With the rapid pace of change in technology today, it’s refreshing to hear the impacts that tech is having in the healthcare space. Technology really came to the forefront during the pandemic and was an enabler for truly remarkable experiences with patients and medical professionals.
In this special “Back @ IT” episode, I’m joined by Paul Swider, Chief Philanthropy Officer for RealActivity and Directory of Philanthropy for the Boston Healthcare Technology Group. We dive into all aspects of healthcare technology from early days and the tech foundations to AI-driven chatbots to the patient experience journey.
00:00: Show highlights – telehealth visits to cutting-edge AI-assisted remote capabilities, and more.
02:03: Introductions with Paul Swider – a 25-year veteran in the tech space. Preparing for Y2K back in the day.
03:03: Brief history of what Y2K was and the fear of what would happen.
05:09: Background on RealActivity that founded in conjunction with the Dartmouth Medical Center to build mission-critical solutions for healthcare.
06:09 Building the foundations of a patient journey leveraging technology as a precursor to today’s machine learning models. This leads to patient experience during their hospital stay and afterward.
07:34: Epic Systems acquires the solutions that Paul developed to roll that into their solutions. Epic extended their patient portal by leveraging the Microsoft stack.
09:23: The growth of the digital tech market for healthcare is expected to reach about $640 billion by 2026.
10:48: How technology is helping healthcare solve critical issues such as bringing down costs, and the changing landscape of how hospitals and doctors are paid and incentivized.
13:42: The expectations of experiences that people have with technology and healthcare that is powered by vast amounts of data.
14:18: The impacts of the pandemic in healthcare technology caused things to speed up in a massive.
15:11: How bots (chatbots) helped people gain access to care and answers they needed regarding their health.
16:00: Technical transformations and people’s expectations are feeding into this concept of the “Acceleration Economy”. Since 2016, investments increased over 300% to reach a total investment of $1.36 billion to date.
17:30: Back to bots… and how many are powered by Microsoft’s Azure Health Bot. Paul covers the background of this bot and how it’s being utilized to solve various issues.
19:38: Data accuracy is key to how the bots are leveraged and expectations that are delivered to patients to curate the experiences.
21:25: Industry clouds are providing a quicker path to implementation by having pre-built tailored solutions. Paul provides his insights into the Microsoft Healthcare Industry Cloud and the industry cloud standards.
25:30: Breaking down other players in the healthcare industry cloud space such as Google (https://health.google/) and IBM (https://www.ibm.com/cloud/healthcare).
28:15: How leading tech companies are building tech standards and collaborating with each other to drive impact in many areas such as humanitarian efforts.
29:50: The wrap-up…Technology can help bring out the humanness of people to truly make a real change.
Sources:
- Boston Healthcare Technology User Group: https://www.meetup.com/healthcare-tech-community/
- Paul Swider Blog: www.paulswider.com/
- Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/health/microsoft-cloud-for-healthcare
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/health-bot/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/bot-services/health-bot/
- IBM Watson Health: https://www.ibm.com/watson-health/learn/healthcare-technology
- Google Cloud for Healthcare: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/healthcare-life-sciences
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