MDTech

Molecule Meets Electron: Pharma Goes Digital A good friend of mine, a physician, once told me “healthcare would be great, if it weren’t for the patients.” She’s a remarkable physician, well respected in her field, caring, compassionate, and clinically brilliant. There’s a reality, however, that as we go from bench to in vivo trials to full-scale clinical deployment, outcomes are more and more a confusing function of multiple factors, including the most mysterious and confusing of all . . . people! What my friend meant was that in the translation from clinical research to clinical practice, to reliably produce the best outcomes, we need a much more expansive view of what constitutes “best care,” in a way that accommodates environment , social support, behavior, habits, and the myriad factors that influence the effectiveness of a selected course of treatment. As I write this article, I am sitting on a terrace in Cambridge, overlooking the Charles River. Google is...

Improving Efficiency and Protecting Patient’s Information by Automating the Identity and Access Management Process Credentialing staff and vendors to own access to the appropriate programs in an exceedingly timely manner and defend access to those systems was imperative for Memorial healthcare System, particularly if a number of these systems provided access to personal health information (PHI). From an IT perspective, the extra criteria included time-efficiency and agility to supply access to these systems. A few years past, our provisioning method was done manually. we had to form, modify, or disable access to all accounts for workers and vendors one by one. With this setup, it could simply take an analyst up to half-hour to create all requested accounts for every user. With the shortage of standardization, there have been delays and inconsistencies once processing access requests for new staff or vendors. we tend to realized it was necessary for U.S.A. to seek out a vendor w...

Why AI is the new frontier in healthcare? As shown on the cover page of the June 2017 issue of Newsweek, Silicon Valley thinks Artificial Intelligence (AI) will cure our sick health care system . Really? As a CIO and MD scientist, I see hypes as well as hopes. AI is becoming the new frontier in healthcare. And here’s why. It is no longer the AI in the 1980s. When I read my first AI textbook in the 1980s, I was amazed by the tremendous possibilities. For instance, by knowing the fact that “Toby is a dog” and “dogs have four legs”, the computer is going to infer that Toby has four legs. However, it is very hard to engineer all human knowledge into simple facts and rules. The theoretical beauty of first-order logic from the Prolog programming language could not solve the complexities in the real world. The AI in 2017, however, is much different. The focus has shifted from knowledge engineering to machine learning. Deep learning now plays a critical role to sift through an ex...

Digital Medicine: A Skill Set that Every New Age CIO Needs to Have Two decades ago, a technological wave influenced healthcare IT, and fundamentally changed the role of CIOs. This wave — the advent of Electronic Health Records — brought with it a new paradigm, creating new CMIO positions as well as an ever-growing team of analysts, managers, directors, and VPs to help implement and support EHR systems . The expectations of CIOs rapidly evolved from the management of health information to directly supporting clinical transformation within health systems. Despite concerns related to lack of interoperability, decreasing provider productivity, and suboptimal user experience, there has been a huge investment in delivering EHR, with the $28 billion federal investment in health IT and the passing of the HITECH Act being key to incentivizing adoption. While EHR interoperability has certainly improved, it fundamentally remains a transactional, provider-centric, record keeping system d...