Courses:

The concept of "connected health" extends healthcare beyond the traditional confines of hospitals and doctors' offices, bringing healthcare to our everyday surroundings. The availability of technology in the home, our aging population and the increase of patients with chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity, are some of the factors fueling increased interest and growth in connected health. Also, health care organizations face a changing reimbursement environment, provider shortages and increasing pressure to lower costs, all factors that contribute to interest in novel approaches to care delivery.

To achieve the vision of connected health, two challenges must be addressed: Providing patients with better tools for self care, and giving providers better tools for remote care. This insight has resulted in the planning and building of connected health platforms that are extensible across many chronically ill populations (e.g. adherence tools, e-visits, physiologic monitoring).

The most success in using connected health as a model of care delivery has been achieved in the management of congestive heart failure, where all participants can find benefit in using connected health tools to manage this population in the home setting. Other programs that will be highlighted include workplace hypertension management, the use of smart pill bottles to improve adherence and activity monitoring as a tool for overweight and diabetes. Lecture by Dr. Joseph Kvedar (PDF)

The U.S. National Healthcare IT program is comprised of many moving parts - standards harmonization, architecture, privacy and certification. This lecture will include a discussion of these national efforts from an insider who is responsible for many aspects of these efforts. Additionally, regional health IT activities are accelerating throughout the country. As CEO of the Massachusetts RHIO, the speaker will describe current challenges in clinical data sharing in New England. Lecture by Dr. John Halamka (PDF)

There is nothing modern about the divergence between research and clinical medicine, or the limitations in translating discoveries into practice. In the nineteenth century, as the art of anatomical dissection and discipline of pharmacology ripened, many prominent physicians considered medical research an impractical, if unethical use of time. Only through the daily "grind" of treating patients could the art of medicine evolve; laboratory research and clinical experimentation were viewed as distracting. While few physicians today would characterize the work of medical research as trivial, many are nevertheless disconnected from it and fail to practice what is referred to as "evidence-based medicine," which roughly translates into more research-based, less instinctually driven. Along with the molecularization of medicine is a quantum leap in the technology of medicine, especially with diagnostic platforms. As the pace of technological innovation increases, the gap is widening more quickly than ever between the art of the possible and what is actually practiced. Physicians have less time to keep up with an avalanche of information on diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic advances. One component of the solution to the challenge of translational medicine is a convergence of informatics capabilities from the bench to the bedside. Also referred to as integrative informatics, providers and their organizations need to invest in a future state infrastructure that will do more than simply capture electronic orders, or clinical notations. Clinical innovation, in the future, if not the present, requires a more accelerated assimilation of information across the discovery continuum, organized and formatted for use at the point-of-treatment. In this lecture, we will review the basic issues of translational medicine, the emerging field of integrative informatics and ideas for accelerating the knowledge-to-practice continuum. Lecture by Keith Strier (PDF - 1.2 MB)

Information technology can provide significant leverage of the strategies of integrated healthcare delivery systems. This talk will discuss three critical areas of information technology: Electronic health records, remote provision of care and IT support for genome-based research and patient care. Lecture by Dr. John Glaser.

Our health care "system" focuses too much on acute illness and neither rewards the prevention of illness nor aligns incentives to encourage better care of the growing numbers of persons with chronic medical conditions. As a result, we are witnessing rising health costs along with massive inefficiencies that contribute to the low rating of the health status of Americans relative to those living in other nations. In an effort to stem the rising cost while also improving quality of care, systematic efforts to organize care for the chronically ill has led to the evolution of a new sector in the health care industry: Disease management (or chronic condition management). This session will use an interactive problem-based teaching method to provide a simulation that teaches problem solving in population health, focusing on improving the care of patients with diabetes. Students will work in teams representing key stakeholders in either a resource-rich or resource-poor environment. Lecture by Dr. Locke.