8 TECH OUTLOOKAUG-SEP - 2019IN MY OPINIONHow Recent Technology Developments and Transformations in Healthcare are Impacting your Business EnvironmentBy Dr. Dhrumil Shah, CMIO/CIO, Compass MedicalThe healthcare industry is at a crossroads. Changing priorities, conflicts, opportunities, advances and declines are all measures that affect the direction of healthcare and the ability to achieve success. Today's healthcare arena focuses on "value based care" over the old "fee for service" model and monitoring and managing chronic care vs. reacting to sick care. This change has occurred due to effectively deploying big information technology in order to improve our clinical, administrative, financial, and organizational performances.MACRA, MIPS, ACO, Big Data, Data Science, Business Intelligence, AI & Machine Learning, if you are familiar with these types of buzz words and acronyms you already know what I am talking about. Healthcare is in a major flux right now and a cloud of uncertainty looms above, keeping our vision obscured. There are many opportunities and challenges we face today in healthcare and I believe the leadership of our CIO's plays a crucial role in facilitating innovation, collaboration and creating new opportunities for our success ahead. A friend of mine always tells me - `We in healthcare are amongst the only industry where the introduction of technology and innovation has added an expense, instead of reducing it' - why is that? From my experiences as CIO, Healthcare is not about `Big Data and Big Solutions' but instead it is about `Small Real Problems and Big Solutions'. We live in an age of algorithms and technology evolutions beyond imagination, but we still have to manage real small clinical and business problems left unsolved in healthcare. How can we promise a better healthcare system for our future generations unless we focus on our small day to day pain points and process improvement needs?A great mentor of mine, Dr. Adrian Zai, says it better than anyone ­ "Healthcare IT innovation should always be about `Workflow, Workflow & Workflow'". As we embrace the healthcare shift to data-driven and value-based care models, one of the biggest responsibilities CIOs have is around change management. Implementing big technology into the healthcare fold has incredible advantages. Compass Medical, for example, experienced substantial organizational challenges in 2016 and 2017. We knew what we were good at and what we were not good at, but there was no science behind it. It was mostly anecdotal. As we started looking at analytics, we started creating data-driven insights around problems we knew we had to get better at. From there, Compass Medical committed itself to developing a team-based care model, along with integrating a new Electronic Medical Record (EMR) platform, to enhance both the patient and provider experience. In its simplest form, EMR technology is nothing new. To make it work better for us, Compass Medical took an
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