eHealth Technologies blog: Rick Travers, CTO, eHealth Technologies
Accelerating workforce development is one of the topics for National Health IT Week. There are numerous new healthcare products and services that are evolving or being created every day. As we get closer and closer to health system interoperability, the volume and complexity of data available to these new products and services will continue to expand.
All this change will drive the need for new or increased workforce skills. This will place a heavy load on existing workforce development practices.
- In the technical world – skills such as secure mobile application development, artificial intelligence/machine learning, big data, analytics, and integration will have to be enhanced or developed.
- In the clinical world – skills will need to be developed to use, analyze, and understand new types of information from multiple sources.
- I also see the need for both, the technical and clinical workforces, to help patients not only use new tools but also help them understand the data that they are looking at.
Workforce development must become a critical and core element for any business that wants to compete in this new healthcare world. Those who do not will no longer be able to keep up with the pace of change.
At eHealth Technologies we recognize this and have taken steps to address this changing landscape. Our teams:
- Support continual workforce development with both online and instructor-led courses.
- Encourage our workforce to attend healthcare and technology conferences along with other outside educational events.
These two combined approaches are getting us ready for the evolution of healthcare. We are active in helping drive interoperability by delivering outside medical records directly into with hospital system EHRs and enabling health information exchanges (HIEs) digital image exchange between connected providers.
In an effort to drive innovation and better support our customers – eHealth Technologies is always looking at ways to utilize new and emerging standards. We are well-prepared to begin using the new FHIR API standard when it becomes available in our customers’ systems. There is also considerable effort behind solving some big data issues being created by the high-density (HD) video’s and images (in DICOM) and delivering large format outside medical records into our customers’ health systems.
Getting ready for the future of where healthcare is headed is exciting because of the possibilities of improved patient care and outcomes. eHealth Technologies is prepared to embrace it, are you ready?
