Healthcare Reimagined
On Healthcare reimagined, we speak with clinicians, entrepreneurs, and provider and payor executives who are innovating within US Healthcare.
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Healthcare Reimagined
Meghna Patel - Deputy Secretary for Health Innovation, PA Department of Health
The first episode of season two of Healthcare Reimagined was recorded on October 5th, 2020. I had a chance to speak with Meghna Patel, who is the Deputy Secretary for Health Innovation at the Pennsylvania Department of Health. We began with a discussion on Pennsylvania's prescription drug monitoring program, which Meghna and her team launched in a five month time-frame as a means of addressing the growing opioid crisis. The database is available to all licensed prescribers in the state, and in less than four years has grown to serve 110,000 active users on the system. Since the launch of the program, there has been a 35% reduction in opioid prescriptions in the state of Pennsylvania, which is remarkable progress in such a short time.
In the second-half of the interview, we discussed COVID Alert PA, which is a contact tracing app released by the state of PA to help support the test-trace-isolate model. The app, created in collaboration with 26 other states and international governments, uses bluetooth technology to create a digital key that allows for anonymous contact tracing. In earlier efforts to contact trace, most people could only identify immediate family members when asked to recall with whom they had been in close contact. COVID Alert PA uses bluetooth to remove the guesswork, prevent false positives, and has been downloaded by close to 200,000 people in the first month since it was released. A joint study done by Oxford and Stanford Universities found that if 15% of people in the U.S. downloaded their state's contact tracing app, we could reduce the spread of the virus by as much as 15%.
The Society for HealthCare Innovation is a community of professionals dedicated to improving healthcare through innovation. We are comprised of physicians, nurses, healthcare executives, tech and industry leaders, and many more with a unifying ethos and mission- improving healthcare through innovation.
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Time Stamps:
0:00 - Introduction
1:18 - Introduction to PDMP - the PA DOH's prescription drug monitoring program
3:50 - PDMP's origins span back to the 1970's. It was previously use for law enforcement and investigations, and was never used as clinical tool until it was relaunched in 2016
4:55 - How the PA DOH gathers data to measure the impact of the program
7:00 - Outcome improvements that have resulted from the program
8:55 - PDMP integration into provider EMR's
10:25 - Introduction to COVID Alert PA
11:14 - Apple/Google joint efforts to facilitate contact tracing
11:40 - The traditional contact tracing strategy and its shortcomings
15:00 - How COVID Alert PA works
18:25 - It turns out it cannot be used like a dating app (I know, I was also disappointed)
19:08 - How COVID Alert PA is different from traditional contract tracing
20:00 - Adoption rate - 185,000 downloads in the first 30 days since it launched
20:50 - International collaboration
24:00 - Important public information about contract tracing apps
25:20 - Interoperability and final comments