Ep. 36 - Aetna with Digital Health Evangelist Brian Ahier and Jordan Bryant on the Mobile First Podcast

Mobile First

Brian Ahier is a nationally known worker in digital health with a focus on health data exchange, use and analytics. He is the Digital Health Evangelist at Aetna working in their Medicity business. He specializes in digital health, EHR, health information exchange, population health management, and IT infrastructure to support new payment and care delivery models. Brian sits on the Consumer Technology Task Force, a Joint Collaboration of the Health IT Policy and Standards Committees which makes recommendations and provides insight on ONC/HHS projects and initiatives with a consumer focus to ensure the person remains at the center, engaging the experience and feedback of both patients and providers. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Brian had always been a technologist and had always believed that the internet will be huge. He shares to us a time when his mom had Alzheimer’s and they had been frustrated in the way the data about her health was presented over to him and his siblings via fax machines. The quality of care and the outcome was not good, the information to make good decisions was not there and it had caused a lot of stress and money to the family until their mom passed away. He was angry at the health system and wondered why the health care system is so uncoordinated if the technology is there to help out. That is when he decided that he will participate and make a difference. The goal is to keep people out of the hospital so Brian shares that we should look at lesser beds and not building new hospital wings (except if it’s for a pediatric cancer or something we need). These hospital beds will no longer be necessary, sort of an exponential decline, as the exponential growth will be brought about by technology caring for people in the community. Computers are now accessible everywhere instead of just in one main frame and a mobile phone has more computing power than computers just 10 years ago. Brian shares that we are in the inflection point of the exponential curve of information technology so you have to think mobile first. If you look at the price point of a computer, the processing speeds continue to increase and other data points towards validating this fact. Anyone who tries to improve health care has to recognize the exponential growth factor. Look at the emerging trends and technologies so that, three or five years from now, you can accurately forecast where you are going to be in terms of technology capabilities. Health care, at its core, is humans caring for other humans so it has to be local and community-oriented. It is local more than anything because if you have a relationship with somebody, it is much easier to build in behavioral modifications. You have to tap in to the people who care about the individual – these are the people who love you, your church group, people you play bridge with, etc. Everybody talks about gaps in health care and its true but we should realize that gaps in data are the ones that lead to gaps in care. That is why it is really vital that we get all the health information to the right person to the right place at the right time so we can provide the best care possible. Brian shares his secret to success: learning more from his failures rather than his success.