Amy Oliver, Marketing Manager
Spring conference season is in full swing, and this year, my first event was ViVE in Nashville.
The show started on a somber note with the school shooting tragedy on Monday morning, just five miles from our location. HLTH and CHIME showed immediate support by donating $50,000 to help the victims’ families. They also set up a GoFundMe so that conference attendees could make donations. But, as Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, American Medical Association president elect powerfully said at a luncheon on Tuesday, we MUST put an end to the senseless gun violence.
Despite the cruel gun tragedies that play out across the nation nearly every day while Congress seems unable or unwilling to take action, this healthcare conference delivered on all fronts. I left feeling truly inspired by the energy and innovation of the work that’s taking place to help patients get better access to healthcare, regardless of their situation.
My ViVE highlights:
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- Patients before politics. During the opening remarks, it was acknowledged that we as a society need to come together and put patients before politics. At the end of the day, all people deserve the same access to healthcare.
- Health equity remains important. While we’re seeing progress with health equity, we need to continue and accelerate the work. The HLTH organization does a fantastic job of putting the spotlight on this important topic, and I enjoyed several sessions related to this topic on the #Techquity stage.
- Patients are consumers. Healthcare is slow to the game of adopting technologies and processes to make it easier for the patient. You don’t call a travel agent anymore, so why are you calling to make a doctor’s appointment?
- Interoperability continues to improve. But… there’s a long way to go until we can truly say data is sharable anywhere, anytime. Timely reference: while at the conference, my friend’s mom broke her arm in St. Louis, and her hometown hospital in Kansas City is on a different EHR. She literally joked about getting the X-ray images mailed to her on a CD. It’s 2023, this should not be a problem.
- Clinician involvement is critical. According to an AMA report, there’s an increase in physicians seeing a “definite advantage” in digital tools, but the expertise and experience of physicians must be leveraged up front to make the technology an “asset, not a burden.”
- Healthcare continues to change—and we need to keep up! The shift to home-based care is happening and an estimated $265 billion of Medicare services could be delivered in the home by 2025! Rasu Shrestha, MD, EVP and Chief Innovation and Commercialization Officer at Advocate Health Care and Deborah DiSanzo, President of Best Buy Health, shared how they’re partnering together to deliver care in the home – and the benefits already realized are phenomenal across the board.
- Real patients are amazing, and so are their stories. A couple of the sessions I attended featured actual patient stories – how committed to improving healthcare that these patients take the time to share their stories with others. It is a great reminder of why we likely all chose to get into healthcare: the end result of our work can truly be life-saving and life-changing, as long as we continue to put the patients before the politics (refer to point #1.)