Industry Insight

Saint Joseph’s College of Maine HIM Program
Receives CAHIIM Accreditation

The Bachelor of Science in Health Information Management (BSHIM) at Saint Joseph’s College is now accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM). The Saint Joseph’s College program is only the second BSHIM degree in New England to earn the CAHIIM accreditation distinction, and is the only accredited BSHIM degree offered in northern New England. The Saint Joseph’s College program is delivered online.

By meeting the CAHIIM standards, successful graduates of the BSHIM program will be eligible to apply and test for the Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) credential. This credential signifies that an individual is an expert in managing patient health information and medical records, collecting and analyzing patient data, and using classification systems and medical terminologies.

Individuals with the RHIA credential are in high demand in New England and other parts of the country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth for health information technicians is projected to grow by 15% by 2024 to nearly 190,000 positions.

Twila Weiszbrod, DBA, RHIA, program director for health administration programs at Saint Joseph’s College, notes, “We chose to undergo this rigorous three-year review process to demonstrate the commitment that Saint Joseph’s College has to this important segment of a rapidly evolving health care industry. I obtained the RHIA credential early in my career, and this allowed me to accelerate into management positions with significant salary increases and increased responsibilities.”

Visit www.sjcme.edu/him for more information.

— Source: Saint Joseph’s College

UCSF, Intel Join Forces to Develop Deep Learning Analytics

University of California, San Francisco’s (UCSF) Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) recently announced a collaboration with Intel Corporation to deploy and validate a deep learning analytics platform designed to improve care by helping clinicians make better treatment decisions, predict patient outcomes, and respond more nimbly in acute situations.

The collaboration brings together Intel’s leading edge computer science and deep learning capabilities with UCSF’s clinical and research expertise to create a scalable, high-performance computational environment to support enhanced frontline clinical decision-making for a wide variety of patient care scenarios. Until now, progress toward this goal has been difficult because complex, diverse datasets are managed in multiple, incompatible systems. This next-generation platform will allow UCSF to efficiently manage the huge volume and variety of data collected for clinical care as well as newer Big Data from genomic sequencing, monitors, sensors, and wearables. These data will be integrated into a highly scalable “information commons” that will enable advanced analytics with machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The end result will be algorithms that can rapidly support data-driven clinical decision-making.

“While artificial intelligence and machine learning have been integrated into our everyday lives, our ability to use them in health care is a relatively new phenomenon,” says Michael Blum, MD, associate vice chancellor for informatics, director of CDHI, and a professor of medicine at UCSF. “Now that we have ‘digitized’ health care, we can begin utilizing the same technologies that have made the driverless car and virtual assistants possible and bring them to bear on vexing health care challenges such as predicting health risks, preventing hospital readmissions, analyzing complex medical images, and more. Deep learning environments are capable of rapidly analyzing and predicting patient trajectories utilizing vast amounts of multidimensional data. By integrating deep learning capabilities into the care delivered to critically injured patients, providers will have access to real-time decision support that will enable timely decision making in an environment where seconds are the difference between life and death. We expect these technologies, combined with the clinical and scientific knowledge of UCSF, to be made accessible through the cloud to drive the transformation of health and health care.”

UCSF and Intel will work together to deploy the high-performance computing environment on industry standard Intel Xeon processor-based platforms that will support the data management and algorithm development lifecycle, including data curation and annotation, algorithm training, and testing against labeled datasets with particular prespecified outcomes. The collaboration will also allow UCSF and Intel to better understand how deep learning analytics and machine-driven workflows can be employed to optimize the clinical environment and patient outcomes. This work will inform Intel’s development and testing of new platform architectures for the health care industry.

“This collaboration between Intel and UCSF will accelerate the development of deep learning algorithms that have great potential to benefit patients,” says Kay Eron, general manager of health and life sciences in Intel’s Data Center Group. “Combining the medical science and computer science expertise across our organizations will enable us to more effectively tackle barriers in directing the latest technologies toward critical needs in health care.”

The platform will enable UCSF’s deep learning use cases to run in a distributed fashion on a central processing unit-based cluster. The platform will be able to handle large data sets and scale easily for future use case requirements, including supporting larger convolutional neural network models, artificial networks patterned after living organisms, and very large multidimensional datasets. In the future, Intel expects to incorporate the deep learning analytics platform with other Intel analytics frameworks, health care data sources, and application program interfaces—code that allows different programs to communicate—to create increasingly sophisticated use case algorithms that will continue to raise the bar in health and health care.

— Source: University of California, San Francisco

Philips Appoints Roy Smythe as Chief Medical Officer
for Health Informatics

Royal Philips recently announced the appointment of Roy Smythe, MD, as chief medical officer for health informatics, effective immediately.

Smythe has deep clinical knowledge and a wealth of experience in leading clinical and technological innovation programs supporting integrated health systems in their transition to value-based care. He joins Philips from Valence Health, a US-based value-based care solutions provider, where he held the position of chief medical officer. He will report to Jeroen Tas, CEO of connected care and health informatics at Philips. Smythe’s key area of focus will be health informatics. His knowledge will be leveraged across all Philips’ connected care and health informatics businesses, which comprise health care informatics solutions and services, patient care and monitoring solutions, population health management, and emerging businesses.

“In [Smythe’s] role as chief medical officer he will help ensure our health care informatics solutions are answering the clinical, technological, and business needs of our customers as they transition to new models of care delivery that aim to optimize care paths, and improve patient outcomes,” Tas says.

Prior to his role at Valence Health, Smythe was chief medical officer at Avia; medical director for innovation for Baylor Scott & White Healthcare; Roney Endowed Chair and Professor of Surgery, Medicine and Molecular Medicine; and chairman of the department of surgery at Baylor Scott & White Health System and for the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine. He began his clinical career as a surgeon and translational scientist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

“I look forward to joining Philips and working together with care providers on the future of health care,” Smythe says. “It’s my firm belief we are at an important and opportune crossroad in time where emerging technologies, IT, and data analytics can literally transform care delivery—rendering it more efficient, effective, and equitable for both populations and individuals. However, implementation of these new tools and approaches will only be successful if done in strong collaboration with those professionals actually delivering care. In my new role I plan to facilitate the open and constructive dialogues that are needed to facilitate and promote these exciting innovations.”

— Source: Royal Philips