Q&A with HIMSS CEO Hal Wolf, Part 1: “We Threw a Lot Against the Wall. Now We Have to Step Back.”

“There’s not a single part of our ecosystem that hasn’t been negatively impacted. There’s been disruption all the way to the core.”

It would be difficult to sum up 2020 more accurately. Healthcare, like most industries, was turned on its head, and those in leadership roles were forced to pivot quickly and find ways to continue to provide care through the most difficult of situations. They also figured out how to leverage that disruption to accelerate innovation, particularly in areas that had long lagged behind, including digital health and supply chain management.

With this “new normal,” however, comes a new set of challenges for leaders, according to Hal Wolf, president at CEO of HIMSS. During a recent interview, he talked about how the pandemic has affected not just health systems but vendors, the weakness that were exposed by Covid-19, and how HIMSS is working to turn those into opportunities as we move forward.

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Key Takeaways:



* The change healthcare has undergone has been “immense,” with areas of resistance that had held digital health back in the past “crumbling out of necessity.”

* For healthcare IT leaders, the real question is, “as we pull away from the emergency declarations, what will that new normal look like,” particularly now that consumers have experienced digital health.

* “There is ambiguity on how reimbursement will be managed moving forward. And that ambiguity is freezing up plans on how to take advantage of full telehealth capabilities.”

* The key weaknesses that were exposed during Covid? Lack of a national patient identifier, lack of a solid infrastructure for population health, and the lack of an integrated supply chain.





Q&A with Hal Wolf

Gamble:  Where are you now? Are you in Chicago area?

Wolf:  No, I live in Denver, Colorado, in the mountains. I split my time between the two. I’ve doing that from the beginning. When I was fortunate enough to join HIMSS, one of the critical questions was whether I could do this from Denver. It’s actually worked out quite well because prior to the pandemic, 60 percent of our organization was working from home. We’ve always been very proactive in providing that type of infrastructure, and so the ability to scale up to 100 percent from home was actually not a significant leap for our IT department. That’s about the only thing that I would say was beneficial in leading to all of this. I think we’re all trying to find little silver linings in this tragedy.

 

Gamble:  Exactly. One thing that struck me is how much care delivery has changed, and really how the whole industry has transformed. What are your thoughts around that?

Wolf:  Kate, it has been significant. I recently met with a group of people from Milan, Italy, which was the initial place where COVID-19 flared up, with Seattle shortly behind it. The change has been immense. We went from an encounter-based paradigm that many of us have worked very hard through the years to turn into a digital health environment, recognizing the challenge in healthcare that is coming, as well as the consumer preference. Overnight, areas of resistance — which could have been anything from the culture of medical groups not wanting to adopt, or regulatory challenges that have existed in the United States, for example — crumbled out of necessity.

And so we’ve seen this incredible acceleration in the use of digital health, through emails, video, and even components of home-based monitoring. A lot of those happened through different areas of opportunity,