RamaOnHealthcare April 1, 2021
“There is a fix for Healthcare. The status quo isn’t an option. Disruption is the answer.” Rama
RamaOnHealthcare has become a mainstay reference for the healthcare world. Rama is an advocate for health innovation. He delivers current events, issues, and opinions of the day. He is a leader with a strong desire to transform and improve the healthcare system.
Sharing similar concerns and interest, I interviewed Rama about healthcare transformation. After gathering and curating over 1 million pieces of newsworthy insights, I wanted to know what he learned and foresees as solutions in healthcare today.
Rama, it is pleasure to be with you. Let’s talk about healthcare and its hope for the future. In the 20+ years you have curated others’ voices, what have you surmised with all that data and information?
Thank you, Mohan, for inviting me to talk about this. I have enjoyed our conversations the last few years on healthcare matters, serving communities and exploring how we can work collaboratively to make a positive impact on human lives.
Curating articles from more than 1,000 nationally recognized trades provides me an immense opportunity to gain insights into trends, potential, and opportunities within healthcare, especially since I have done this daily for more than 20 years.
My first thought is that we don’t have a highly effective healthcare system in the U.S. So many people talk, experiment, and attempt change, but with minimal tangible results. As a result, for decades we have delivered care that is expensive, complicated, and fragmented. In my opinion a fix for healthcare begins with the acceptance that the status quo isn’t an option. Disruption is the only answer.
The status quo isn’t an option. Disruption is the only answer.
To do that, stakeholders must embrace that learning, reimagining, and engaging are essential to ensuring health outcomes.
Given that technology adoption has been redefined and even accelerated because of the pandemic, where are the three areas to watch in the next two years, and where you see results forming of significance?
Yes, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technologies by at least 10 times. That places the healthcare industry on the fast track required to improve health outcomes and cost benefits.
I can think of three areas to watch:
- At-home care delivery by leveraging digital health with access to providers,
- Augmented intelligence / machine learning, and
- Cybersecurity
Soon, we will be living in a “health data” world that will demand algorithms built for prediction, detection, personalization, and precision, while we face privacy and security issues.
However, within that digital health space, multiple point solutions and terminologies currently also contribute to fragmentation. Consequentially, it is essential to standardize various technologies, including wearables, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, mHealth, apps, and more.
Technology accelerates even bad designs, so do you believe business models and transformations are in line or leading technology or does technology transformation push new changes in healthcare business models?
I believe that now is the time to bring together business models with an innovation mindset enabled by technologies, data, analytics, and individual engagement. Together, we should aim for the three A’s of healthcare transformation: Affordability, Accessibility, and Actionability, to ensure healthcare for all by all, while promoting health equity.
We should aim for the three A’s of healthcare transformation: Affordability, Accessibility, and Actionability.
The narrative of population health, health inequity, value-based care, and even data transparency and ubiquity have been the subject of seminars and conferences for years. What do you think we need to do to get it to real and scaled results?
We have been talking about those things for decades. We should ask: why we are not making progress in healthcare while we all see the exponential progress of other industries benefiting the community. We need to transform and disrupt the status quo first and encourage government to invest in fundamental research, while the private sector makes an impact through innovation and commercialization to alter the current trajectory.
In 2021 and beyond, will the information you gather change healthcare or will we be talking about this in the future? What do you hope to see from an industry filled with narratives?
I see consolidations, technology evolution, and investments that will change decades of broken, siloed, and fee-for-service healthcare within an opaque and convoluted payment structure.
I believe at-home care delivery of online and of in-person care will set the trend to create a health ecosystem that is digital and data intensive. I see it driving transformation into the home and lives of diverse individuals.
What about you and your passions? Why are you and your enterprise so focused on your value proposition?
I am a health IT industry professional with four decades of industry experience and a passion for the internet, information, imagination, innovation, and impact. I love my curation job and the healthcare industry. I enjoy it each day. It keeps me energized, thinking, and dreaming.
I have a passion for the internet, information, imagination, innovation, and impact.
RamaOnHealthcare was formally created six years ago. We built a state-of-the-art digital platform, and today we are known nationally in all sectors of healthcare through our daily online newsfeed. RamaOnHealthcare has become the “Healthcare Industry’s First in Kind Article Research Hub” that brings signal to noise with SmartSearch and SmartTopic features. The database exceeds 40,000 impactful articles to research, self-educate, and share strategically.
We are currently building a business media platform for healthcare, comprising of filterability/ personalization, white label, and collaboration modules. We plan to collaboratively launch a learning, innovation and impact network within a peer-to-peer community by leveraging our business media platform.
Do you have any advice for the readers? What do you wish for them and what is your mandate to them?
Our readers should continue to learn daily and to be thoughtful and actionable. It takes a village to care for a village. We should collectively work towards creating a better health system, ensuring affordability and access for all by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It takes a village to care for a village.
Timely data is essential for learning, enabling innovative ideas, encouraging engagement, and providing the hope and inspiration that can impact all human life.
Thank you, Rama. This helps accomplish what I intended: to inspire the hope and intentions of RamaOnHealthcare, and you, to create and promote the greater good for all.
Mohan Nair is the CEO of Emerge Inc., a business transformation advisory. He is a holder of the very prestigious Edmund Hillary Fellowship from New Zealand and sought-after keynote speaker and moderator. Mohan holds the most read commentary in the history of RamaOnHealthcare. @mohanemerge, mohannair.com, linkedin.com/in/mohanemerge