A lot has changed in the way the health-care industry uses technology since Bruce Goodman became Humana Inc.’s chief information officer in 1999. And, he says, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Mr. Goodman, who joined the Louisville, Ky., health-insurance giant amid the Y2K frenzy over the ability of computers to deal with a year ending in 00, sees both technical and creative challenges looming for his industry. His primary goal is to get doctors, patients and insurers fuller information more quickly.
Mr. Goodman recently discussed these challenges and more with The Wall Street Journal. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation:
An Echo of Y2K
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Do you think we’ll ever see something like Y2K again?
Mr. Goodman: The health-care industry is going to go through something equivalent to Y2K in a couple of years. There is a new code that the government is promoting around how you describe medical procedures called ICD-10. And that significantly expands the code set when a doctor describes what they have done for a patient.
So the old code said, “broken leg.” The new code set gets much more specific as to exactly what part of the leg is broken and why it got broken. Tennis accident, skiing accident; it is really detailed.
You have got to go through all the systems where those kinds of codes are carried and expand those fields and bring in those new code sets. A lot of it can be automated. But it means remediating millions of millions of lines of code across lots of systems—systems hospitals use, we use, doctors’ offices use. [When completed] it gives you more capability. You can do much more refined studies in terms of what is going on.
WSJ: How much freedom do you give Humana employees when it comes to using technology?
Mr. Goodman: They have a lot of freedom, but we are in a highly regulated business. We have some very confidential information about our members, and we are very sensitive to the level of security and the devices employees use. Our data center is attacked millions of times a month from the Internet. So we don’t have our users using devices that can bring viruses and worms and Trojans and phishing expeditions into the mother ship.
WSJ: How can you tell which ones meet that criteria?
Mr. Goodman: For example, currently the Apple iPhone doesn’t. It is not a secure enough platform where we would allow our highly confidential data to move. We tightly control laptops and other things that we give to our people. BlackBerrys, by the way, do satisfy the requirement, and we have those.