VA turns to data standards to improve health care as more veterans use personal health monitoring devices.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is leveraging data standards to leverage new information from smart devices and improve personalized medicine for veterans.
“Our job is to look at where we need to be in health care, not where we are,” said Joe Ronzio, VA’s deputy director of health technology, at the Federal AI and Data Summit. ATARC in Washington, DC on Thursday. “We are constantly trying to figure out where we need to be in five to ten years… When you modernize, you have to look to the future to see where we need to go, but we are still using old systems in most health care.
VA is making new strides in health care partly fueled by new demands from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the agency still faces “outdated issues.”
“We still need engineers, we still need industry, we still need government and everybody working together to move that needle so we can start talking about the full use of technology” , said Ronzio.
Remote monitoring and diagnostics have been growing since the start of the pandemic, enabling organizations to better deliver virtual healthcare solutions and services. Ronzio said 97% of adults have a cellphone or smart device in their pocket, and 85% of those devices are smartphones. VA focuses on consumer-facing technologies and identifies similarities with medical devices to improve data collection and delivery to healthcare providers.
“At what point is this a medical device versus a consumer device? That’s going to be interesting for data collection as we move forward, because everyone in this room who has one of these devices at home or on your body 24/7 have more data than any of your medical staff on yourself,” Ronzio said.
As consumers use personal health monitoring devices, Ronzio said more emphasis needs to be placed on privacy and data protection. VA also focuses on ethical AI, particularly as it relates to healthcare. As more organizations develop AI-based solutions, VA works to mitigate bias to improve personalized healthcare.
“How do we get to a point of impact on the health of everyone in the United States? How are we driving personalized medicine? Every analytics platform requires a lot of data,” Ronzio said. “So we’re not going to get a machine learning algorithm to figure it out unless we get a lot of data and a lot of people want to support these kinds of initiatives. But it’s not going to be cheap. And , for it to be effective, it must help you when you need it.
VA leverages interoperability standards, such as Hl7 FHIR, to move the needle for data exchange. With respect to IoT devices and personal health data, the agency is exploring emerging standards such as the IEEE Standards Association P2795 standard being developed for shared analytics.
“It’s that standard so that if we have a data definition for disease, if we have data definitions for your physiology, we can share any analysis with you to go on your own device. – whether it’s an Android device, an iPhone, or any other type of data crunch that contains your data – so you can analyze your own data,” Ronzio said. “How can we change the paradigm of how health care works? health through? »
Going forward, VA will focus on innovation in stem cell research, digital healthcare, 3D printing, synthetic data and more to personalize and accelerate healthcare for veterans.
“We already see a lot of the possible event field,” Ronzio said. “That’s where the money is going to be: accelerating the practice of medical research…the benefits far outweigh any problems.”
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