Digital health has great potential, but it's often not living up to it | MobiHealthNews

In the areas of interoperability, telemedicine, health apps and AI, we still have work to do. The American Medical Association has always had an interesting relationship with digital health, vacillating between gadfly and cheerleader as it seeks to fulfill its role as the voice of physicians in industry conversations.

At the Cleveland Clinic Patient Experience: Empathy and Innovation Summit, an event held in Cleveland this week and organized in conjunction with HIMSS, AMA Board Chair Dr. Jack Resneck Jr. laid out the AMA’s perspective on the tremendous potential of digital health technology — as well as the many ways that potential is not being fulfilled.

“When I come to meetings like this, I get tremendously excited as everybody does seeing all of the disruptive innovation and things that are taking place that are going to help us take better care of some of our patients, and I also channel the frustrations of some of my peers about tools that are out there that don’t work, or don’t think of whether they affect a physician’s workflow or a patient’s health in a positive way,” Resneck said.

Resneck said that the AMA’s attitude toward technology has been shaped by what he sees as one of the great technological failures in medicine: the EHR. EHR interoperability is moving forward, Resneck said, but still has a long way to go.

An issue right now is that, as EHRs begin to talk to each other at last, they still aren’t speaking the same language in terms of having their data formatted in uniform or easy to use ways.

“When I do see [data from other EHRs], when I dig into them and get them, it’s like getting a DOS file from 1985,” Resneck said. “Interoperability isn’t worth that much when it’s a six-hour homework assignment for one patient.”