As a pediatric Anesthesiologist, I waited patiently for my profession to be reshaped by the technology revolution that had fundamentally transformed countless other industries. The opportunity for patients to be active participants in their care, doctors to better understand their performance and place in the hospital, and easily accessible data to drive out risk and inefficiencies.
Unfortunately, emerging solutions were no better than the status quo, especially within surgical services and anesthesia. Medical records systems were clunky, expensive, and siloed, and data wasn’t being efficiently leveraged to improve the delivery or quality of care.
In hindsight, it’s all entirely understandable. Existing healthcare systems have a limited ability to embrace change. They’ve spent decades navigating difficult security challenges and patching together disparate systems using expensive and complex integration options. They’ve adopted “single-vendor” approaches and implemented complex policies and procedures to address these limitations – the very policies that now ironically inhibit the adoption of new solutions. But thankfully, patients, providers, and administrators all agree we need transformation.
On a personal level, I struggle to objectively measure the quality of my own practice. I lack the tools to compare myself to my peers, identify best practices, and monitor areas needing improvement. I lack perspective, and without the ability to understand performance, I must rely on personal opinions to make clinical decisions. We have learned from other industries that such perception-based approaches to improvement are less than ideal.
We founded Graphium Health with a team of private practice physicians, proven business intelligence experts, and skilled software architects who understand the business and information needs of healthcare providers. By providing easily accessible and consumable analytics to both hospitals and the individual healthcare providers, we create an unprecedented opportunity to improve operational efficiency, reduce complications, and lower costs – thus, improving the overall patient experience.
