This week we’re lucky to be taking part in the MEDITECH Live user conference. The event brings together MEDITECH users to hear from MEDITECH executives, connect and learn from peers, and for MEDITECH to hear from its users. We’ll be sharing a number of videos we shot with healthcare executives at the event, but here’s a run down of some of the ideas that were shared on stage at the even along with a little of our own commentary.
Would it be a healthcare IT event if we didn’t start off with some talk about AI? MEDITECH is pushing into AI as you’d expect, but from a very practical standpoint focused on the impact for good that it can have for its users. I was also intrigued by their commitment to functional transparency when and where they implement AI. A lot of healthcare organizations appreciate this type of transparency. It will be interesting to see how this takes shape at MEDITECH.
This is a nice vision of what MEDITECH is working on. You can see a very practical approach to make a meaningful impact on the organizations that use their systems.
This has become a pretty common theme at conferences lately. No one needs more data and data movement doesn’t solve problems. Turning the data we have or that we can get into something impactful is what everyone really wants to see from a solution.
One of the big topics of the conference was around interoperability and the efforts MEDITECH has put into their Traverse Exchange product. Mike did a great job describing the impact of their interoperability tools for healthcare organizations. We did a video on this topic with a MEDITECH user which dives into it a lot more, so watch for that interview coming soon.
When I first got into healthcare, I thought how cool it would be if something I worked on saved someone’s life. The reality of the work we do in healthcare is it literally does impact people’s lives. This story from Dr. Frase was a really great example of how health data sharing and good health IT can have that kind of impact. Gives you chills to just think about how it impacted a patient for good.
MEDITECH always does a nice job bringing in keynote speakers that inpsire you and expand your thinking. This year it was a former UFC fighter, Justin Wren, who found his purposes serving the “forgotten” people in Africa by building wells for safe drinking water and even a clinic.
His story also included being bullied and treated poorly as a kid, a battle with addiction and suicide, and finding his mission and purpose in life. The above story was some wrestling mentors that helped him find belief in himself and transforming his life.
The story was powerful to hear and made me wonder how else we could do that in healthcare IT. I think we’ve all bumped into people who didn’t have a lot of self belief. Encouraging them and helping them see their potential is a powerful thing that changes their lives and yours. In some ways it reminded me of MEDITECH’s policy to promote from within. They often see the potential in someone well before they do and they invest in them to reach that potential.
When Justin shared his views on leadship, he really expanded the idea of a leader. This included this large giant of a man learning from a frail, blind, small African lady. I do love how he shared that real leaders don’t just talk. They go and do.
I was intrigued on if real leaders “know the way” since there’s a lot of challenges in healthcare IT where we don’t know the way. A new AI solution may require a lot of new knowledge. However, knowing the way doesn’t necessarily mean knowing everything. You can know the process of how innovation happens at your organization. You can know the process for testing if a solution is secure. You can know the process of getting buy in at your organization. Those are all examples of great leadership knowing and showing the way.
I think about this a lot in the context of luck. There have been a lot of studies that show that the “luckiest” people are often the people who work the hardest. By working hard, they put themselves in a position to be lucky.
Obviously, that’s the story of Healthcare IT Today. I grinded for 5 years working on SEO and building the site. Then, I got “lucky” that the government gave $36 billion of stimulus money for EMR software. Of course, if I hadn’t done the hard work for 5 years, I wouldn’t have been a position to get lucky.
Also, are we brave enough to say yes when the opportunity arises?
This was a powerful idea. Far too often we tell ourselves we can’t do something. We may want to ask ourselves…why not us?
This was a powerful Swahili proverb and appropriate in a room full of many rural health and critical access hospital executives. I’ve heard from many of these leaders how they’re a “small” organization. However, in the same breathe they’ll tell me how impactful what they’re doing is for their community.
Shifting to some of the insights I heard at a few of the sessions I was able to attend, shadow IT and shadow AI is becoming a big topic at organizations. The reminder that these shadow efforts are actually an important demand signal from your organization. You shouldn’t ignore this or be punitive with people who decided to implement shadow AI. Instead, you should embrace the fact that they have a problem and they want a solution for that problem.
Halamka was right on resistance to AI. I see something very similar. When AI is done thoughtfully, it’s largely embraced by the people in your organization. In most cases, it’s replcaing the work we as humans don’t want to do anyway.
This is a topic we’ve been writing about here at Healthcare IT Today for over 15 years. Doctors are incredible humans with incredible knowledge. It’s amazing they do as well as they do. However, the body of medical knowledge and the vast amount of patient clinical data that’s available today is too much for any human to process. We’re going to have to partner with good AI and technology to be able to sort through it all. I think it will eventually become medical malpractice not to do this.
This is a classic quote and something I see happen a lot in health IT. Fix the process and then apply the technology.
That said, I know we had to implement the EHR for people to see how bad the process was. Then, they were begging us to redesign the process to match what the technology can do. So, there can be different approaches to getting to the right process.
Those were a few of the insights and perspectives I heard at MEDITECH Live. I’d love to hear what else people heard since I missed a lot of great sessions when I was busy doing videos. Thanks to MEDITECH for hosting us at the event.
