“The combination of COVID-19 disruption and longer-term industry trends has left health tech innovators in a prime spot for growth, by one former Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) chief technology officer’s reckoning.”
“Ed Simcox spent plenty of time with entrepreneurs over his nearly three-year stint at the agency, largely thanks to the Startup Days initiative launched under his watch. He crossed the aisle into the private sector with his appointment as chief strategy officer at precision health and artificial intelligence startup LifeOmic in early 2020.”
“While he acknowledged that the tech side of healthcare has generally lagged that of other industries by a few years, Simcox was generally bullish about new and expanding opportunities for startups looking to close that gap.”
“Speaking in an on-stage interview at the 2021 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Global Conference in Las Vegas, he broke down the main drivers of those headwinds.”
Startups have greater access to health data than ever before
“The game changer for these startups has been the 21st Century Cures Act—specifically, its requirements that EHR vendors and other healthcare organizations provide patients with access to their data, no longer block population health opportunities and enable third-party APIs.”
“’The 21st Century Cures Act is a big deal. Don’t underestimate how big a deal it is,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen APIs take hold in other sectors very strongly, not so much yet in healthcare. 21st Century Cures is really opening the door as far as modern API technologies to be used to transfer data and compute…'”
AI and automation ease administrative burdens
“Healthcare AI has been a steady area of advancement, Simcox said. A growing number of startups are putting together these tools covering use cases ranging from FDA-regulated diagnostics to clinical decision support and workflow support.”
“The added opportunity, however, comes from the pandemic stressors piling onto practitioners.”
“’There’s a real appetite now amongst providers and individual providers as well as provider organizations to figure out how to reduce the documentation burden, the reporting burdens for quality reports and things of that nature—which would really, really help reduce clinician burnout, which has also been really exacerbated as providers have had to address issues around COVID,’ Simcox said…”
Healthcare catching up on cloud
“Simcox called out healthcare’s limited embrace of cloud technologies a particular sore spot in comparison to other industries. Within the app and API economies of these sectors, innovators and investors expect that organizations have already jumped on board and are reaping the benefits…” Read the full article here.
Source: HIMSS21: Former HHS CTO Simcox breaks down health innovation’s bright future – By Dave Muoio, August 12, 2021. Fierce Healthcare.
