental problem of the next decade, decade and a half. I think the challenge is that there's kind of two pieces to it, right? There's kind of syntactic interoperability, which is how does the machine just get connected to send this information so that it's in one database and now it's in the other and someone can see it?
Then, there's the more challenging problem, which I think a lot of us tend to gloss over, which is semantic interoperability, which is the idea of how do you, as a user, understand the information you're getting? When I describe that a cat is gray and is a female, you know what a cat is already. You and I have a mental model that's shared about what a cat is.
Well, the challenging pieces in health care, the mental models are not really defined. They kind of exist to some degree. For instance, you could send me a blood pressure. Okay, what kind of blood pressure is that? That's blood pressure in my left arm, my right arm, my leg, my extremity. It's intraarterial with a catheter. It's a 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure. I was admitted during that time. I was standing, I was sitting, and I was laying. So, there are these challenges to sort of being able to encode the data and have that metadata around it to be able to help us understand it.
I mean, if you look at kind of the current state of interoperability, they're starting to sort of work through those problems. I think that's a lot of the work that HL7 and some of their various initiatives and the DaVinci Project and the Solor Project are doing. It's challenging work. It's really challenging work.
So, providers right now, if you go to a health care provider, you see a doctor, they've got a lot of information about you in their EHR. One of the things that they're kind of nervous about is having a deluge of information outside, so how do we get that information? How do we filter it? How do we understand who the user is that's looking at it? What do they need contextually? Sort of where in the patient's journey, what kind of decisions are they going to make so that it doesn't just become kind of the digital fax of the entire record.
That's kind of really the fundamental challenge. It's not something that's easy and it is definitely going to take time. I always feel bad because the providers, again, I think rightly so, they're asking, "Why hasn't this happened already?" It seems simple but it's not. The things specific to your question about claims data, I mean, I think that's really important, especially as the providers enter into more kind of value-based care contracts or risk sharing arrangements, to be able to have that total picture and be able to understand, okay, they got a colonoscopy over here or there.
Ideally, what most people agree we would like is, you log into the electronic health record and you see the totality of information about the patient. Beyond the interoperability challenges, there are the realities of privacy and security issues, and in the United States, how those things work out and who's the owner of the data. There are still some challenges to work through there to make the data flow easier.
I think there's a shared set of goals, which is important to get the journey started. I think most of us agree on kind of where we want to go, which is helpful, but it's definitely going to take some effort. It's kind of fun work. I enjoy it. It keeps me motivated coming to work every day.
KA: I'm glad you brought up the privacy and security angle of this. I spent a lot of my career in health care information security. I get this question a lot as I'm talking about interoperability. There is this concern that as we talk about interoperability, and when people hear that they hear, "Data is now moving around that wasn't before." I think there's concern about that.
One of the misconceptions that I think is pretty common is that data is not being shared today. The reality is we move data between payers and providers today, and we've been doing it for a while. We've been doing it though in these very ad hoc, non-standardized, very complex ways. That is a nightmare, really, for someone who's tasked with trying to secure that data, trying to make sure that it is used only for the purpose that it was intended. One of the greatest values, in my opinion, of the focus on interoperability and moving to standards like FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), is that we can bring some order and some repeatability to this exchange of data that's been happening in all these different ways. I think it's really one of the understated values of this work and interoperability, is the privacy and security benefit of doing it in a consistently best practices way.
SK: Yeah, I think you nailed it. I couldn't agree with that more. I think the reality is yes, absolutely. There is a tremendous amount of data being moved in all sorts of manners that is completely ad hoc, and we're doing it differently and bringing it into a standard process, so you can have policies and control and auditing and all those things, is going to be tremendous. I think that's the right narrative in the way to sort of help alleviate some of those concerns about the privacy and security.
In the United States, we don't really have a consumer data privacy set of laws or regulations. It's pretty loose. One of the things that's happened with FHIR is that patients, since meaningful use stage two, have been able to get access to their electronic health record data through FHIR applications from third-party vendors.
When the health care system has that data and is the controlling entity, it remains under the regulations of HIPAA, and there are all sorts of constraints about how that data needs to be managed. Once the patient data is moved over into the patient control, it's no longer under the HIPAA framework. That was probably the most commented on thing in the information blocking regulations when things came out.
How is the consumer supposed to understand the inherent risks? For better or worse, I think at the time with the administration, we took a kind of libertarian approach, which was, "Hey, the patients are responsible adults, when they get their data, they're going to be responsible for it. Whatever happens, it's kind of on them."
I think there's still a lot of folks who feel like that's probably not the right approach, both from a kind of practicality and a reality situation, because I think there is an expectation of when you're interacting with your health care provider, I think you do have expectations of them. I don't know that having a tiny disclaimer on a website that says, "Hey, once you click here, it's all on you." I don't know that that's sufficient to kind of meet the end goal. And I think there are a lot of folks concerned about bad actors in the system. And certainly, as the data becomes more portable through those mechanisms, we may see that.
That's one area that's kind of wide open, but I think from a policy perspective it's not clear that we're going to see a specific set of patient level health care data privacy laws, outside of a larger kind of consumer data privacy context.
We're kind of all waiting to see what's going to happen there. I think that the cynics among us would say, "All the data is out there on a server in Belarus already." Maybe the cat's out of the bag. I'm not sure. That story is still to be told; I think.
What is it that the patients want? My supposition is, the first person or company who can find out a way to bring value to the patient and potentially also help them monetize it, I think is going to bring something very interesting to the table.
KA: That story's being told again. Same story. The same kind of challenge, same sort of conversation about sort of paternalism versus sort of the libertarian approach as you described it. It's now being told on the payer side, as payers through mandates and new legislation such as the CMS patient access APIs rules, right?
Payers are now making data available through FHIR APIs so that our members can choose whatever app they'd like to be able to download that data and to use it. And of course, as you said, as they do that, that data leaves HIPAA world and it becomes that consumer's data to control and to really be relying upon whatever app they've chosen, be relying upon trusting that app.
I think accelerator groups like the CARIN Alliance that we've been active in, are looking at that and trying to bring a trust framework to help with that problem. But I agree with you, it is one that if we don't do a good job of educating the community about these new capabilities, it could really unwind a lot of the benefits that we see of putting consumers in control of their data.
SK: I think that that's absolutely true. One thing I'm interested to see if someone does, because I think this is probably the sweet spot of being able to do this. There's been health apps for 10 years or so, and I'm not sure exactly how folks are going to kind of take the totality of the data. I think the real question is sort of, how do you bring value to the patient from their data, right? That's table stakes, we can do that. It needs a trust framework and all that.
What is it that the patients want? My supposition is, the first person or company who can find out a way to bring value to the patient and potentially also help them monetize it, I think is going to bring something very interesting to the table.
There's a mantra in health care. Maybe not a mantra, but many of us believe, and it's somewhat in the law that the patients own their data, right? There's a lot of very big companies who have all that data and resell it in various ways and monetize it consistently, whether it's prescription drug data that's sold to the pharmaceutical companies to do targeted outreach, things like that.
You go online and you want to buy a big health care data set and it costs money. If it's the patient's data, how come they're not being remunerated for some of that, right? I think that's going to be an interesting thing if someone provide value to the patients from a health perspective, but also say, "Hey, if you share your data here, every time that someone uses it in a research study, you're going to get some percentage of that back or something." I think that's going to be really interesting. I think it'll truly make the world patient-centric.
The health care system, in my mind, we want it to be patient-centered, but maybe the patient should be sharing some of the financial value of the system as well. That's just kind of something that's always been on my mind.
We're interested in interoperability, participating in the greater good of the health care ecosystem, but we really want a project.
KA: Coming back to the way providers and clinicians are interacting with payers. We've talked about the value of payers being able to exchange and provide claims data to providers in a structured way, such that that provider can drive value out of that and deliver better care.
I think another area that we can improve upon as payers, and we're certainly trying to, is in just being easier to work with providers. Forget about shifting big data sets around and focusing in on just business processes that we're engaged in every day. Things like prior authorization. Not a lot of data going over the wire there, but one that I know is particularly a big pain point for providers and for patients, frankly. Going beyond that, it's not an easy thing to manage for payers either.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the things you're excited about in the areas of using FHIR to streamline the business processes like prior authorizations that clinicians are working through every day?
SK: I can say undoubtedly, that for everything I've heard been involved in about FHIR, I am most excited and most confident in the level of success of the Da Vinci Project. That's a project you’re aware of, Kirk. We're an invited member, with Cambia working on the Da Vinci Project. I think I had mentioned earlier in the show, but again, it's a multi-stakeholder project run by HL7 focused on value-based care use cases.
When I first heard about FHIR, probably at AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) back in maybe 2013 or 2014. I was super excited, and I just said, "Oh man, there's so many places to apply this." As I've watched it roll out, I've realized that the opportunity and figuring out kind of the right entry point and how to leverage it for the health care providers, is to start with some of the real foundational problems, to not only have things that have real clear kind of ROI use cases, but also serve to help the organization build capacity, to understand what it is.
If you look at a lot of the early FHIR kind of demonstration projects, a lot of them were niche important, but niche clinical use cases. Those folks, we've struggled with adopting those things, because they're not vendors supporting the products. Health care, for as much as we do want it to be focused on the right things, tends to focus on, it still has a big financial component, so how do you create a ROI use case on a clinical area that's not totally clear? It's been tough.
My sense of the DaVinci work has been it's really focused on those foundational elements, so we're engaged in the prior authorization use case. I always thought prior authorizations were really just painful around medications, because that's where a lot of the individual providers see kind of the friction and pain points. It turns out most everything that I order, a lot of it is prior authorization and it's kind of happening in the background.
When we were approached about participating in the project, we said, "We have some FHIR experience. We're interested in interoperability, participating in the greater good of the health care ecosystem, but we really want a project. We want a use case that has a real burning business problem because we want it to stick. We want it to have that high level leadership support have that the green dollar ROI so we kind of get enmeshed and then people say, "Hey, yeah, this is really important stuff." Not, "Oh, Steve thinks this is interesting, and I don't know what we're going to do with it."
We shopped a few of the use cases around and we hit on the prior authorization one. I will say, I appreciated, our VP of Revenue Cycle who said, "Yeah, I think you guys tried something like this 10 years ago. There was some standard everybody was going to roll-out that was going to eliminate it. But you guys sound motivated, so have at it." So, we jumped headfirst in with the folks at Cambia.
Our first, and really kind of the value we brought to the project is to really map out what's happening from a business sense. On our side, it's a very complex process, extremely labor intensive. Essentially, I as a provider, might order something, and then we have a set of business rules to try to figure out if we think it needs a prior authorization. If it does, it drops to a work queue and then a human looks at it. Goes to a website. Looks at the rules there. The rules are different, even with the same payer, depending upon what the actual insurance coverage is.
What I've learned on the payer side is, it's exceedingly complex to have those business rules and get them all encoded and have a library that makes sense in some indexing and a process. Then we get forms, and we fill them out. It's a little bit embarrassing, I think, as far as technologically, where that is, but that's a great place for it to be, so we're excited about the work.
We worked really collaboratively in the project to kind of map out what we think the ideal future state would be, and how we can automate that process. And really excited about it. We're about to start testing some of those pieces, actually, I think in the next couple of days. So, the timing of the question's really good.
I think for us, institutionally, it's really helped us understand the value of things like FHIR. FHIR is not just some fancy thing that someone's going to try to tell you it's going to solve all your problems. No. It's actually how you're going to solve your really tough business problems, and your transactions that you have. I've really enjoyed the project, both from kind of a participation in sort of the larger ecosystem, doing something that's going to have an impact and have some influence across the health care industry, but I've also just loved the collaboration.
Cambia Senior Interoperability Strategist David Degandi has been really instrumental in this work. One of the first questions I asked, I said, "Is it payer or pay-or?" Because people always pronounce it differently. And even just those language things. I think of health care provider and I'm thinking of an individual person, right? When the payer side thinks of a health care provider, it's the giant box of the whole industry. It's that whole stakeholder.
So, really, just a lot of level-setting on language and processes. I think that work's been great. I think for the collab, it's definitely one of the most visible points of collaboration we're having with one of our payers, and I think is helping turn it into a real collaborative relationship. How do we build towards kind of common goals together that are most importantly good for patient care and then good for both organizations? I think it's really, really positive work and I'm really excited about it.
KA: Yeah, couldn't agree more with that. Prior to our engagement in Da Vinci, we really did not have any kind of relationships with the technology teams, not to mention the clinicians and the experts such as yourself in our provider partners, which is really insane if you think about it. Given how much interaction happens between payers and providers to make the health care system work.
When we sat down and started to look at these as single business processes, even though it may start inside a clinician's office and go to a payer, and typically even in the case of a prior authorization, there's several back and forths there. It's a conversation really. Looking at it in the end like that, did we start to make progress to be able to break it down and figure out how to make it better?
Previously, it was just kind of throw it over the wall, and then one side catches it and throw something back, and as you mentioned earlier, you do it a different way with every provider. Some of them are sending us faxes. Some of them are going over to a portal that we've provided.
Another thing, I mentioned how I hear from our provider partners in Da Vinci all the time, really two things. One is, we'd love to see that claims data, as we talked before. Three things, really. Second, help us fix prior authorization. Then, the third is, don't make me leave my EMR to do any of this. It's got to work inside my EMR, it's got to be part of the clinician's workflow, which, again, takes us back to that, reducing the provider abrasion.
The prior authorization work that we've done with OHSU, which as you mentioned, is just about to go into production. It’s really been a great opportunity for us to collaborate, not as a payer and a provider, but as two parts of what really should be one system. It’ really exciting. We're thrilled with that partnership and looking forward to extending it, not just with OHSU, but with other providers, and I know OHSU feels the same about extending this work you've done with Regence with other payers. The fact that we're doing this, using an open standard like FHIR, allows for that reusability, which is really exciting.
SK: I think that's going to be great. Once we figure out the particulars of the transaction and get the usability and all that stuff is, what is the real-world adoption roadmap look like? What's the tipping point and how do other health care providers tell the story about value of doing this til this point? Something like this clearly is going to be the standard way that everybody does it, but how do we kind of accelerate that adoption? Because I think we have the opportunity to really do that.
KA: Well, Steve, thanks so much for joining. Really enjoyed the conversation. Always enjoy connecting with you. And just really appreciate all the work that you've been doing at OHSU.
SK: Thanks so much for having me, Kirk. I've really appreciated the conversation as well and really excited about all this work. It's a great time to be in health IT, I would say. I think it's the golden era.
KA: Let's hope so.
That wraps up this episode of HealthChangers. You can find more information on all our episodes at CambiaHealth.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at @Cambia. To stream more episodes of HealthChangers, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and more. Thanks for listening.
Links and Resources
- Episode Direct Download Link
- Kirk Anderson is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Cambia Health Solutions
- Steven Kassakian is a Physician Executive and Informaticist at Humana
- HL7 International
- The DaVinci Project
- Solor Project
- Getting Health Care as Easily as Hailing a Lyft? It’s Not so Far-Fetched
- HealthChangers Podcast
- The Pulse Blog
