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June 26: Today on the Conference channel, it’s an Interview in Action live from HIMSS 2023 with Harsh Nayyar, Co-Founder and CTO at Pocket Health. How did Harsh's personal experience with obtaining medical imaging on CDs inspire the creation of Pocket Health? What are the limitations and inefficiencies associated with using CDs for medical image sharing, and why is it important to eliminate these barriers for patients? How does Pocket Health facilitate the seamless transfer of medical imaging data between different providers and patients?

"The Patient Experience - A Technology Perspective" is a live webinar that explores the intersection of healthcare and technology, focusing on enhancing the patient experience. As healthcare systems prioritize patient-centered care, leveraging technology becomes crucial. Join us on July 6th, 1:00 PM ET and join the discussion! Register Here. - https://thisweekhealth.com/leader-series-the-patient-experience-a-technology-perspective/

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Transcript

 This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Welcome to this week, health my name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week Health. A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 Spring conferences, vibe in Nashville and hymns in Chicago.

Special thanks to our cDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

You can check them out on our website this week, health.com, now onto this interview.

 All right, here we are from HIMSS 2023 in Chicago, and I'm joined right now with Harsh Nair with Pocket Health. Yeah. Very nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Looking forward to the conversation. Likewise. So, um, Founder and CTO, which came first? Founder. No, CTO had to come first. You had an idea.

You had a thought.

and you started

That's true. That's true. So, you know, I had my own personal experience, actually. I was actually living in the Bay Area. I'm from Toronto. I moved to the Bay Area to do my grad school. At Stanford. I was actually working at a startup. I was playing tennis with a buddy and I fell and I, and I hurt my ankle.

I went home that day. The next day it didn't get any better. So my doctor actually asked me to go get an x-ray and an mri. I went to the local imaging center in Sunnyvale, California. At the end of the appointment, they handed me these two CDs. I was just like blown away. Here I am in the middle of Silicon Valley and apparently the state of the art in medical imaging is to burn digital information onto a CD so that I could take it back to my doctor.

And so what's wrong with the CD? I mean, it's worked for years. The fax still works for us.

When's the last time you used a CD? in your, in your, in your life and more importantly, I think asking the patient to come back to pick up a physical piece of media to then like act like a courier to go from one provider to the next provider to the third provider is just really inefficient when as a patient you have much more important things to deal with.

I mean, I think it's, it's almost obvious to people now, it's like. I can't remember the last time I had a CD player in my computer. So, if you're going to bring that to me as a position or a practice, I'm going to look at you and be like...

You'd be surprised, honestly. Like, the existing CD player... solutions in image sharing are so ineffective that providers are being forced to fall back to the CD because it is interoperable when you have networks, which is what is the traditional solution in this space, they require a lot of prerequisites on both sides, whether it's different providers or the patient and the provider in order to even get started.

And what we're really focused on at Bucket Health is just Eliminate all of that friction, those barriers to getting started.

I'm going to get to that in just a second, because I really want to dig into pocket health. But it's, when we think of interoperability as the person picking up a CD and taking it to the next, the person is essentially the A.

P. I. The pipe and then the A. P. I. On the other side to get it from one place. I mean, that's got to be the worst form. And so we've got to solve that problem. So pocket house steps in. You have that experience. And I mean, how do you solve that problem? I mean, when you talk about imaging centers now, there's a lot of third party imaging centers.

I mean, we're talking about data that could be in a lot of different places and moving it. Yeah. to the health system, getting it to the provider. What does that look like?

What that looks like is relying on common standards. So, sit on top of the PAC system. We use the DICOM interface in order to connect with those providers wherever they may be.

in order to facilitate that image exchange between the provider and pocket health. So we connect securely with the provider within their environment and then securely transfer that imaging out to our cloud so that providers and patients can then access that image.

Interesting. So your client is the providers.

Our clients is the provider and the patients. So we have a very unique. model where we, we actually deploy at no cost to the provider and patients can actually pay a nominal fee, which is actually reimbursable through their FSA or HSA plan.

So any health system can call you today and say, look, we want a better solution for our patients.

You're going to come in and put a,

uh, We have a lightweight software that installs directly on maybe a VM in their environment. Connects within their environment to their clinical systems like the PAC system and then facilitates that transfer to other providers as well as patients.

So then when, when the patient comes into their practice, they can say, Hey, look, download Pocket Health and we're going to give you a copy of the image and then you're going to be able to take it to wherever you go next.

Exactly, exactly. And they can, share directly to that other provider. But what's most efficient and what we're encouraging is Focus on getting that imaging to the patient and they'll take it exactly where it needs to go. Cause there's no one who cares about the outcome more than the patient themselves.

The patient.

 We'll get back to our show in just a minute as we celebrate our fifth anniversary At this week, health, we've partnered with Alex's Lemonade Stand of Foundation, combating Childhood Cancer. And I've just been floored by the generosity of our community. We set a goal to raise $50,000 this year, I wasn't sure how we were gonna hit it.

And we are already up over $34,000 for the year, and we want to thank you for being a part of that. This June, as you know, we've been doing drives all year, and we're gonna do something a little different in June. We have 2 29 groups where we bring together healthcare leaders, about 10 to 15 of 'em in a round table format.

And we discuss the biggest challenges facing healthcare and how technology can be applied to those challenges. We have an event in June and together with our chairs of that event, our participants and our sponsor partners, we're gonna be donating $5,000, to the cause. We really want to thank our chairs.

For that event, Jeff Sterman and Chad Brisendine. Jeff Sterman with Memorial Healthcare. Chad Brisendine with St. Luke's University Health Network, for being a part of that. We want to thank our sponsor partners order, Gordian Dynamics Clear Sense rubric. Sure test VMware and Nuance for also being a part of raising that $5,000.

And we wanna thank you again for your generosity. If you wanna join us this week, health.com, you can click on the Alex's lemonade stand banner on the homepage and you'll get taken to our lemonade stand. You can go ahead and give directly onto that page and see some of the other people who have given Now back to our show.

You know, As I'm thinking about this solution, the patient, the patient moving the data from point A to point B with images, there's a lot of different kinds of images, obviously radiology, images. Not that hard. Cardiology images get to be a little bigger and that kind of stuff.

I mean, does the complexity of the image create different challenges?

Not really. Fortunately, all imaging is sort of standardized on top of the DICOM format, which means that as long as it's DICOM, we're able to retrieve it. We're able to share it with the patients for the viewing. our zero footprint viewer is able to visualize that imaging, whether it's cardiology, breast imaging, anything, really any imaging.

And what that means is that not only can the patient view it, but anyone they share with can also view it. So oftentimes, if you're a community provider, you're dealing with a very, let's say, poor viewing experience on a CD that may or may not even load versus when you get access facilitated by pocket health, just a consistent experience that's actually often loads faster than even the native experience from the PAC system.

So the individual imaging centers, this could represent, and for them, I would picture very low cost solution for them to get a digital transport solution for their patients. It would actually potentially catapult some of them into the 21st century.

Absolutely. Absolutely. In terms of actually takes, there's there's providers out there southern Illinois health care is actually an example.

they're so overburdened. They actually have their C. T. Text. Burning CDs in between appointments, rather than performing more scans. We have a shortage of technologists, and, once they implemented pocket health, now those technologists are actually doing what they're trained to do, rather than...

Unnecessary administrative work.

And the overall cost of them was

zero. Yeah. And in fact they realized 100, 000 in immediate R. O. I.

So what's an example of a large system that's utilized?

So we have UHS, their Southern California region, which recently went live. And we have Southern Illinois is another example. We have a number of large providers in Canada as well. SickKids , uh, University Health Network.

Fantastic. So if you were going to have a conversation with somebody in the health system, who would it be with?

We would talk to the CIO, we would talk to the Director of Radiology.

Those are the best. Well, Harsh, I want to thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you. There

     Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it's phenomenal that they've taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community. It is greatly appreciated.

We wanna thank our partners, CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

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