AI, Interoperability and a Cloud First Mentality

By Matt Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer, ClearDATA
Twitter: @cleardatacloud
Host of CTO Talk – #CTOTalk

Now on Demand, CTO Talk with Josh Siegel of CareCloud

I’ve had the privilege of working with CareCloud for more than four years and have been witnessing first-hand their amazing journey into the public cloud. I first started working with CareCloud CTO Josh Siegel when they were in a co-located data center facility and have been with him during their migration to AWS, and now with additional cloud services on Google Cloud Platform. The innovations coming from this company are impressive. If you haven’t read it already, check out our most recent CareCloud case study about their work modernizing the patient experience in a multi-cloud environment.

Episode NOW on Demand

I had the pleasure of getting to sit down with Josh this year for my podcast series CTO Talk that airs on HealthcareNOW Radio. In this episode, you’ll find Josh and I discussing the drive in healthcare to engage patients and give them an experience that is more akin to what we expect to find with our consumer facing apps and mobile devices, rather than the historically cumbersome monolithic healthcare infrastructure that left patients with silos of data and fractured health records. Oftentimes, these silos resulted in burdensome practice management systems for physicians that could make them prone to errors.

Thanks to emerging technologies like AI and machine learning, or as Josh prefers to call it, machine intelligence, a lot of redundant and repetitive tasking providers were faced with can now be automated and handled at a greater scale with intelligence, freeing up providers to focus more of their time on their patients. And thanks to great UX design, patients can be helped through engaging apps that make healthcare understandable and accessible.

In this podcast, Josh and I talk about what makes UX great: putting just the right content on the front end for the end user and making it available quickly and clearly, while the content you need to store but the user may not need to see is held to the back until they need to access it. This intentional way of building apps is enhanced greatly by microservices in the cloud. We talk about why, and how to approach these kinds of builds for powerful and dynamic workloads.

We also talk about how the game changes a bit when you move from a collocated facility to a cloud first environment, and what that can mean to your buy and your build for cost optimization.

And, for any of you wrestling with interoperability, we talk about HL7 and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) as well as what advancements on the Google Cloud can bring to enhanced interoperability. It turned into an interesting conversation about using technology – specifically machine intelligence – to drive to better outcomes while driving down costs.

Speaking of machine learning and AI, in this episode Josh shares his views for where machine learning is going in healthcare in the next 12 – 24 months, and the role data standardization like FHIR can play in making machine intelligence smarter, faster.

About the Show
On CTO Talk, technology expert Matt Ferrari discusses the issues, challenges, and opportunities transforming healthcare technology today, all from the CTO point of view. Tune in because when CTOs talk, health IT listens.

This article was originally published on ClearDATA and is republished here with permission.