Deborah Heart and Lung Centre

Could you shed some light on your journey in the medtech space over the years?

I have been working in the medtech sector for three decades now. I began my career as a medical-debt collector who collects overdue bills for hospitals and later worked in a firm that pioneered the automation of third-party payer information identification for patients. While I rose through the ranks working for different vendors, I have leveraged technology in new and unique ways. For instance, in the 90s, I have been running queries in the Microsoft Access database, which is not something new and novel right now, but it had been then.

When serving as an executive director at McKesson, I got an opportunity as a CIO at a prominent hospital. I swiftly realized that I love working on this provider side, helping healthcare facilities. My primary charge was to make things better for the hospital, which, in turn, makes things better for patients, doctors, and everyone along the care chain. As the CIO of the hospital, I constantly sought interesting ways to use technology and better understand workflows so that we could perform a better job. That’s when an opportunity to work at consulting organizations came knocking. So, I asked myself, ‘wouldn’t that be fun?’ I worked at different consultancies for a few years until I landed a CIO position at a hospital close to my home, where I am now—Deborah Heart and Lung Centre.

In the past seven years working here, I have understood many different aspects of the hospital's day-to-day operations. When you're in information systems, you must know everything because you're supporting people on many different levels. You have to understand their world to meaningfully contribute ideas on how they can automate their workflows. I get to learn a lot, experiment with new technologies, and discover new methods to make a difference positively. For example, how do we use technology to enhance patient engagement? Primarily, the focus is to make it easy for the patients to engage and interact with us.

What are some of the major challenges that impact the medtech space?

One thing that keeps me up at night but not necessarily directly helping patients is to keep our systems safe from ever-evolving cyber threats. Cybersecurity has become a significant challenge today, and we are running a tight ship there. There are facilities much bigger and more resourceful than us that have gotten a hit. So, it can happen to us, and we need to do everything in that regard to mitigate a cyber-attack. It’s essential to know how we’d respond during such an unfortunate incident and bring the system back to normal to take care of the patients at the absolute best.

Another major challenge centers on patient engagement. We need to provide a comprehensive and more patient-friendly engagement, not only when they are at the hospital but also before and after that. We have to communicate relevant and educational information that will help them manage their own health.

“Patient empowerment will be critical as we advance, allowing patients access and ultimately control over their medical records.”

I believe another significant and emerging challenge is to take advantage of the cutting-edge research ongoing in the domain, including initiatives like precision medicine and more intricate clinical surveillance systems. We got to do everything possible to make workflows easier and utilize limited available resources because employee recruiting and retention remains a major issue in the sector. We have to do more with less and find ways to do that. That’s going to be another challenge that we’ll continue to grapple with for some time.

What do you think are some recent trends that have emerged to help address these pain points?

I think clinical analytics has been beneficial. Whether it be on being more sophisticated about how we protect our systems, using third-party security operations centers (SOC) to monitor networks on a day-in, day-out basis, or proactively identifying any anomalies in the network integrity, the domain continues to improve year over year. However, it is essential to realize that cybercriminals trying to break into our systems are also strengthening their attacks yearly. When they stay one step ahead, we must react accordingly. So, the vulnerability aspect is always there. But the more hardened we are in monitoring our network activity and unusual behaviors, the better off we would be in terms of staying one step ahead against such cyber threats.

Can you briefly describe one of your most recent project initiatives, wherein you have been leveraging some of these technological elements to make it successful? 

We might say the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, but it isn’t. It is impacting every decision that we currently make.

Our hospital has a lot of significant projects in the pipeline right now. One of our big projects is named Transfer Center, a dedicated department to facilitate the seamless transfer of patients from other facilities into our hospital by eliminating choke points along the process. It makes the whole procedure more straightforward and precise for everyone: the physicians who are referring the patients to our hospital, the physicians here who are going to attend to those patients, and the patients themselves. It is strategically going to be a real competitive differentiator for us.

Deborah is going to provide a platform and a range of services on that front that would allow us to document things, track them over time, and let us understand where we are falling behind. It would enable us to be proactive throughout the process. It’s more like peeling an onion, peeling away one layer at a time. We must consider much to make this work and are enthusiastic about taking the project live next month.

How do you envision the future of the medtech space?

Patient empowerment will be critical as we advance, allowing patients access and ultimately control over their medical records. It will make clinical information readily available to caregivers across different stages and levels of care. That would also help providers make informed decisions as they have complete patient information. I also see areas like precision medicine and pharmacogenomics booming in the coming years, improving care delivery.

As an industry, we are propelling forward with advanced research and analytics. Detailed analytics helps us emphasize quality, letting us know where we are doing well and where there is room for improvement.

Anything you'd like to say to your fellow peers out there?

I would ask them to stay nimble. With the outside world changing so rapidly, we, as providers, must ensure that the services we’re offering, whether in terms of patient care or patient experience, must evolve with it.