EP255: UCHealth: A Short List of Hospital Innovations Rolled Out in 2019, With Richard Zane, MD, From UCHealth

Dr. Richard Zane is the chief innovation officer at UCHealth. He’s also the executive director of emergency services there. Besides that, he chairs emergency medicine at the medical school and he’s a professor at the business school and at the medical school.

At the recent NODE Digital Medicine Conference, I asked Dr. Zane to talk about the 2019 innovations that he is most proud to have rolled out in their hospital system. We talk about three of these innovations, and then we get into the challenges that Dr. Zane and his team faced and overcame in the pursuit of those rollouts.

What struck me most is the underlying dependency on data of all three of these innovations. Optimally complete data sets are really needed to make each one of these programs work as well as they possibly could. And as a corollary to that, the necessity of collaboration with payers like insurance carriers and PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers) to even get close to that complete optimal data set. Sidebar (because I can’t help myself): It’s going to be really interesting to see which payers and PBMs are ultimately willing to share data with providers—and, honestly, which providers are willing to share data with other providers—to help their patients get the right treatments in pursuit of better patient outcomes, because that’s kind of a proxy to which ones value better patient care more than, let’s just say, other things. I think the organizations that choose to share and choose to collaborate—you know, which ones self-sort into that category—that information is going to become more and more publicly available, and I wonder when and if that transparency will influence organizational decision making.

In this health care podcast, Dr. Zane uses the term ethnographic a couple of times. Call me “out of the loop” but I had not heard that term before. So, just in case you haven’t either, let me reference my go-to for mostly accurate information, otherwise known as Wikipedia. Ethnographic research, says Wikipedia, is a qualitative method where researchers observe and/or interact with a study’s participants in their real-life environment.

You can learn more by connecting with Dr. Zane on Twitter at @richardzane.

Richard Zane, MD, currently serves as the George B. Boedecker Professor and chair of the department of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, professor of health administration at the University of Colorado Business School, and chief innovation officer for UCHealth. Dr. Zane completed medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia, followed by residency training in emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Following residency, Dr. Zane joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins as assistant chief of service. In 1998, Dr. Zane joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.