VP Of Care Management At John Hopkins HealthCare To Speak at the 2012 Healthcare IT Summit

Linda Dunbar, PhD, RN and vice president of care management at Johns Hopkins HealthCare will be speaking at the 2012 Healthcare IT Summit that runs Nov. 11-13 at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Fla. Dunbar's session, "Integration and Innovation: New Care Delivery Models and the Technology to Support Them," will be extremely beneficial for both provider and payer attendees.

Dunbar will be speaking about Population Health strategies and new models of care delivery in support of improving the health, and decreasing the cost, of the care of a population.

"The model I will describe has been implemented at Johns Hopkins Medicine and is comprised of an Integrated Delivery Team at the site of primary care," said Dunbar.

The model addresses primary, secondary and tertiary prevention and care of a population with an integrated care system. In the JHM model of care, the Primary Care Provider, a Nurse Case Manager, a behavioral health specialist and a community health worker complete an assessment of behavioral and clinical needs, complete a rounding process and then work to support self-management activities, explained Dunbar. 

"The biggest takeaway from my session,  for healthcare IT executives, will be a better understanding of the importance of IT in supporting the interdisciplinary team in their activities, aggregating data and measuring outcomes," said Dunbar.

Here's a little more background on Dr. Dunbar...

Dr. Dunbar serves as vice president of care management at Johns Hopkins HealthCare. In her role as Vice President for the past ten years at JHHC, Dr. Dunbar directs the 220 staff members in the divisions of Population Health Management, Behavioral Health, and Research and Development. Since 1997, Dr. Dunbar has led the department to create, deliver and evaluate innovate population health management strategies in the areas of single and multiple chronic diseases, behavioral conditions and substance abuse disease. 

Dr. Dunbar holds an adjunct faculty appointment at the JHU School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and frequently teaches and lectures on such topics as managed care, population health strategies, health policy and reform, risk adjustment, and research and evaluation.

Dr. Dunbar’s dissertation work, entitled “Alternative Methods of Identifying Children with Special Health Care Needs: Implications for Medicaid Programs”, explored the use of predictive models and risk adjustment in populations of children with chronic conditions. Dr. Dunbar has published in peer-reviewed journals on chronic illness in infants and children, risk-adjustment methodology, predictive modeling in high-risk patient identification, health policy for children and adults, pay-for-performance and quality, primary care and population health strategies. She has served as a consultant in the Disease Management industry and for State Medicaid Agencies and health plans. Dr. Dunbar speaks and consults nationally and internationally about risk-adjustment and population health strategies.

Dr. Dunbar completed 40 credits in the Master’s of Business Administration program at Johns Hopkins University in early 1984-1988, a MS in 2000 and PhD in 2005 from University of Maryland in Nursing and Health Policy.

Todd Park, U.S. CTO, On HHS & Healthcare IT

Todd Park, the former Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2009, still has high interest in the healthcare industry and how it is utilizing technology for the American public. Prior to joining HHS, Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry.

Although he is now the Federal Chief Technology Officer, Park still keeps involved in the healthcare community by creating the Health Data Initiative (HDI) Forum and the annual Health Datapalooza event, which is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health.

Q: What is on the horizon for HHS? What is the biggest innovation in progress in the effort to revolutionize the release and use of health data?

Park: HHS has been the lead agency for the health data initiative and is continuing to expand the amount of data that is being available, readable and is continuing to broaden awareness of entrepreneurs, innovators and the public about this data and its availability as resource to power innovation. There’s a lot going on there across multiple dimensions.

For example, CMS (Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services), which is part of HHS, has very powerful data and has just launched a new office called The Office for Information Products and Data Analytics. This is an office that is dedicated to improving access to and utilization of data, both internally at CMS and externally, in order to improve health and 
care.

Q: Among your achievements at HHS were the launch of programs such as the consumer website HealthCare.gov, the Health Data Initiative and the HDI forum. What was the thought process behind the creation of these projects and how did they come to fruition?

Park: Well, HealthCare.gov was a requirement of The Affordable Care Act so that’s where that project came from. The Health Data Initiative came from earlier conversations that I had with Bill Corr, deputy secretary of HHS, who really wanted us to think about how HHS can deliver higher social return on all of the data that HHS had as a priority. There were other ideas that were germinated from innovative career civil servants at HHS who came to me with amazing ideas, which we then crystalized and put into action. Something that I’ve learned from this is that great ideas can come form anywhere and anyone and as innovation leaders, it is very important to look everywhere for the next great idea that can then be turned into something wonderful for the American people.

Q&A With Todd Park, U.S. CTO

Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has a vision for changing the way American citizens interact with technology. We had an opportunity to discuss those initiatives with Park, who was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2009. Prior to joining HHS, Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry. Many of our questions came from XChange Events advisory board members.

Q: Please tell us about the digital government strategy—how will it help the American people, and what you are doing to drive that strategy forward?

Park: U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel and I rolled out the digital government strategy in May, which seeks to do three things:

1. Put government at citizens’ fingertips and literally bring government to mobile devices, and any device in general, that citizens are using.
2. Buy technology in a certain way that gives bigger bang for the taxpayer buck.
3. Move even more energetically and strongly in the direction of open data.

Q: Why is it important to make government data open and machine-readable?

Park: This is important because if you open up the data and make it machine-readable, it becomes easier able to power innovative digital government services. And, even more importantly, it opens the data in usable form so that all of the other “smart people” in the world—developers, innovators and entrepreneurs—can take our data and turn it into magic. They can turn it into new products or services that can improve American lives, help grow our economy and create jobs.

Q: What is one of the key initiatives that you are pursuing to catapult the digital government strategy forward?

Park: One of the key initiatives that is driving the digital government strategy forward is the open data initiatives program. This program seeks to not just liberate government data in machine-readable form, but also catalyze the development of an ecosystem of innovation that utilizes that data and educate innovators and entrepreneurs about that data. Through a series of meet-ups, code-a-thons and datapaloozas, we are able to celebrate the wide range of innovations that people are already pursuing.

Q: What is the Presidential Innovation Fellows program? How will it impact the state of our health care industry and the American government as a whole?

Park: The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a program that we launched simultaneous with the digital government strategy. It’s a program that aims to bring together the amazing innovators from outside the government and the best innovators inside government. We then create agile teams that aim to deliver game-changing solutions in six months.

Q: At what point does the federal government start leveraging this country’s IT infrastructure and talent as opposed to developing its own?

Park: I think that moment is now. The central thrust of our approach with open data initiatives and the digital government strategy is that we shouldn’t build the tools that should be useful to citizens ourselves; we should open up that data so innovators outside of government can leverage our data to build useful services and applications with their infrastructure, technology, ingenuity and people.

So if we want to maximize the social return on taxpayer investment in government data, we know that we can’t just have the government build tools on it, but instead have everyone else build tools on the data to help the public.

Q: What’s your plan to deal with “Policy Lag” where the current federal policies have not kept up with the advancement of technology?

Park: Initiatives like the digital government strategy can close that gap dramatically.  If you think about the implications of a move like open data, what we’re doing is future-proofing the U.S. government from a technology standpoint because we are saying, “we are going to open up our data and when the world evolves, it will utilize that data in a number of ways.” It allows our data to evolve and advance at the same speed that technology is advancing.

Q: Small businesses continue to struggle to get a fair share of the federal government IT pie. What are some actions the federal government is taking to enhance SMB opportunities?

Park: RFP-EZ.  One of the features of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is that it is both bringing in 20 people to be literal fellows, and it also is an opportunity for others to engage as well. You can sign up and provide input from wherever you are. We are looking for folks to join the networks to provide support and ideas to each of the projects. It gives small businesses, and anyone else, the opportunity to provide input and insight. To sign up you can go to white.gov/innovationfellows.

Q: If you could give our diverse IT executive audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

Park: There is immense innovation talent locked in your organization and the most important thing you can do as an innovation or IT leader is to unleash that talent and unleash that mojo. Embrace the power of the lean start-up approach to change management (an idea first established by Eric Ries). The final piece of advice is to embrace the power of open innovation and to embrace the idea of Joy’s law. It is to recognize that if you came up with lots of other people to get something done, you will actually deliver much better results, much faster with a much lower cost than if you try to do it all yourself. 

Q: What is the day in the life of Todd Park as the CTO of the U.S.?

Park: Crazy and wonderful! About 80 percent of my time is spent functioning as the virtual CEO and leader of a set of high-priority initiatives and projects that I am responsible for leading the execution of, and delivering results. The other 20 percent of my time is being a senior adviser that provides council and ideas and other kinds of assistance on issues as they arise.