Center for Connected Health Symposium

Lubna Hammoudeh

Fellow at BWH/PGY6

I greatly enjoyed attending the Center of Connected Health Symposium.

As a first-time attendee, it was interesting to see how technological developments in medicine significantly impact patients’ lives and help physicians move forward in future advances of healthcare, connecting care & discovery.  One such development stands out to me because in my field as radiation oncologist there is a big technological turn over in our machines & the ways to treat patients with multiple different set up that change rapidly from previous era for example after being simulated patients for planning relying on CT based machines now there is moving towards the use of MRI mapping instead.

This symposium gives us the opportunity to take part in the new era of health, reduce burnout on physicians by improve their satisfaction, practice efficiency, time saving, efficient practice and decrease the cost of healthcare.

One of the challenges in this era of a digital health system is the patient-physician relation which I believe is still the cornerstone in this zone of technological changes.  I believe this is the cornerstone because we as physicians & healthcare team have to focus on not losing patients’ trust, consider quality of care, continuous engagement with patients & understanding their concerns to have a valuable outcome. The conference touched on these themes ….

Attending this conference has impacted my thinking on implementing a mobile app which will assess radiation treatment toxicities to evaluate & assess patients’ disease outcome after completion of radiation course; this app that would incorporate a list of yes or no survey questions with the expected side effects including grading parameters for each one & according to score results observation vs. intervention will be decided to deal with different patients’ status.

An app like this was talked about at the conference.  Apps like these will be a great convenience to patients by avoiding extra trips to the hospital, it would also be cost effective and reduce medical team efforts. I would like to be a part of implementing this type of change and attending the conference helped give me the boost to do this.

We as radiation oncologists have also implemented a pre-encounter questionnaire by use of an iPad, we have been able to save time & employee workload in patient evaluation, this idea was similar to one that was shown in the conference that enable the patients to do pulmonary function test from their home & send the results to the clinic.

My future plan is to work on a project within my field of radiation oncology to generate a new modality of radiation that would improve and widen the treatment course and decrease radiation related toxicities which will in return benefit patients , this was highlighted clearly in the conference talks especially the topics that were related to pediatric patients with ADHD & autism using new tools that help them concentrate & deal with daily activities with less harm possible whether it is physical side effects or negative psychological impact.