American College of Cardiology tech chief on… Leave a comment
Ami Bhatt, MD, chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology, has been an advocate for digital health long before the COVID-19 pandemic expanded its adoption and use.
Dr. Bhatt, who is also the director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s adult congenital heart disease program and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, began working in virtual stroke care around 2013. However, “nobody really wanted to join me in this effort,” she said in an interview with HealthTech Magazine published June 6. Then the pandemic happened.
Here are a few highlights from her talk with HealthTech:
COVID-19 began to make people understand the value of digital health and telemedicine: “It also allowed us to create the workflows and infrastructure that nobody had invested in before,” she said. “We were able to say, ‘This kind of innovation is important. Delivering care in the communities where people live is important. Therefore, we will create an infrastructure that makes that happen.'”
All of the parties involved in the digital health sector must work together — academic institutions, startups, engineering schools, providers, health systems, payers, venture capital and private equity firms: “I think that’s both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity,” she said. “There is so much growth in digital health, but if that growth is running parallel to the practice of medicine and the delivery of healthcare, then to try and shove those two together is going to be very hard.”
Future innovations include using analytics and machine learning to diagnose heart conditions, virtual reality training for surgeons and healthy food as prescription medicine: “That’s the great thing about healthcare innovation today: There are so many ways to be innovative, because being innovative means looking at the same problem through a different and collaborative lens,” she said. “Rather than asking, ‘How can I change this,’ ask, ‘How can we change this?'”
