Our staff polled clinicians on today’s most innovative care team communications solutions to determine which product/service line yields the most effective results from their day-to-day use. We asked about alert integration, secure messaging, cross platform support, enterprise-wide directories, ease of use, analytics and reporting tools and cost. We surveyed 19 separate solutions. Below are the top 10 HIT Leaders for 2018.

1.  @Telmediq
2.  @DocHaloApp
3.  @VoceraComm
4.  @PatientSafeSoln
5.  @spoktweets
6.  @Imprivata
7.  @TigerConnect
8. 
9.  @PerfectServe
10.  @Cerner

John Kravitz, MHA, CHCIO, Geisinger Health

Few healthcare systems have the rich history and scope of reach as Geisinger Health. To learn more about the organization’s mission and its goals for the future, we spoke with John Kravitz, MHA, CHCIO.

Some of the subjects we discussed included:

• his career path leading up to his ascension to his new role at Geisinger Health;
• the vision of the organization’s new leadership;
• the function and power of implementing an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL);
• the need for thorough patient education and the use of analytics to identify gaps in patient education;
• his view of interoperability within Meaningful Use;
• the Keystone Health Information Exchange (KeyHIE);
• xG Health Solutions and
• what he sees as the next big thing in healthcare.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Christina Fortner Slade, Vice President, Product Management, Greenway Health

In my previous interviews with Robin Hackney, Chief Marketing Officer, and Tina Graham, Senior Vice President, Revenue Services, Scott Fannin, Vice President of Product Management and Rob Newman, Vice President of Interoperability Services, we learned about Greenway Health’s (HIMSS’16 booth #4043) recent re-branding campaign and its first new mission pillar: serve. 

For the final feature of the “Voices of Greenway Health series, we spoke with Christina Fortner Slade, Vice President, Product Management, Greenway Health. 

Some of the topics she discussed include:

• Greenway Health’s maturation as a company;
• the evolution of population health in healthcare and Greenway’s plans to lead the field;
• the spread of consumer health information and telehealth;
• the effects of patient generational differences within healthcare decision making; and
• the goal of Greenway Health to create a unified patient experience.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Bob Rossi, Vice President, Healthcare Sales, CDW Healthcare

As part of our “Countdown to HIMSS’16” series, we spoke with Bob Rossi, Vice President, Healthcare Sales, CDW Healthcare. We contacted him to get better insights into his organization’s innovative work regarding patient engagement. In particular, we hoped to learn more about CDW Healthcare’s Patient Engagement Perspectives Study. (If you are attending HIMSS’16, you can visit booth #3606 on Wednesday, March 2nd from 2:00pm – 3:00 pm and speak with C-suite executives focused on improving patient engagement.)

Some of the topics we discussed during our conversation included:

• how patient engagement has evolved over the years in healthcare; 
• the findings of CDW Healthcare’s Patient Engagement Perspectives Study;
• the need to educate patients with weaker technology skills so that they may truly benefit from IT solutions such as patient portals; and 
• the impacts patient accountability and wearable will have upon patient engagement strategies in the future.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

In my previous interviews with Robin Hackney, Chief Marketing Officer, and Tina Graham, Senior Vice President, Revenue Services, we learned about Greenway Health’s (HIMSS’16 booth #4043) recent re-branding campaign and its first new mission pillar: serve. 

For the third part of this “Voices of Greenway Health” series, we spoke with Scott Fannin, Vice President of Product Management and Rob Newman, Vice President of Interoperability Services. Our conversation centered upon the topic of interoperability, however, the core of our talk was Greenway Health’s second mission pillar: connect. 

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

As we literally take a break from packing our bags for our upcoming trip to Las Vegas to attend HIMSS’16, we thought we would share with you some recent conversations we’ve had with healthcare IT veterans who are also making the annual pilgrimage to our industry’s largest conference and exhibition.

We will share each individual’s interview in its entirety after we return from Nevada, but we wanted to offer the personal perspectives each healthcare IT has relative to HIMSS before you go to the show. 

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of these interviews, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Jason Stanaland, Mobility Solutions Consultant, Spok

While documented resources will always account for a significant part of the information flow in healthcare, growing evidence indicates that information requests by clinicians will be met more often by their colleagues via mobile synchronous and asynchronous communications. 

As part of our “Countdown to HIMSS’16” series, we spoke with Jason Stanaland, Mobility Solutions Consultant, Spok (HIMSS’16 booth #4829). He described Spok’s approach to establishing effective clinical communication systems and how the company’s experience across multiple vertical markets provides special insights that are particularly important in healthcare.

Some of the subjects we discussed included:

• the historical and contemporary challenges surrounding clinical communications;
• the need to secure communications for both the organization and the end user;
• how communication gaps between patients/consumers and providers/marketplace are eroding;
• the potential of Big Data’s impacts on the future of clinical communications.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Andy Aroditis, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, NextGate

Few things are as simultaneously fascinating and disturbing as going onto a social media application such as Facebook or LinkedIn and seeing it present a suggested list of potential connections. It can be disconcerting to think that a bunch of algorithms could so accurately predict that out of billions of users these are actually people you might consider a friend. Or that because you liked “Whiplash” you might be interested in these other videos that other fans of that movie enjoyed.

Yet the same core social media technology that seems to understand the most intimate details about your childhood, current relationships and other interests holds great promise for transforming healthcare by finally showing how all the data are related. 

It’s called the graph database. Designed specifically to interpret relationships between different sets of data, the graph database is the foundational technology that allows social media applications, as well as companies such as Amazon, to build sophisticated social networks around each account owner. For instance, it’s what enables us to look at our friends’ friends and navigate through their interests and connections.

Chuni (Ginny) Kwong, MD, Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer, Halifax Health

In a previous set of interviews with Jim O’Brien, MD, MSc, Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety, Ohio Health Riverside Methodist Hospital and Stephen Claypool, MD, Medical Director, POC Advisor, Wolters Kluwer, we learned about the ravages of sepsis and how POC Advisor’s electronic surveillance and alerts assist in sepsis detection.  

To continue our “Countdown to HIMSS’16” series, I contacted Ginny Kwong, MD, Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer, Halifax Health. Dr. Kwong and her organization just recently partnered with Wolters Kluwer (HIMSS’16 booth #5537) to implement POC Advisor in 2016. 

When we spoke, some of the topics she outlined included:

• how healthcare has approached sepsis in the past;
• the inherent difficulties of accurately detecting sepsis;
• her philosophy for working effectively with vendors;
• the steps Halifax Health took in selecting Wolters Kluwer as a partner to address sepsis and
• her organization’s projected goals for POC Advisor.

(Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series. We will publish the progress of Halifax Health’s efforts utilizing POC Advisor to address sepsis later in the year. To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Mark W. Stevens, Contributing Editor

If John McDaniel appears tired, please forgive him. He’s also behind on returning his e-mails (and don’t even mention the projects piling up at home). John’s life is emblematic of the stretched-thin state many health IT executives find themselves in today – and there doesn’t appear to be any let-up for these busy folks anytime soon. John is Vice President of the HCI Group (HIMSS’16 booth #6832), a global leader in strategic advisory services and EMR implementation, training and support, and he and HCI are riding a wave of worldwide health IT innovation and expansion that has yet to crest.

Surge in domestic health IT growth

In a study recently released by HIMSS Analytics, 18 health technologies poised for significant growth were examined (Health IT News, August 25, 2015). “By now, everyone’s got an EMR. And most providers are also making use of ancillary technologies to help harness patient data toward more efficient care and better outcomes. But many species of health IT are still surprisingly underused in the U.S. hospital market”, says Matt Schuchardt, Director of Market Intelligence Solutions Sales at HIMSS Analytics. “While the EMR market itself is pretty saturated, and usage has really improved since the HITECH Act, the challenge for hospitals and health systems is, now that you have all this data, what do you do with it?” The technologies HIMSS analytics identified, data warehousing alone is poised to achieve an eye-popping 500 percent growth in the coming year in the United States. Explaining the drivers behind such growth, Schuchardt reminded readers that an EMR is a series of components, “with a clinical data repository being the hub of that spoke”. But in its most basic form that only means the data inside that system – “it’s not all of the external data that’s available – pay data, etc. You need all of that to really start doing BI.” That’s a massive amount of data that needs a place to live and a means with which to be fed into clinical and business intelligence platforms. And that’s saying nothing of all the new data sources [such as remote monitoring devices] emerging onto the scene.