The chief scientific officer at Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA, born and raised in Nigeria, has seen the dire consequences of inequalities in women's healthcare play out before her eyes. For example, 20 years ago in Nigeria her young cousin, Georgina, died from undiagnosed uterine cancer.
Growing up observing a Nigerian culture where women and men were not treated equally, Garner developed a lifetime mission to swing the pendulum to a more balanced position in women’s health--not only in Nigeria, but around the world.
"I often speak about having close relatives in Nigeria who are literally dying from conditions that women just shouldn't be dying from anymore," she says. "While there has been progress made in some areas of women's health, as long as there are women dying from conditions as common as pregnancy, I feel like we've made virtually no progress."
Elizabeth Garner, chief scientific officer at Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA. Photo courtesy Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA.
In the US, for example, the maternal mortality rate is increasing, not decreasing.
"As far as its rates of maternal mortality, the US is looking very much like a developing nation," Garner says. Worse yet, Black women are approximately three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause compared to white women. There are many causes for this, including lack of access, distrust of the healthcare system, and ongoing racism.
Among the health challenges faced in maternal care is the threat of preeclampsia, which occurs when new blood vessels developing in the placenta don't work properly, leading to high or erratic blood pressure for the mother. The condition is commonly treated with magnesium.
"Preeclampsia is a major cause of death during and after pregnancy in this country," Garner says. "And we still treat that condition with intravenous magnesium. How is that possible in 2023?"
Breaking Down the Challenges in Women's Healthcare
Garner says more research is needed to identify and understand the threats to women's health, including conditions that happen only with women.
"We need desperately to just understand the science of women's health," she says. "Even as women, we don't understand most of what happens to us. Without the science, how do you develop the medicines to address these conditions?"
But more research also creates a need for more investment in developing treatments for women's health conditions.
"In women's health the industry has underinvested for so many years," says Garner. "In 2020, only 1% of the R&D spend of $200 billion went to conditions that solely affect women."
Recently, while speaking before an audience of investors, Garner asked how many had invested in women's health.
"There was nobody in that room who had invested in women's health, and incidentally there were only about four women in the audience," she says.
There is a perception in the industry that there is no profit in women's health, but Garner says that's a wrong assumption.
"There are huge opportunities to make money and we need to get the business case out there so investors will figure that out," she says.
Another factor is that women may be hesitant to talk openly about their health. Women as patients need to shoulder some of the responsibility for their healthcare, Garner says, meaning they need to speak out about uncomfortable topics and clearly outline symptoms for their physicians no matter how embarrassing it may feel.
"It's time women moved beyond the stigma of women's health conditions and speak honestly and descriptively to their practitioners," she says. "This is a global issue. The US has the same issues around stigmatization of women's conditions as in Nigeria. I firmly believe that the fact that historically women have not been comfortable talking about all their issues is a big reason why there hasn't been the attention paid to women's health needs."
Garner says she is motivated to create ways to reduce the stigma so that patients will open up more about their conditions, allowing physicians to learn how to address those issues. She says programs like Fertility Out Loud and Safe Birth are helping to increase this awareness.
Ferring partners with advocacy organizations, such as Resolve, to increase education as well as government organizations to increase access.
"For me, it's all about access and making everything available, no matter where or who you are," she says.
Another factor that will help improve women's healthcare, according to Garner, is putting more women in the top seats.
"The more women in leadership roles, the more we'll see a true investment in women's health, because women understand there is absolutely money in the space, and a need, because we are willing to spend the money to improve our health," she says.
Calculated Risks on a Career That Resonates
With 30 years of experience in reproductive medicine and maternal health, Garner is using her passion and her professional skills to move the needle on improving women's health globally. Her goals include becoming the CEO of a women’s healthcare company.
Prior to joining Ferring in 2022, she held chief medical officer roles for ObsEva and Agile Therapeutics, both women’s healthcare companies. At Agile, she led the Phase 3 clinical development of Twirla, a low-dose contraceptive patch. In 2010, at Merck Research Laboratories, she was instrumental in obtaining FDA approval for Gardasil, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.
Taking calculated risks has been her MO from the beginning of her career, when she switched to OB GYN practice during her residency. She then jumped from clinical practice to industry, which at that time was an unheard-of career move.
"I definitely got a lot of pushback," she says. "But I wanted to have more impact on patients than I could by caring for one at a time. It was certainly worth that risk."
As a leader Garner gets a boost from showing others how to take calculated risks and stretch themselves in their job.
"What I enjoy the most is working with teams, and growing people, and allowing them to shine," she says. "That aspect of drawing people out and showing them what they can do is one of the things I like best about being a leader. "
The New Jersey-based mom of three takes her downtime seriously and enjoys spending it at home with her family.
"I'm a family person. I have three children, two sons and a daughter, all born in July," she says. Her oldest recently got married, and her youngest lives with autism.
"I love the opportunity on the weekends to just literally be home, just sitting with my son," she says.
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The Virginia hospital will use an analytics platform integrated with its EHR to track patient feeding metrics, identify pain points, and offer best practices to improve staff workflows and clinical outcomes.
A children's hospital in Virginia is integrating digital health technology into its neonatal intensive care unit to improve care management for preterm babies and infants with acute medical conditions.
The partnership between Roanoke-based Carilion Children's Hospital and Astarte Medical will enable NICU staff to access the latter's NICUtrition platform, which analyzes patient feeding practices and outcomes to identify feeding protocol effectiveness, patient risk factors, and best practices that can positively impact patient outcomes.
The technology, which will be integrated with the hospital Epic electronic health record platform, is critical to a 60-bed hospital that typically operates at or close to capacity.
NICUtrition "is able to reflect both longitudinal and real-time patient feeding and growth metrics that help our care teams make evidence-based decisions," Dena Goldberg, PhD, RDN, a clinical dietitian and neonatal specialist at Carilion Children's Hospital, said in an e-mail to HealthLeaders. "Because the platform streamlines data-gathering, we no longer have to collect nutrition and growth outcome data by hand and then use statistical software to analyze it. It's not replacing any jobs but augmenting our teams and reducing the burden placed on resources."
The fast-paced, stressful environment of an NICU often puts high demands on staff who are monitoring frail babies and tracking key vital signs and metrics every hour, if not more often. Digital health tools that can accessed through the EHR can help with that data gathering and analysis, offering crucial clinical decision support when and where needed.
Goldberg said the technology will be evaluated over the next 3-6 months to see how it affects daily workflows as well as clinical outcomes. That research may be used to help expand the platform to other areas of pediatric care, including cardiac care and cerebral palsy.
A survey of more than 200 healthcare executives by IDC and Redox finds that despite the tough economy, health systems will be spending more on technology like AI and RPM to address workforce issues and improve clinical care pathways.
The push to stay on top of the digital health landscape is prompting healthcare organizations to increase their technology investment in the coming year. And they're very interested in automation and remote patient monitoring solutions.
That's the takeaway from a new survey from Redox and global tech advisory firm IDC, which analyzed the insights of some 205 IT executives at US-based health systems. Of that sampling, 88% said they plan to increase their third-party technological investments in 2023-24.
While the results of the survey might be surprising considering many health systems are struggling to stay in the black during an uncertain economy, the emphasis on technology investment isn't. Recent events like the American Telemedicine Association conference, HLTH, HIMSS, and ViVE have all been dominated by discussions on using technology to improve back-end processes and clinical care pathways and address workforce shortages, stress and burnout.
According to the survey, more than half of healthcare IT executives see digital transformation as the most important goal for their organization, with 35% citing cost reduction and 31% picking either improving quality of care or improving patient safety as critical goals. Another 30% selected using data as a strategic asset.
Those priorities are intersecting with two trends in healthcare: The development of AI and the shift of services from the hospital to the home.
According to the survey, almost 70% of healthcare executives see telemedicine and other virtual care solutions as playing a key role in addressing staff shortages, still the biggest pain point facing health systems. More than 60% say RPM programs will be critical, and just over 40% see increased value in automated appointment scheduling tools.
Additionally, 43% said they have RPM programs in place now or are making additional investments, and 55% said their using the platform to manage patients with chronic conditions or to trigger real-time clinical interventions, while 45% plan to use RPM to enable earlier discharge of high-risk or frail patients. Some 77% of those surveyed said they'll have between five and 20 RPM programs by 2024, and amny said they'll be expanding to cover behavioral health treatment as well.
Just as important, if not more so, is the use of automation to gather and analyze healthcare data coming into the enterprise. Almost 50% of those surveyed say automation will be a key benefit when deploying new technology, while 43% cite reduced costs, 40% cite data reliability, and 39% list data availability. Another 31% point to organizational agility as a top benefit, hinting at the growing issue of competition in the healthcare space.
On the flip side, integration and interoperability are still key challenges in getting all that new technology to work. Some 40% of healthcare executives surveyed cited integration and middleware as their biggest IT headaches, coming just ahead of privacy, security, and data protection.
“Delivering health data that’s complete, accurate, and standardized at the point of care makes it possible for providers to offer the personalized care that consumers want,” Redox CEO Luke Bonney said in an accompanying press release. “But before that can happen, the data must be usable; clinicians, as users, must be able to customize their data experience, accessing only the data they want, when and where they need it.”
As far as multimodal strategies go, roughly half of those surveyed see mobile applications as the most beneficial digital patient engagement platform, while a third also call it the most challenging to use and deploy.
Finally, healthcare leaders say in-person trade events, which have been on the rebound since the end of the pandemic, are their most influential source of information on new technologies. Some 30% selected events, while 27% picked peer review sites, and 26% selected either interactions with sales executives or vendor advertising.
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PCORI has announced $208 million in funding awards for 17 clinical effectiveness research (CER) studies, as well as a separate, $2 million award for a project that aims to improve access to mental healthcare services for people undergoing dialysis.
The awards are part of a continuing program to apply new technologies and strategies to many of healthcare's common problems, such as chronic care management, palliative care, senior services and care for people living with rare diseases.
“These awards present significant opportunities to address urgent health challenges and empower patients and their families with actionable information about their health care choices,” PCORI Executive Director Nakela L. Cook, MD, MPH, said in a press release. “Facing a complex healthcare system and many care options, patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other health decision makers need reliable information to help them understand which care options will best meet individual patient needs and circumstances. PCORI-supported evidence will improve healthcare and outcomes for people across the nation.”
Included in the list of projects are three that use telehealth to improve care management for people living with multiple chronic conditions in primary care settings, with a focus specifically on COPD and sleep apnea, obesity and asthma in children, and care for medically fragile children.
Four large studies receiving PCORI funds will compare:
The treatment of coronary artery disease with either open-heart surgery or less invasive stent placement, with a focus on women and underserved populations.
Palliative care delivery for seriously Ill hospitalized patients by specialists against the same care delivered by trained general care practitioners.
Various medications as second-line treatment for the 25 percent of children with a severe form of juvenile idiopathic arthritis who do not get better taking a first-line biologic drug.
The impacts of annual wellness visits for older adults with complex healthcare needs against a program that adds integrated care involving interprofessional teams and at-home visits.
The $2 million award targets a project that will compare two treatments proven effective in a previous PCORI-funded project, medication and a cognitive behavioral therapy program delivered via telehealth, in dozens of dialysis units across several states.
“PCORI’s stewardship of patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research extends to ensuring useful findings can have a salutary impact in everyday clinical care, which is why we fund projects that encourage uptake of results,” Harv Feldman, MD, MSCE, PCORI’s deputy executive director for patient-centered research programs, said in the press release. “As a result of PCORI’s latest implementation funding awards, clinicians and patients confronting decisions about mental health while undergoing dialysis may experience better care and outcomes.”
A teledermatology clinic that was launched in a church is the model for a program aimed at creating new channels for underserved residents to access healthcare.
A DC-based health system has launched a grant program aimed at using telehealth to expand access to dermatology services in underserved neighborhoods.
The clinic offers access to care for treatment of inflammatory dermatoses, such as Atopic Dermatitis, which affects more than 30 million children and adults in the US.
“During the pandemic, the healthcare divide became even more apparent across many underserved areas,” Adam Friedman, MD, chair of dermatology and residency program director at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences, said in a press release. “However, as telemedicine enhanced access to dermatologic medical care for many, we also noticed that the divide itself was widened not just because there was a health desert, but now there’s also a technology desert.”
“Specific populations are at greatest risk for physical, emotional, and financial losses associated with inflammatory dermatoses," he added. "And it is well established that there are significant racial disparities in healthcare and disease burden. For example, those who identify as Black tend to have more Atopic Dermatitis [and] have more severe disease, but make up fewer of the appointments seen by a dermatologist for this condition. While finally receiving the attention it deserves, this disparity has been long-lived and pervasive in all areas of medicine.”
Friedman's program is one of many across the country aiming to address lack of access to healthcare by putting clinics and/or telehealth stations in areas where communities tend to gather, like churches, malls, pharmacies, salons, community centers, homeless clinics, and libraries.
"I appreciated that utilizing and partnering with a community lighthouse, so to speak, would engender a sense of trust and comfort for those potential patients in the area," Friedman said in an e-mail exchange with HealthLeaders. "Using a familiar location demystifies an unknown and unfamiliar program."
The grant program, offering grants of up to $250,000, aims to identify healthcare organizations that can take this model and expand to other underserved areas and communities. Applications are due by August 24, with programs expected to start by January 2024 and continue for as long as 18 months.
"First and foremost, I want applicants who are just as excited as I am to explore new ways and approaches to improving healthcare outcomes to those who need it most," Friedman told HealthLeaders. "I want to not only see how the applicant and their team will employ our telehealth help desk model within their community, but how they plan to sustain beyond the period of the grant. The funds can be used to support medical students interested in pursuing dermatology to dedicate, coordinate, and oversee the execution of the clinics; to compensate community partners for their time and investment in the project's success; [and] to purchase supplies and tools needed for a successful series of clinics and marketing/advertising to ensure a steady stream of patients."
The telehealth help desk, established in a church with more than 15,000 members, offers resources and education on how to access and use telehealth and specific dermatologic diseases like Atopic Dermatitis and Alopecia Areata, and can link a visit to a specialist for a free virtual visit. Patients are registered through GW's EHR platform and can be scheduled for follow-up visits.
“The number of dermatologists/dermatology clinics in this area of the district is disproportionately low to serve the health needs of this large population," Friedman said in the press release. "In fact, there is not a single dermatologist practicing in this area of DC. Though the reasons for underutilizing telemedicine can vary from patient to patient, we believe that improving access to technology and increasing awareness of teledermatology will lead to more patients using this type of healthcare to seek diagnosis and treatment before symptoms become too severe.”
Friedman told HealthLeaders the process of finding partners to establish clinics and good locations for those clinics isn't easy. Good programs need high traffic and visibility and a steady base of volunteers.
He hopes to expand this model not only to other locations, but to address other chronic conditions.
"This grant program, even the telehealth help desk we established and can now continue thanks to [support from organizations like (Pfizer and Lilly] is an amazing example of how academic and pharmaceutical partnerships can be meaningful [and] productive and achieve the shared goal of improving patients’ lives," he said. "I am very grateful we have the opportunity to take the learnings and experience from our free clinic and support those we fund to launch this model in other cities to ensure success."
Liz Ashall-Payne, the founder and CEO of ORCHA, an international effort to establish digital health standards, explains why mHealth apps need a rigid rating system to gain widespread acceptance.
[Editor's Note: Liz Ashall-Payne is a trained clinician in the UK's National Health Service and the founder and CEO of the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA), a global leader in digital health accreditation and distribution services.]
Twenty-five years ago I started my career as a speech language pathologist for the British National Health Service. And from day one I was frustrated that I could only see one patient at a time, especially with long waiting and treatment times.
When digital health and mobile health apps began to appear on the market, I realized that these scalable tools could help solve those problems. They can be given to one person or one million people, giving everybody access to help at the same time.
Back then, there were only around 35,000 digital health apps, but more importantly, nobody was using them.
With that in mind I founded the Organization for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA). Our mission was to be an arbiter between the tech-focused health app developers and the healthcare providers who wanted to use and/or prescribe these new tools, holding these health apps to the highest possible standards.
Liz Ashall-Payne, founder and CEO, ORCHA. Photo courtesy ORCHA.
On one hand, having this technology on our cellphones brings unparalleled possibilities for the future delivery of healthcare. Health apps can help us manage chronic conditions such as cancer or diabetes, remind us to take meds, encourage us to eat well and exercise more, flag potential skin cancers or help support us with our mental health.
On the other, this market still is largely unregulated, and poor-quality apps can present a significant risk to IT security and patient safety. Unlike the tightly controlled medication marketplace, the health apps available to consumers on Google and Apple app libraries are subject only to light oversight.
Yet when these apps are put through an ORCHA assessment, we consistently fail around 80 percent of them. They fail due to poor performance in data privacy, professional assurance, or usability, or a combination of the three.
In contrast, when the federal right to abortion was overturned last year, we were all jolted by the unexpected consequences to digital technology. Users of period tracker apps who had felt safe and private found that their most sensitive data was being shared with third parties--and that, in the wrong hands, this data could be used against them. Our own research found that 84% of period tracker apps were sharing data with third parties and half showed poor compliance with privacy laws.
Our team has identified several apps that are popular on app stores but offer little or no evidence of support from a healthcare expert or any published trials or studies. These include a substance abuse app with more than 100,000 downloads and an AI chatbot with 10 million downloads.
So here we are, on the cusp of a healthcare revolution that offers unlimited potential for every demographic in the US, and with citizens increasingly ready to use these tools (5 million are downloaded each day) but with significant issues still to be addressed.
In 2020 an open source and multi-organization steering group was set up to tackle this problem. Working together, and in the interests of the public good, the American Telemedicine Association, the American College of Physicians and ORCHA developed the nation's first health app assessment framework – a nationwide effort to raise the quality of health apps.
The Digital Health Assessment Framework (DHAF) offers a universal benchmark, testing each health app against 400 standards, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The framework has been developed based on existing and emerging global digital health assessment models, including those used by UK's National Health Service, the German Federal Ministry’s DiGA and emerging standards used in Scandinavia, New Zealand, and Canada.
To meet the DHAF standards, digital health products need to score 65% or better in three criteria: Data privacy, professional assurance, and usability.
The objective is twofold: To help digital health app developers produce better products, and to collate the high-quality apps which pass the DHAF review into digital health app libraries. Physicians can then use these online libraries to recommend top quality health apps to their patients.
As an example, the ThyForLife app helps more than 30,000 people cope with thyroid cancer.
“I find the DHAF to be the necessity in this field because the lack of regulation means the barrier of entry is very low," the app's developer, Natalia Lumen, says.
“It has been difficult for professionals to know which tools are reliable and they don’t have the capacity to do the due diligence to find the resources available," she adds. "Having a standard approach that collectively everyone agrees is the right benchmark helps create more transparency and enables professionals to feel more at ease. Without the framework the healthcare professional cannot recommend digital tools. It also benefits the patients themselves, as they now have access to the best tools and assurance that the tools are top quality.”
A year on from launch, the DHAF team has reviewed hundreds of health apps and is working with organizations across the country to set up safe and trustworthy health app libraries.
While the DHAF, which remains an open-source program, gathers steam, the message needs to get out get out that people should be asking their healthcare providers for health app recommendations, and those providers should be familiarizing themselves with apps, where they can, and to begin telling patients about them.
What we are all trying to achieve here is to get better healthcare to more people, so that consumers can learn to manage their health better from their homes. It's not going to be easy, but considering that are now more cellphones on this planet than toilets and toothbrushes, it is achievable.
The chief innovation and transformation officer at Israel's largest hospital talks about the ARC innovation model and efforts to forge international partnerships.
One of the world's most innovative healthcare organizations is Sheba Medical Center, located near Tel Aviv in Israel. In 2019, the hospital launched the ARC innovation model, and set its sights on guiding the evolution of healthcare across the globe. Earlier this year Sheba signed an agreement with Deloitte Consulting to facilitate adoption of the ARC model in other countries.
To explore the global implications of the ARC model, HealthLeaders sat down, virtually, with Eyal Zimlichman, MD, MSc (MHCM), chief transformation officer and chief innovation officer at Sheba Medical Center. Prior to joining Sheba, he was lead researcher at Boston-based Partners Healthcare, now part of Mass General Brigham, and conducted research for Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard-affiliated Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice on using technology to improve quality and patient safety.
Q. What is the ARC innovation model and how does it benefit healthcare organizations?
Zimlichman: ARC is short for accelerate, redesign, and collaborate. The ARC innovation model allows healthcare institutions to accelerate transformation efforts to answer the many challenges that healthcare systems currently face while also turning healthcare innovation into an engine of economic growth.
Based on our experience at Sheba Medical Center, we were able to build a model that can really move the needle on both aspects simultaneously. The model was built in a way that is very structured, enabling it to be implemented successfully anywhere in the world not just specifically at Sheba. To our knowledge, it is the only model of its kind in the world.
Q. Several large health systems in the US have created their own innovation centers and programs. How does the ARC model differ from those programs?
Zimlichman: ARC is not really an innovation center; it's much broader because it has a global aim. ARC aims to transform healthcare around the world, and to do so by the year 2030. This goal requires a very specific strategy that will enable us to reach the global standard we've set for ourselves.
To achieve this goal, ARC has built a global ecosystem that now includes more than 140 members in almost 30 countries. These members are all working together to lead transformation efforts for themselves, but also drive this as a global effort. This is unique because other hospitals typically focus internally to create solutions to be deployed only in their institutions.
Our partners include leading medical centers such as Mayo Clinic, Mass General, and Cedars Sinai, in addition to many international industry partners, governments, academia, startups, and more.
Q. What are the challenges or barriers to healthcare innovation that ARC addresses?
Zimlichman: ARC is looking to address the most critical challenges facing healthcare.
One of these challenges, for example, is quality and patient safety. There are huge gaps in quality and patient safety around the world which we've not been able to address over the last 30 years.
Another challenge we're facing is the workforce shortage and burnout, which is a critical problem right now, especially post-pandemic. ARC is focused on finding solutions to address this by taking the load off clinical teams and creating solutions that can replace some tasks that today are carried out by humans.
A third challenge is the rising cost of healthcare. Healthcare costs are on the rise in every developed country around the world and they are reaching unsustainable levels. It requires innovation to be able to provide a high level of care at a lower cost.
Finally, how do we build a system that will be more focused on the patient's needs and expectations and have the patient play a critical role within the system? This is another barrier that current healthcare systems have not been able to bridge. ARC is working on solutions to try and solve that.
Q. How are new or emerging technologies integrated into the ARC model?
Zimlichman: To really see the vision for the future of health come alive and make these transformations a reality, technology needs to play a central role in disrupting how we're delivering healthcare today.
We need to focus on two avenues to create these technological solutions. One is organic innovation, and the other is open innovation.
Organic innovation is technologies we develop in-house, based on the needs that we realize in the market. We then find the right teams to create solutions that we can implement and take to market, to have large-scale implementations across multiple institutions.
However, organic innovation is never enough to create meaningful transformation. For that, you also need to have open innovation, which is the ability to look outside of your own walls. We find the best technology outside and bring it in, so that we can create impact for our patients.
This is a central component of ARC as well. We've built an open innovation platform that constantly allows us to find the right technology, prove that it works, and take it to large-scale implementation.
Q. Would you say that's like a venture arm within ARC? Is that a good way to describe it?
Zimlichman: There is also a venture arm within ARC. The funds work to recognize the right technology, give it the support needed to grow, and get to a point where it can impact many patients.
In 2019, we identified the need for capital within ARC and established our first fund, Triventures. This was followed by two more funds, including Shoni Health Ventures. They are critical as well to ensure we get great ideas and great technologies to scale up.
Q. How do you measure success in the program?
Zimlichman: There are several metrics that we use. Some specifically look at the impact on our patients. For example, clinical outcomes or cost reduction. For technology solutions, we generally measure how much we're able to improve efficiency as well as effectiveness. That's one angle.
The other angle, of course, is financial. Are we able to really drive the economy and make this a successful and sustainable commercial model? We measure how many companies are born out of ARC. How much money have they raised? What are their accumulated valuations? How much are they selling on the market? These are all metrics that we've been following since the launch of ARC three and a half years ago.
Q. Could you point to a specific pain point in the healthcare industry that the ARC model has already helped to address?
Zimlichman: One example is our focus on technologies specifically related to artificial intelligence, which allows us to help clinicians improve decision-making and efficiency. A company called AI Doc that started at Sheba and is now deployed in 1,200 hospitals around the world, and is transformative in the way that it helps radiologists in the emergency department read the scans in a much more efficient manner. That has led to an improvement in patient outcomes--reducing mortality rates, for example, but also creating a reduction in cost for the hospitals due to the increased efficiency of radiologists. This is an example of where we could help in terms of being more sustainable, both in terms of trying to reduce our dependency on the human factor and improving quality and patient safety.
Q. What are the biggest challenges that healthcare organizations face in adopting the ARC model?
Zimlichman: One significant aspect is the culture. It requires a culture of innovation, a culture of being open to change. That is not always existent from the get-go, but part of the ARC model is about improving the culture.
We firmly believe that culture can be transformed and become a culture that's more open to innovation and change. This is part of the model of implementing ARC. Of course, it's always a challenge, especially when you start, and there's a lot of reluctance to change from your own staff. That's challenge number one.
Challenge number two is funding. Innovation is costly in many ways, especially if you want to build something robust and big enough to have a long-lasting impact. There are many opportunities for funding, such as government support, competitive grant funding, or even philanthropy, that will allow academic medical centers to build this much-needed infrastructure. But it is a challenge. Finding the source of funding, as we all know, is a challenge.
Q. How will the Deloitte partnership help this program?
Zimlichman: After spending three years building the ARC model, we started implementing it in different sites around the world. We very quickly understood that this was not our business; we're not consultants, we're a hospital. In addition, we don't have the capacity to do this for more than three or four institutions a year.
As the demand for ARC increased around the world and we realized that we don't have the capacity to teach organizations how to build ARC, it was evident we needed to find a partner in the consulting space to help us scale up the ARC model. As a result of an RFP that was put out, with five consulting firms applying, Deloitte emerged as the winner. Now we're at a stage where we're putting together a joint product that Deloitte will take the lead in implementing around the world, with ARC's help to make sure it accurately encompasses what ARC is about.
We believe Deloitte is a critical partner to deliver a more professional product and enables us to scale up. Instead of doing just three or four implementations each year, we will be able to do 40 a year, which is our ultimate aim, to be able to scale up significantly.
Q. How do you see this program evolving?
Zimlichman: We see the ARC ecosystem growing, becoming stronger, and building better ways to collaborate. It's always a journey that we're on. ARC will have a substantial impact on what healthcare around the world will look like, accelerating transformation efforts through creating new solutions that will be able to answer the many challenges that we are facing.
Eventually we see ARC as a global force that will lead to two key outcomes that we're focused on. The first is improving the health of populations around the world through transformation. The second is driving the economy, within the local ecosystems, through investments, job creation, growth in businesses and so on.
Regarding our partnership with Deloitte, I personally am very excited about the possibilities. We found a great partner in Deloitte, with a very similar way of thinking.
We're confident that the Deloitte-ARC joint product will be the leading model around the world to drive transformations and growth in the healthcare sector and the economy. I would like to relay the dedication and excitement of the entire team on this new journey we're taking together with our partners.
Stacy Taylor, CFO at Nemaha County Hospital, chats with Associate Content Manager Amanda Norris about innovative ways Nemaha County Hospital has worked to optimize its workforce, provide revenue cycle education, and ensure financial stability as a small, critical access hospital.
