Day Two of Healthcare Business Intelligence Forum: Show Me More Workflow

By chuckwebster | Published: April 17, 2014

I’m back for day two of the Healthcare Business Intelligence Forum in Washington DC! Here’s my report from Day One. I’m looking for even more workflow tech, and I find it.

Below is the venue, from the view of the stage, about a half hour before festivities begin.

Fantastic presentation by Glenn Steele MD of Geisinger Health.

Refer to the following tweeted link for an overview.

What I want to focus on is the idea that healthcare value and cost are not necessarily positively correlated. In fact, the opposite is true. The great thing about this is that it brings physicians on board relative to reducing cost as a path to increase value to patients.

So, how is it possible to reduce cost to increase value? Value Reengineering and then scaling and generalizing.

So, where’s the workflow tech? It’s under the hood. In fact, I happen to have a slide from a presentation given by the CIO (I believe) from Geisinger Health two years ago a National Library of Medicine. (It was sitting in a draft blog post I didn’t finish).

For me, the two best presentations were this one from Glenn Steele, MD and from Ray Hess yesterday. In both cases, the results of applying business intelligence to healthcare workflows were remarkable. And in both cases I happen to know they’re workflow automation, AKA BPM (Business Process Management) under the hood!

I enjoyed this presentation about the need to decrease healthcare data Semantic Incongruity — especially since it was an excuse to tweet a link to my From Syntactic & Semantic To Pragmatic Interoperability In Healthcare. My general point is basically that workflow tech can compensate for problems at the syntactic (transport) and semantic (meaning) layers. Workflow, or pragmatic, interoperability is the degree to which actual effect of a message matches its intended effect.

Issues regarding cost accounting systems have came up frequently. And here it is again. Activity-based costing is a form of micro-costing that can more accurately assign costs to specific healthcare workflows, such as an appendectomy. For a variety of technical reasons I won’t go in here (except to note I’m the only premed-accy major I’ve ever heard of) there’s a really great fit between ABC and workflow tech. In fact, I’d go as far as to say ABC won’t be practical without workflow tech. But that’s another blog post.

Now, finally, back to a bit of humor. Gus Venditto, emceeing the Healthcare BI Forum, mentioned me as a “Twitter Celebrity” so I just had to capture the moment using Google Glass. I grabbed 9 seconds and uploaded it on the spot.

This year’s Healthcare Business Intelligence Forum was a great conference!

I’ll be back!

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