Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Harrison, Chief Commercial Officer of Concord Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about specific use cases. You can pick whatever illustrates best your value proposition in the healthcare IT workflow.

John Harrison: If you don’t mind, one minor digression before we talk to the use cases themselves. As we look at how these three pillars of focus come together – document-based communication, document handling, and extraction and recognition of contents – the fundamental thing that we’re getting out there is interoperability of data.

That is our calling and our purpose. While there are many organizations doing really wonderful work to improve the interoperability of data that exists in healthcare, we’re tackling that from a different angle. We believe that unstructured content in multiple forms will continue to exist in our healthcare ecosystem for a fairly significant amount of time.

We are approaching that problem of interoperability from the document perspective and from the unstructured content to say that if two systems can’t communicate effectively and they’re having to resort to exchanging unstructured data, what can we do with our technology to turn that unstructured material to something much more structured?

The fundamental purpose or calling for us is solving the fundamental problem of data interoperability in healthcare. To use that as a transition to the use cases, there’s a number of different ways that we see this technology delivering value to our customers.

If you think about something as very simple and fundamental as ensuring that when there is a piece of document-centric communication that takes place in healthcare, we’re simply making sure that those documents don’t get lost and that the important and critical data contained in those data is properly delivered to the end destination.

I’ll tell you a quick story about that that I think will illustrate that use case very well. A physician that we worked with told us a story of a patient that had come in to see colleague with a lump in her breast. She had an exam. The mammography lab found some concerning tissues and immediately sent a document-based communication back to the referring physician to say, “We saw your patient, but there is a problem. You need to reach out to this patient and help her seek therapy quickly.”

That document ended up not making it to the patient’s record and ultimately got lost in the receiving practices’s office. The patient assumed that no news is good news. As a result, treatment was delayed significantly. It ended tragically; the patient passed away. That’s a very simple use case.

That’s a very tragic story about how a simple thing like making sure that when you got this clumsy communication mechanism of documents being exchanged, every single one of those touchpoints should be closed out. Every single one of those documents needs to be delivered where it needs to be delivered.

Our technology will take those documents, automatically recognize the patient data, and associate those documents directly with patient records in a receiving EMR system to ensure that that’s a seamless end-to-end process. That’s one use case that we deal with a lot in our daily business. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Harrison, Chief Commercial Officer of Concord Technologies
1 2 3 4