Thought Leadership

When doctors know their patients have been to the hospital, they can act fast to provide needed support. Widespread use of hospital event notifications is associated with all kinds of health benefits, including a 10 percent decrease in readmissions for Medicare beneficiaries. These event notifications are one of the simplest, easiest (most-bipartisan!), and most impactful changes we can…

California has had strong leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic. But, like other states, we are struggling to get COVID-19 data right. Between the disclosure of a missing backlog of a quarter of a million lab results and announcement of a $15.3 million six-month contract with Optum to fix COVID-19 data, California is reckoning with health information issues. With decisive…

Driving from California to Vermont, as I did this summer, offers time to think and plenty to look at. The vast interstate highway system that I followed for much of my journey, championed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was created in large part by the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, which declared that building this highway system…

We got the call. Riverside County, one of the most active regions in our health data network, was asking for help with identifying people in their community who most critically need help during the COVID-19 pandemic. From my time at the Office of the National Coordinator to Aledade to the past three years at Manifest…

I was relieved when HIMSS was canceled. We had already made the decision to withdraw to protect our team and so we can focus on continuing to help on the front lines of California healthcare as the statewide health data network. As public health leaders, it is our responsibility to make this kind of difficult…

What do we want from our healthcare system? What do we need from it? And what is the role of technology in helping us feel better? There are so many ways that healthcare technology has advanced to help people live better lives in the last few decades: pacemakers, CT scans, interventional radiology, insulin pumps, digital records, genome…

Anybody who has had a loved one with an acute hospitalization or a chronic illness will have experienced some of the many ways in which healthcare systems fail to live up to the values and ideals of the people who have chosen healthcare as a calling. Healthcare is complicated indeed, but there are rare instances…

“Data is the new oil,” British data scientist Clive Humby once said. “It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.” I thought about that line recently when I met with the chief medical officer of a large health system. “I don’t want more data,” she told me, “we are already drowning in it.”…

In the middle of California’s fire season, it’s hard not to think about the role healthcare organizations can and must play when it comes to providing and coordinating care for patients during a natural disaster. These events will become more frequent and intense as the impacts of climate change increase. Natural disasters like the fires…