Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., is urging healthcare leaders to use healthcare information technology to improve the efficiency and quality of care and to support future innovations in prevention, wellness and personalized medicine.
Speaking at the Health Evolution Partners Leadership Summit, Dell urged healthcare organizations to expedite adoption of electronic medical records and cloud computing to create new information-driven efficiency and care advantages. A key benefit of technology like EMRs, he said, is the correlation between higher-quality information and higher-quality care.
Health Evolution Partners, founded by David Brailer, MD, the nation’s first healthcare information technology coordinator, invests in rapidly growing companies that are commercial leaders in the healthcare industry.
At the summit, Dell put fourth four ways executives could put health IT to work:
- Unlock information – Enhanced digitization and the management and sharing of patient information will help eliminate information silos between patients, providers and payers.
- Empower caregivers – Dell said IT implemented at the point of care could empower caregivers and enhance their productivity, a growing issue as the United States faces physician and nursing shortages and increasing aging and chronically ill populations. Point-of-care solutions such as mobile clinical computing, which enable clinicians to securely access patient EMR information from any device, are saving clinicians several hours per week to help hospitals reclaim thousands of hours for patient care each year.
- Improve business and Technology Infrastructure – Updated processes combined with the right technologies can also improve the business of healthcare to help hospitals reclaim time and money in a challenging economy. Dell said his company has helped hospitals recover $15 billion through revenue-cycle process and technology improvements over the past seven years. One hospital with a large percentage of public-pay patients reduced unbilled claims by 30 percent and increased its cash flow by $8 million a month by improving revenue cycle processes, he said.
- Use information for innovation – With an effective strategy in place to manage the dramatic increase of digital data generated by EMRs, imaging and genomic research, healthcare leaders can tap data for intelligence that will lead to major innovations in healthcare and create new opportunities for the industry.
Dell discussed how EMR data would help pharmaceutical companies develop targeted treatments for patients who do not respond to conventional drugs. And the integration of genome information with EMRs will enable physicians to develop lifetime wellness plans for patients with genetic predispositions to specific diseases or health conditions, he said. More targeted therapies and lifetime wellness plans will maximize the billions of dollars invested annually in research and create new opportunities for the industry globally.
“Digitizing patient information and making it available in a secure and convenient way across our healthcare system are among the best opportunities we have to improve U.S. healthcare and create a better system for future generations of Americans.”
