Our February meeting of Health TechNet was held on Friday, February 21 from noon to 2 pm at Nelson Mullins’ offices in Washington, D.C. It focused on health systems’ use of data for performance improvement, in collaboration with large data companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
The program was arranged, and moderated, by Dr. Richard Singerman of TrustNet MD and Johns Hopkins. Our primary speakers were David Branch, VP Performance Improvement at Medstar Health, and Matt D'Agostino, Sr. Performance Improvement Manager at MedStar Health, who spoke on this topic. After touching on key themes on this timely topic, David and Matt dove into representative examples of how Medstar is leveraging data for performance improvement today, what it envisions for leveraging data in the future, and how technology provider companies play a key role in these initiatives.
In light of how large technology companies have been using data, there has been additional public scrutiny of how this trend is playing out for healthcare delivery systems. From the Mayo Clinic to Providence Health to Ascension Health, there are major efforts underway for the leveraging of patient data to increase heathcare quality and reduce costs. However, these health system initiatives often rely on large technology companies being the aggregators of the health information of millions of patients. The potential for improving healthcare quality is great. But the privacy concerns over access to this data, how it will be used, and whether or not the data is identifiable at the patient level (once the data resides with a particular technology company) is of great concern as well, not only in the public at large but among legislators and regulators at the state and federal levels.