Workshops aim to increase collaboration between technology, healthcare

February 8, 2016

INDIANAPOLIS — Once again, Indiana is a leader in life-saving technology. On Tuesday, January 26, a unique workshop brought together professionals from all aspects of health care to discuss “Indiana’s Opportunities to Lead in Digital Health.” Presenters Dr. Nir Menachemi from the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and Dr. Titus Schleyer of the Regenstrief Institute, inspired doctors, nurses, CEOs, informaticians, professors and others to pool their collective brain power at the first of three workshops designed to improve the health of all Hoosiers.

As a foundation enabling Indiana to use technology to improve healthcare outcomes, Indiana is fortunate to have the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC), a state-wide electronic medical records system originally developed by Regenstrief and supported by the Indiana Health Information Exchange. The participants discussed ways we can all use this informatics platform to jumpstart innovations. The diverse group of concerned healthcare advocates generated the following ideas:

1. How can the private sector be brought on board when they have no access to INPC or its infrastructure?
2. How can the Indiana State Legislature help? Suggestions included easing the ability to combine various external data sets with INPC data.
3. Clinicians from the Mental Health sector felt disenfranchised because mental health data are not part of the INPC, illustrating the larger problem of mental health data being treated differently than other health data and being governed by different rules.
4. Healthcare is moving from “sick care” to a “prevention and wellness promotion” model. In addition to changing the way we treat people, it should also change the kind of information stored in the INPC repository. We should be able to integrate fitness tracking data, preventative monitoring, etc., to help quantify people’s health status.
5. How can we use data to change individual behavior, and promote healthy behaviors?

About 80-90 concerned Hoosiers took part in this workshop, where participants asked the tough questions about how to use the tools we have to make us all healthier. The workshop was sponsored by Ice Miller, and organized by Techpoint, hc1.com, and the Regenstrief Institute.