It’s hardly a surprise that about half of the items on ECRI’s list of priorities for CIOs are IT-related. But some of those items might actually raise a curious eyebrow or two.
Not on the list are traditional information technologies like databases and big iron. Instead, one finds robots, the NanoKnife, a little bit of magic and a whole lot of data.
To the chase, then, here are the IT parts of ECRI’s list:
1. Down Under: Will Lower Costs and Higher Patient Satisfaction Offset Brewing Turf Wars over Computer-assisted Sedation Systems?
“Get ready for the big waves being generated by the new Sedasy computer-assisted personalized sedation system,” from Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc. in Somerville, NJ, ECRI wrote, explaining that “if health systems adopt it, the system could theoretically be used during millions of endoscopic
gastrointestinal (Gi) procedures (esophagogastroduodenoscopy and colonoscopy) performed on adults and reduce use of nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologists (and thereby lower costs).” Perhaps telling is that the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) “isn’t happy about it.”
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2. Roboman, Arise: Should You Offer Wearable Powered Exoskeleton Rehabilitation for individuals with Paraplegia?
This breed of wearable is typically used in two ways, the first being for rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, the second is as a personal assistive device operated at home. These robots are far from ubiquitous but ECRI contends it’s time for CIOs to decide whether to hop on the leading-edge of rehabilitation therapy or hold out until more vendors bring relevant offerings to market.
3. NanoKnife System: Real or False Hope for Patients with Cancer?
Not without its share of controversy, the NanoKnife for treating delicate and otherwise inoperable tumors has, in ECRI’s words, “diffused prematurely,” and the FDA even issued a letter warning its maker, AngioDynamics, to stop using words like “treatment” and “therapy in its literature. As such, ECRI recommends that NanoKnife should be confined to limited controlled trials.
4. Inside Out: Will Intelligent Pills Magically improve Medication Adherence and Prevent Readmissions?
At some point, every CIO might be familiar with the phrase “networked medication adherence,” but today there are more questions than answers. “Should your pharmacy and therapeutics committee plan to use oral digital medicines for patients discharged with chronic disease medication regiments, especially if it shows promise to reduce readmission rates?” If so, you’ll need clinical groups to get on board, which means adoption strategies, patient education plans, and protocols for action steps based on various scenarios.
5. Big Data: Does it Signify Big Decisions?
Everybody’s favorite buzzword du jour, Big Data had to be in there. Can healthcare reap the analytics model popularized, at least in theory, by Moneyball? “Just maybe,” ECRI noted. “With digitization of data through electronic health record (EHR) implementation and increasing creation of patient outcomes registries by payers and product manufacturers, big data opens the door to a new approach to making decisions in healthcare.”
For curious readers, ECRI’s list also included the less IT-centric topics of catheter-based renal denervation for treatment resistant hypertension as cash cow or fuel for the fire, emergency departments just for the elderly, how many copper surfaces hospitals need per room, magnetic resonance guided ultrasound for bone-crushing cancer pain, real-time MRI and adaptive radiation therapy.
And in case the above did not make this clear, ECRI was careful to explain that its 2014 Top 10 Hospital C-Suite Watch List does not consist of “must-haves.” Instead, it’s a compilation of “must-think-carefully-about technologies and health system issues.”
Date: January 06, 2014