Health Care’s Leading Minds Discuss Data Usage and Enhancing Value

Participants of this year's Snowbird Health Summit.

The annual Snowbird Health Summit in Utah is an opportunity to gather some of health care's great minds to envision the future of health care. Attended by 32 leading experts – physicians, data scientists, government health policy leaders, and change agents from hospitals, physician groups and health plans – the 2020 Summit focused on two issues: the potential for data to guide and drive change, and the question of how to enhance value in health care.

This year JHF President and CEO, Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD, moderated two panels. In the first panel, Paying For Healthy Aging: Innovative Case Studies, she challenged the panelists to consider how healthcare systems can appeal to the growing consumer demand of seniors—paying for the services that seniors want and jettisoning the services they don't—and keep up with the new commercial innovators.

Responding to her challenge were panelists Ken Kim, MD (Chief Medical Officer at Alignment Health), Jason Mitchell, MD (Chief Medical and Clinical Transformation Officer for Presbyterian Healthcare Services), and Vindell Washington, MD (Chief Clinical Officer for the Verily Health Platforms group). The group described exciting innovations in services and service delivery – in hospitals but also in homes – that lowered diabetes amputations, decreased patient falls and reduced hospital readmissions.

For the second panel, Safer Care: How Can Big Data Save Us? Three Case Studies, Feinstein moderated input from panelists Dave Classen, MD (CMIO at Pascal Metrics and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah), Jason Mitchell, MD and John Birkmeyer, MD (Chief Clinical Officer at Sound Physicians). Building on a Patient Safety Ecosystem developed by JHF staff showing all of the federal agencies that collect safety data, Feinstein shared a laundry list of how big data can save us – from precision medicine to population health & individual-level surveillance to system failure analysis, quality engineering (enabling the development of customized training programs), accreditation and accountability, patient empowerment, and research & innovation. The panelists featured ways they had harnessed the power of big data in many of these areas, drilling down, for example, on reasons for uncontrolled diabetes and real-time risks to patient safety.