Walter Reed doctor on how Military Health System taps data for innovation
LAS VEGAS -- True innovation often comes from a "single personality," an outlier who sees ways to better connect with members of the community to better facilitate their health, Steve Steffensen, MD, a neurologist at Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland, said at the HIMSS16 Innovation Symposium conference Monday.
"It's sometimes due to a rebel who sees things aren't right, and needs to be better," said Steffensen. "One of my roles is to recognize that -- sometimes the senior leadership doesn't get it right."
Honing in on technology, he said, is the best means to move from a healthcare IT model to one he dubbed simply "health IT," which focuses more on outcomes.
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"We needed to understand where our gaps were," said Steffensen. "And we weren't doing a lot with data and retrieval." The military, he said, is working on ways to visualize data to make it more comprehensible to the consumer, rendering it more easily digestible and comprehensible. Numbers mean a lot to clinicians, he said; they mean less to the general public, unless it's distilled into a user-friendly form.
The emphasis on technology has been heralded by the technological revolution itself, he said, which has given consumers greater access to data and shifted the focus to the individual.
To that end, Steffensen said it is important being more involved in an individual's life, starting with their immediate network. Knowing how their friends and family impact their lives, and familiarizing themselves with the pharmacies and tertiary practices that influence them, can be crucial when it comes to personalizing care, he said.
"It starts to tell a much bigger story about the patient's health -- knowing there's a much bigger network of people around this person aside from just them and the clinician. How many of us are actually connected to that? If we're not there, then we need to be."
Steffensen's emphasis on data visualization is part of a model that seeks to convert data to wisdom, something tangible that can be used to improve results and create better relationships with the community.
