Hope of a New Future in Healthcare

For 45,000 people who spent last week in Orlando, Fla, the dust is settling and the HIMSShaustion is giving way to the brightness and hope of a new future in healthcare.

Just as HIMSS was getting underway, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed policy changes supporting its MyHealthEData initiative to improve patient access and advance electronic data exchange and care coordination throughout the healthcare system.

“For far too long, electronic health information has been stuck in silos and inaccessible for healthcare consumers,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “Our proposals help break down existing barriers to important data exchange needed to empower patients by giving them access to their health data.”

These were clearly some of the most talked-about ideas of the week. Patient empowerment, consumerism, and data interoperability in support of these laudable goals. We heard about these themes in the keynotes, the panels, and the sessions — and we riffed on their potential to fundamentally change healthcare at the meetups and in the hallways and the restaurants and the hotels. The times, as Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin’.

Here at Carium, supporting and empowering patients with technology is music to our ears, and the proposed policy changes are a symphony. You could even say we’ve been humming this tune for a while, since our leadership team incorporates first-hand pro-patient policy expertise in addition to experience redesigning care delivery to better empower patients. We believe deeply in the potential of technology, supported by policy, to fundamentally change models of care delivery — with patients, family, and caregivers central to the design ethic, and the provider-patient relationship restored and enhanced for value.

Shortly before we left for Orlando, Nirav Modi (Carium’s president and co-founder) and I had the opportunity to talk about Making Data Usable to Enhance Care with Matt Fisher on his Healthcare de Jure podcast. If you weren’t at HIMSS or are still digesting everything, we hope you’ll have a listen and share your reactions and perspective with us. This healthcare transformation thing is hard work, and we can move more swiftly and effectively together.

As Nirav says in the podcast, “the data is out there — let’s focus on making it actionable for patients and their care teams.” Indeed.