The leaders at Houston Methodist Hospital have been working hard to develop a totally new facility, which is set to open in the next two years. The strategic planning has been both broad and deep, and has involved leaders from departments and disciplines across the organization. Two Houston Methodist leaders will join us—Michelle Stansbury, Vice President, Innovation and IT Applications, and Debra. F. Sukin, Regional Senior Vice President and CEO of Houston Methodist-The Woodlands Hospital—to share what they and their colleagues have been working on, and what they’ve been learning as they’ve been moving closer to the new facility’s opening date.

Health Systems continue to be exposed to ransomware attacks during the global pandemic with increased impact to patient care and exposure to large global integrated health delivery systems.  Patients have recognized significant patient care impacts such as rescheduled surgeries, increased patient wait times, delayed COVID-19 test results, and challenges filling prescription medications.  This presentation will provide healthcare executives a guide to understanding how their organization is positioned to protect against emerging ransomware threats.
Learning Objectives

• Provide thought leadership to current cyber security events
• Share industry experience and how they have impacted health systems.
• Educate leaders on what core security program elements should be foundationally in place.

At a time when cyber threats against patient care organizations are intensifying, where should healthcare IT security leaders place their bets—and their resources—when it comes to investing in protective technologies and strategies? In this panel, respected cybersecurity leaders will help audience members sort through the noise and the hype

Secure your data and recovery in the data center and the cloud

The pace of IT change continues to rise, accelerating in Healthcare often more than other industries. Healthcare data protection strategies have had to evolve to support modern environments in the data center, the cloud and SaaS workloads. This session will show how you can secure everything across all workloads and reduce the reality gap between business expectations and IT capability for disaster recovery. 

Learn how to improve your cyber security posture, reduce vulnerabilities, protect your data, and align your organizational needs with industry best practices. Best practices like data immutability, granular role-based access controls, and broad platform support can ensure your mission-critical data will always be available. 
 

Borders, parameters, and rigid silos are fading as it comes to data and the potential to speed improvements in care. Data in the EMR is simply not enough these days, but once set free it semantically attracts its SDOH counterpart elements, painting a complete picture of an individual or impacting a population at a macro level.

Our stories of swift data collaboration take place across all parts of the world, from southwest San Antonio in connecting the entire spectrum of orchestrated care for individuals with special needs, to an almost unbelievable tale of touching 1 billion lives in India. Join us on this journey around the world to hear stories of improved care resulting from a conscious pairing of interoperability with a clear purpose.
 

Randal Weber, M.D., Associate Vice President for Healthcare Advancement at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, will sit down with Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland to share about the important initiative that he is helping to lead in order to improve response times from inside his organization when new patients who have never been treated before at MD Anderson, as well as patients previously seen, come into the system to be scheduled for diagnostic appointments and procedures. Dr. Weber will share about the complex process challenges involved in improving organizational responsiveness, and what’s being learned.

The final 30 minutes of Day 1 at the Healthcare Innovation Summits will feature 2 dedicated focus group style workshops taking place. Each workshop will explore unique content created by the HI editorial team. The Summit audience will be split up into 2 groups and every 15 minutes the groups will move to the next workshop.

We’ll demonstrate how an attacker searches for wireless medical devices (aka “shadow networks”) over the Internet and uses that knowledge to create an over-the-air attack which results in unauthorized network access, network hijacking, ransomware execution or data exfiltration. 
In this talk you will learn how to:
●    Build a wireless security policy that incorporates all the HDOs networks, including shadow networks
●    Enforce your wireless security policy in an effective and efficient manner
●    Prevent over-the-air attacks without hampering business operations 

Nick Bonvino, CEO of Greater Houston Healthconnect, will share with the audience the important work that Greater Houston Healthconnect is involved in, in advancing health information exchange across the greater Houston metropolitan area, while also analyzing and preparing for policy changes at the federal and state levels, changes anticipated to shift how HIEs work and the services that they provide to clinicians and patient care organizations.

The pandemic took telehealth from a “nice-to-have” to a critical solution overnight. Since the height of the pandemic, U.S. healthcare organizations have embraced hybrid care models that bring virtual workflows into traditional patient care. By applying lessons learned in digital transformation and, in many cases, redeploying resources adopted during the pandemic, many leading health systems are reimagining their virtual care strategy to help address staffing challenges and improve patient safety. Enterprise telehealth is paving the way for virtual engagement at every patient’s bedside to reduce clinical blind spots and amplify the reach of limited staff resources. With this new paradigm in place, there has been a drive to rein in the various solutions put in place temporarily during the pandemic, with more and more healthcare IT teams trying to drive security standards across virtual care workflows.
The true value of hybrid care is only realized with the ability to see and hear in every patient room. The success of virtual care programs hinges on networks’ ability to support uninterrupted, high-quality video communications on a 24/7 basis. This requirement is often not fully understood by health IT teams driving standardized security and network management across the enterprise. In fact, this is often at odds with corporate IT initiatives around network security and performance. Standards that make perfect sense for many IoT devices such as forcing time-outs on logged-in staff, renewing IP address leases, and over subscribing Wi-Fi access points can seriously disrupt patient care. Designing networks to efficiently handle IP address management and support two-way communication at scale is not trivial. Wi-Fi networks must be optimized to handle not only two-way video but the potential congestion caused by connected devices. It is not sufficient to say we have invested millions of dollars in a state-of-the-art network if it is not properly configured to support the high demands of two-way, real-time communications. 
This session reveals practical steps health systems can take to successfully extend virtual care across the enterprise. The presenter addresses key network considerations when designing the tech-enabled Hospital Room of the Future, with emphasis on bridging the gap between IT and clinical teams to ensure an ideal balance between network security and workflow enrichment. Attendees will learn about key network-related factors that can impact virtual care programs and best practices to ensure your network is optimized to support the critical nature of virtual patient care. The presenter will also share sample workflows that illustrate the importance of coordinated planning between IT and clinical teams to ensure all parties are on the same page as they deploy hybrid care programs aimed at reducing pressure on clinical staff and improving patient outcomes.
Learning objectives:
1.    Uncover key network considerations for developing a reliable and adaptable enterprise telehealth strategy
2.    Explore best practices for maximizing security without disrupting care through IT and clinical collaboration
3.    Identify ways health systems are improving clinician and patient experience with hybrid care models

The leaders at Memorial Hermann Hospital System are very serious about fully supporting and enabling their organization’s population health management work—so serious, in fact, that they created a Population Health Services Organization. Healthcare Innovation Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland will sit down with Mital Brahmbhatt, Director of Health Management at the Population Health Services Organization (PHSO) at Memorial Hermann Hospital System, to find out about that organization’s strategic goals and how it operates.

Pioneering patient care organizations are moving ahead to develop strategies to integrate the social determinants of health (SDOH) into their population health management initiatives. A panel of experts will discuss the complexities, challenges, and opportunities in moving forward in this leading-edge area of activity.

The session that will be talked about for month’s after the Midwest Summit concludes. Do not miss the Ask the Experts interactive networking session. Have your questions answered and help attendees tackle their greatest challenges. 

George Gooch,  CEO of the Texas Health Services Authority, will share with the audience about the important work that THSA has been involved in on the state level, to advance health data exchange and interoperability across Texas. He will discuss with Mark Hagland elements in the state-level and federal-level policy landscapes around interoperability, and how TEFCA might reshape the overall landscape.

Industry partner spotlights feature engaging, passionate speakers whose talks expose new ideas in healthcare that are supported by concrete evidence and are relevant to current and future industry trends. Presentations will explore novel and counterintuitive approaches to solving the many complex problems facing our health system.

Even as leaders at the most pioneering patient care organizations are moving quickly into artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced analytics strategies, there remains much confusion over which strategies—and technologies—are valuable, and which aren’t. Find out from a panel of experts what’s working and what’s not—and where data analytics is really headed in the next few years.

Nora Belcher, Executive Director of the Texas e-Health Alliance, will sit down with Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland to discuss the broad policy landscape around interoperability, telehealth, care delivery, at a crucial time in the evolution of the U.S. healthcare system. She will offer insights on the biggest challenges and opportunities in this operating environment of change and challenge.

At a time of extreme pressure and stress for practicing physicians, one of the key areas of focus around the topic of EHR optimization has become the overall effort to avert physician burnout. Among the issues involved:

• First of all, what is physician burnout, in the context of EHR use? What do we know about its causes, and sources of relief?
• What are the key areas in which EHRs can be optimized in the physician workflow, but which still require ongoing effort and strategy?
• What are the leading-edge organizations doing in this area?
• What are the biggest challenges to EHR optimization to improve workflow and ease physician burnout?
• What are the biggest lessons learned so far in this area?
• What does this journey into EHR optimization look like, healthcare system-wide, in the next few years?