⚕️ Empowering Technology Teams

We just crossed the 150 day mark in 2024 a few days back!

As time continues to whizz past us at dizzying speed, let’s take a headlong dive into the world of HealthTech instead.

Before we go too deep, get in touch with Arkenea if you're looking to augment your engineering teams with experienced HealthTech engineers that can hit the ground running from Day 1.

DEEP DIVE

Acing User Experience In Healthcare Web Design

• 50% of consumers feel that a website design is crucially important for brand building of a company.
• 31% of the people think that an engaging user experience is a top priority for the website design

Attention to user experience plays a critical role in SEO ranking, accessibility and inclusivity, and improving patient experience. Here are 12 things to keep in mind for enhancing user experience in healthcare web design,

1. Who is the website for?
2. Users love a secure website
3. Design to include everyone
4. Keep a track of trends
5. Lead with engaging visuals
6. Go for mobile-friendly design

Read the other half of the list here.

PULSE POINTS

Latest Breakthroughs This Week

Here’s the most important breakthroughs and advancements we spotted in the healthcare technology space this week.

• Virtual Scribes: Using virtual scribes at Mass General Brigham reduced the time providers spent in electronic health records (EHR). The study analyzed 144 outpatient physicians who used virtual scribes for at least three months between January 2020 and September 2022. The digital tools significantly decreased total EHR time, time spent on notes, and "pajama time."
• Generative AI: Researchers at Mount Sinai found that generative AI, such as GPT-4, can predict hospital admissions for emergency room patients with minimal training and data. Analyzing over 864,000 ER visits, they developed models using both structured and unstructured data. They compared GPT-4's performance to traditional machine-learning models, discovering that GPT-4 could learn effectively from fewer examples and enhance the performance of traditional models when combined.
• 3D Holograms: Crescent Regional Hospital has installed a hologram display and video studio, allowing physicians to "teleport" as life-size 3D holograms for real-time connections with patients. This technology, called Holobox by Holoconnects, will also be integrated into various hospital locations and clinics. It aims to reduce patient wait times and enhance access to specialty care, with applications including virtual consultations, rounds, specialist consultations, and patient education.
• Artificial Intelligene: Providence, Microsoft, and the University of Washington have developed an AI pathology model, Prov-GigaPath, to improve cancer diagnostics. Announced on May 22, it captures global patterns across entire pathology slides. Trained on 1.3 billion image tiles from 171,189 digital slides, Prov-GigaPath outperforms previous models by using the GigaPath vision transformer architecture to analyze whole slides.
• Cybersecurity: California hospitals had decreased emergency visits and inpatient admissions for weeks following a ransomware attack. Targeted hospitals saw over an 8% drop in the first week and over a 16% drop in the second week. Nearby hospitals experienced increased emergency visits, indicating that the effects of such attacks extend beyond the targeted hospitals.

EXPERT SPOTLIGHT

Matt Lavin: Empowering Technology Teams

This week, HealthTech Zen got in touch with Matt Lavin, a fractional CTO with a background in health data storage and analysis, who excels in assembling teams necessary for successful product launches.

How do you see the role of technology evolving in patient care over the next decade?

Technology will continue to enhance patient care by collecting more data and offering personalized interpretations to guide treatment. We can expect an increase in data sources from wearables, advanced imaging, and genomic data, all while reducing the cost of data collection.

With this influx of data, both individual and population-wide, we will be able to generate increasingly personalized treatment recommendations, identifying key areas for improvement and the most effective actions to drive positive outcomes.

How do you foster a culture of innovation within your technology teams?

Fostering innovation in your technology team is both easier than you expect and also scarier. The key to success is letting go and empowering people.

Technology teams are full of problem solvers, and often they are full of people specifically interested in the business domain. The best engineers have many opportunities for jobs, and they have chosen your company due to their interests. What you need to do is unleash their problem solving on the right problems.

The scary part is that you need to relinquish control over the details of what people are doing. You need to give people big problems to solve and give them the space and time to find the best solutions. Do not tell them what to build. Instead, tell them which problems need solving. Specifically, you need to:

1. Hire people who are passionate about the problem you are trying to solve.
2. Make sure they understand the guardrails. Tell them which types of solutions are allowed and which would be rejected.
3. Give them time to explore to find solutions.

People will surprise you with innovative solutions you would never have thought of.

Continue reading here

DECODER

What Is HIPAA Compliant Video Conferencing?

HIPAA-compliant video conferencing ensures the privacy and security of protected health information (PHI) as required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

To be compliant, video conferencing solutions must implement the administrative, physical and technical safeguards. Key features of HIPAA-compliant video conferencing platforms include end-to-end encryption, access controls, audit trails, secure data storage, and adherence to HIPAA policies.

Read more about the features to look out for in a HIPAA compliant video conferencing app and HIPAA compliant video conferencing APIs you can rely on for building your own app here.