Cognitive Computing: The Key to Scalable Health Insights
A Q&A with Greg Caressi, Senior Vice President of Healthcare & Life Sciences at Frost & Sullivan
At Next IT Healthcare, we believe that patients should be in the driver’s seat. Until the patient is in charge of his or her own care, it will be impossible to make meaningful progress on some of the biggest issues facing our healthcare system. “Patient-centric care” is a big buzzword right now, and that gives me hope. But even if we know in theory that the patient belongs at the center of our healthcare system, we still have a long road ahead of us to make that a reality.
That’s why we’re so excited to be hosting the second annual Next Edge Health Experience Summit where we will explore the patient journey — the path healthcare professionals have to pave to fully empower the patient — and how we get there.
Leading up to the summit, I’m interviewing some of the leaders and visionaries on our agenda whose ideas are impacting the healthcare world in an important way. These people are designing and building the future of the patient journey, today.
I’m excited to host a Q&A with Greg Caressi, a global leader in healthcare and life sciences at Frost & Sullivan. A frequent speaker and consultant to companies in the connected health sector, Greg brings unique perspective that we had the honor of showcasing at last year’s Next Edge Summit. This year, his colleague Venkat Rajan will join us to participate in a panel discussion on the potential transformation that cognitive technology solutions will bring to the patient journey.
What technologies today are proving to be most promising in helping patients better engage with their healthcare?
In sickcare, I think that genomic data has the most promise to offer immediate benefits to individual decision-making with regard to diagnosis and treatment. We are starting to understand and leverage that impact in oncology. I believe consumers will soon demand that genomic assessments be part of the decision-making for any provider in cancer care. We will likely see those interested in the quantified self pay out-of-pocket for sequencing, and begin to shop for providers based on the capabilities to consume and analyze this data when they are first diagnosed with cancer. Payers and providers are both interested in using genomic data in cancer care, and there are many efforts to bring these solutions into clinical use now. Within 5 years, our standard of care expectations in oncology will rapidly change based on genomics.
In health, there are context-aware sensor solutions that allow us to better measure biometric parameters and understand the environmental factors in which these measures are occurring. These solutions will add valuable data to help us reach the refined information we need to really understand and predict what’s going on with someone, and when to reach out to address risks.
How do you define cognitive technology and where in healthcare do you think it will have the greatest impact on patient care?
Cognitive technology refers to systems that are able to consume information in different formats (e.g. discrete field data, text, voice, images, and more). These systems leverage artificial intelligence to support data organization, analysis and insight, and provide outputs or analyses based on hypotheses or likelihood of success. They interact and learn from interactions with humans to confirm or deny these hypotheses, refining their outputs and improving their ability over time to make better conclusions, recommendations, and more.
Cognitive technology will have the greatest impact on interactions and insights delivered to the edge, i.e., to individual patients and to lower-skilled clinical personnel in the field. This capability will be a game changer in early interventions, cost savings in care delivery (as well as decisions that tell us we don’t need to deliver care), and more equal access to the knowledge and information on next steps needed to help themselves or others. We will be able to change the paradigm of leveraging resources to collect and consume information, and deliver health insights at scale.
What’s the one problem in the health industry that you aren’t working on but would love someone to address?
I would love to see low-cost, simple to execute diagnostics in the home. A key to better tracking, monitoring and preventive care is being able to test more cheaply and more often. There are many efforts to bring point-of-care testing into home environments. These efforts offer great promise to change a key barrier to what we can know and act on in addressing chronic disease care, and the movement toward low-cost, high-impact changes that will help us ultimately transform healthcare.
What areas are ripe for collaboration that business leaders overlook most as they build and deploy disruptive solutions for health care?
The opportunities and benefits that could come from the alignment of social care and healthcare organizations lie in addressing high-cost individuals. Many of the highest cost individuals in the healthcare system are also clients that are addressed (or should be addressed) through government and community programs in the social care system. If we had a vision and capability to share information and coordinate resources across the care continuum, from PCP to hospital to specialist to social care agencies to community programs, we could exponentially increase the impact of the dollars we invest in various organizations. They are all interacting with very high-risk, high-cost individuals that are clients of these currently separate organizations.
How can healthcare players bridge better share data across systems, hospitals, and organizations? What’s possible when we break down the data silos in healthcare?
The biggest issue we have in creating a unified patient data set on which to base analysis, action, and prevention is that we assume this data set should be created and owned within the exact systems that are the source of our problems: enterprise-based software platforms, such as EHRs. I believe this problem is not about “interoperability” as much as it is about the failure to recognize that this data set should be housed at the individual, not organizational, level.
I’m waiting to see a big IT player focus on creating a unified health data infrastructure that collects information from EHRs, claims data, wearables, etc., and organizes it for the individual. It could still be funded by a payer, or payers and others (like clinicians) could be users allowed to access the data to support delivering care and/or health recommendations and support. However they would not be seen as “owning” the data.
The truth is that you can only get this single view of the person if you go beyond the data set that any one entity owns or controls. We need someone to pull it all together at the individual level, and have it be accessible to many organizations who can deliver value to that individual from this aggregated data.
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About Greg Caressi
Greg Caressi is the Senior Vice President of the Healthcare and Life Sciences at Frost & Sullivan. He has more than 15 years of healthcare related experience covering next-generation technologies, healthcare system and solution innovation, end-user and product/feature/pricing analysis, and international expansion strategies. Additionally, his focus is applied to next-generation healthcare, with a focus on healthcare and life sciences IT — telehealth, mHealth and remote monitoring.
Additionally, Greg has more than twenty years of experience as an economist, with a focus on macroeconomics, developing economies, international trade, international marketing and export promotion. He served for two years as the Chair of the HIMSS Life Sciences Information Technology Committee and has served as a chairman and speaker at industry conferences around the world.
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Interesting in contributing to the future of the patient journey?
Join Greg Caressi and many other healthcare leaders at the Next Edge Health Experience Summit this fall in Boston to discuss real world solutions and learn ways to create engaging, inclusive and seamless experiences for patients everywhere.
Reserve your seat today at www.nextedgesummit.com. Join the conversation by following @NextEdgeSummit and using the hashtag #HXsummit.
