In recent weeks at HTN we’ve spoken with health tech leaders from across the world, to discuss innovation and new technologies, data and analytics in health and care, platforms and infrastructure, to supporting patient engagement and self-serve initiatives. Here, we share a selection of our recent international interviews.
Let’s take a look at some of the interviews we’ve published so far…
Siuwin Wang, director of business analytics and health information management at Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital, Canada
Siuwin joined us to share insights into some of the data-focused projects taking place at the hospital, his hopes for the future of data, what it means to be a leader of digital change, and more. He discussed how he developed the data analytics vision strategy for the hospital, his engagement work with staff, and the importance of tying data to clinical outcomes despite the fact that data teams are not patient-facing.
What does it mean to be a leader of digital and data change to Siuwin? “Embracing new technologies means changing,” he reflected. “Being open to this means you can always find ways to improve. It also means that change management is going to be an important focus for leaders in taking users with them on that journey, from an adoption and a utility perspective. You want technology to help people solve their day-to-day problems.”
Click here to read Siuwin’s interview in full.
Dr Zafar Chaudry, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer at Seattle Children’s Hospital
Zafar told us about his work at Seattle Children’s Hospital, a paediatric health system with 46 sites located across the states of Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, where he runs the IT service covering “everything from infrastructure to informatics, through to digital health”.
In particular, Zafar highlighted the organisation’s strategy around Google Cloud: “We built a partnership with Google to move all of our analytics stacks over, so that we would have access to the cloud, as well as the ability to burst our capacity when crunching the numbers. We now have 116 plus data sources within Google cloud, with 69 data marts within that space. Within the platform we are using compute storage, networking, big data, ETL and query, and AI machine learning.”
The results of this, according to Zafar, include “99.99 percent uptime on our analytics platform”, and reductions in the time taken for SQL server cube refreshes from “about four hours” to “less than one hour”.
Read Zafar’s interview in full.
Keltie Jamieson, chief hospital information officer for Bermuda Hospitals Board
From Keltie, we heard about Bermuda’s digital priorities at health board and national level, her insights into the digital healthcare landscape on the island, and her own career path into this space.
Keltie explained that last year, the Bermuda Hospitals Board approved the BHB Digital Health Strategy which is founded on four pillars and focuses on growth from a digital perspective, with pillar one centring around IT uplift; pillar two around digitising operations; pillar three around digital evolution; and pillar four around digital innovations and insights.
“It has been developed to support the vision and mission of the BHB strategy and it considers how we implemented a full suite of Cerner products across our hospitals last October (2022), and the need to leverage the work around that,” Keltie said. “I also see the strategy as an integrator across Bermuda – we need to think about how we can connect the dots not only across Bermuda Hospitals Board but also out into the community, emphasising a people-centred care approach.”
Keltie’s interview can be found here.
Tino Marti, digital health facilitator at the European Health Telematics Association in Brussels, Belgium
Tino joined us to discuss his work with the European Health Telematics Association, which he described as a multi-stakeholder platform aiming to encourage collaboration between digital health players across Europe, along with his previous experiences in health tech management and healthcare administration in primary care and integrated care organisations across Spain’s health sector.
Referencing the “fragmented provision sector in Catalonia”, Tino told us about the development of the Catalan E-Health Infrastructure, which aims to decouple the data from services and “form a backbone for an entire system, and different healthcare providers will have to adopt this data backbone. Decoupled this way, the service that they are providing will use a common data model. It’s a long-term project that will take four or five years to deploy, but it will change the landscape and provide the opportunity to have data consolidated centrally with all the potential for innovation and research. At the same time, innovation will spread out much faster, as once you have developed a solution the shared data model means that it can be transferred from provider to provider a lot easier.”
Inderpal Kohli, vice president and chief information officer at Englewood Hospital, New Jersey
Inderpal shared how he has amassed more than two decades of experience in driving innovations and working on enterprise information systems, working within his current role at Englewood to provide strategic direction and oversight of IT functions, advance tech infrastructure, and support the growth of the organisation.
He described some of the main digital projects that have been undertaken at Englewood Health during his time as VP and CIO, including patient engagement and self-serve opportunities, the expansion of electronic medical records, imaging solutions, and medical device technology. One of the overall goals, Inderpal said, has been to “reach out to our patients and make their interactions with our system more digital, so that they can interact with us when, where, and how they want to interact with us.”
Click here to read Inderpal’s full interview.
We’ve got plenty more interviews lined up to publish over on HTNI in the coming weeks – we’ll be sharing insights from Florida, New Zealand, Austria and more – so don’t forget to bookmark the site to keep your finger on the pulse of international health tech.
