Key to information sharing? Giving patients ownership of their data

Cletis Earle, CHCIO, VP, CIO Penn State
Health  Image courtesy – Penn State Health

When Cletis Earle, CHCIO, stepped into his new role at Penn State University as senior vice president and chief information officer he was hit with the major disruption in plans with the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of implementing information technology (IT) initiatives across Penn State Health and Penn State College of Medicine, Earle led his team of professionals in developing an agile fast response to the challenging IT needs of the institutions caused by the pandemic. Previously Earle had served as VP and CIO for Kaleida Health and St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh/Cornwall, NY. He began his healthcare IT career as a support manager at Brooklyn Queens Health Care Inc. in Brooklyn, NY, eventually taking on roles as director of technology and vice president and chief information officer and privacy officer within the organization. Earle is a member and former chairman of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and is a frequent speaker at healthcare IT conferences. He also serves as an ambassador on the HIMSS Global Health Equity Network Advisory Task Force. PARCA eNews spoke to Mr. Earle by phone to get his perspectives on future directions healthcare information technology.

Registration for now open for RSNA 21

Annual Meeting Nov. 28-Dec. 2

PARCA eNews – Sept. 21, 2021 – The 107th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting for the Radiological Society of North America is set to kick off Nov.28 at the massive McCormick Place convention center in Chicago, IL. 

The in-person conference will continue through Dec. 2, while online attendees will have until April 30, 2022 to view any and all of the meeting programs.

Unlike years past, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed things a bit. All attendees will be required to show proof of vaccination and wear a mask for all exhibition space and meeting rooms. 

Big conferences learning to live with pandemic restrictions forge ahead

HIMSS 21 drew more than 17,000 despite pandemic

PARCA eNews – Sept. 12, 2021 – Kudos to HIMSS for taking the risk of holding one of the largest in-person medical conferences amid what looked like at the time, a waning pandemic.

Held Aug. 9-13 in Las Vegas, it looked to have been perfectly timed. Cases and deaths from COVID-19 had plummeted from the peaks of November and December 2020, vaccinations had surged and people had begun to think we might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Providers planning for permanent deployment of telemedicine

PARCA eNews – Sept. 2, 2021 – As the pandemic grinds on the use of telemedicine is emerging as a mainstay for healthcare delivery among many providers and patients. Health systems are beginning to incorporate it into planning beyond the emergency implementations spurred by the pandemic.

A group of Stanford Department of Medicine researchers looked into their own institution’s implementation of telemedicine and published their findings in the Aug. 30, 2021 Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Cloud computing and AI are key to healthier communities

Image posted on LinkedIn

PARCA eNews – Aug. 23, 2021 – Interoperability, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are keys to improving patient outcomes and providing the preventative healthcare that will increase efficiency and lower healthcare costs in the future, according to Phoebe Yang, general manager for nonprofit healthcare at Amazon Web Services.

In an interview in Healthcare IT News, Yang said that interoperability and AI/machine learning can help physicians predict health issues for individuals and across populations, and cloud computing combined with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is playing a driving role in data interoperability by helping de-identifying patient data to allow large-scale analysis while upholding privacy.

Publicly available AI algorithm proves useful for spotting actionable radiology findings

PARCA eNews – Sept. 12, 2021 – A publicly available artificial intelligence algorithm for detecting and flagging "actionable" radiology reports proved superior to three other methods for distinguishing actionable from non-actionable reports.

The study by researchers let by Yuta Nakamura at the University of Tokyo appears in the Sept. 11 journal, BMC Medical informatics and Decision Making. The goal is to use AI to more rapidly detect and refer radiological findings to clinicians.

AI may be highly useful for cutting turnaround times for abnormal chest x-rays

Image credit – nature Scientific Reports

PARCA eNews – Sept. 12, 2021 – In a study of artificial intelligence capability to distinguish normal from abnormal x-rays, researchers were able to show that AI reduced the turnaround time and prioritize abnormal x-rays by as much as 28 percent. In other words, when asked to flag suspicious x-ray results for the radiologist to review, AI was able to do it faster.

The AI study by researchers at Google Health took a different approach than most AI algorithms studies. Instead of training the algorithm to spot specific diseases, such as breast or lung cancer, the Google investigators tapped six international data sets from x-ray studies in India, China and United States using a total of 248,445 de-identified patient x-rays to simply distinguish normal from abnormal findings.

FDA ok’s SpinTech’s STAGE platform for rapid brain imaging

PARCA eNews – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given 510(k) clearance to SpinTechMRI’s latest magnetic resonance imaging software device, STAGE (STrategically Acquired Gradient Echo), a post-processing software platform.

The software enables comprehensive, quantitative brain imaging with enhanced visualization in significantly less time than conventional MRI. STAGE allows MRI techs to acquire 16 brain imaging contrasts, including 10 enhanced contrast qualitative outputs and 6 quantitative outputs in just 5 minutes, according to a SpinTechMRI press release.

Google launches healthcare data engine to boost interoperability

PARCA eNews – July 22, 2021 – Google Cloud launched and extension of its healthcare data services offering with a private preview of its Healthcare Data Engine to power an end-to-end solution for healthcare organizations.

In a press release, the company says its data engine builds on and extends the core capabilities of the Google Cloud Healthcare API.

Healthcare data breaches continue unabated

PARCA eNews – Aug. 23, 2021 – The US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights data shows that healthcare data breaches involving more than 500 records continues on an average rate of two per day.

The OCR is currently investigating over 830 such breaches dating back to September 2019.

Over this past summer millions of patient records have been compromised with the highest numbers of breached records reported by Forefront Dermatology, S.C. (2.4 million), St. Joseph’s/Candlier Health System in Georgia (1.4 million), University Medical Center Southern Nevada (1.3 million) and UF Health Central Florida (700,981).