On April 29th the Coalition for Imaging and Bioengineering Research (CIBR) held its 5th annual Medical Technology Showcase in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Building. The goal for the annual event is to highlight the impact imaging research has on patients, academic research institutions and industry through collaborative imaging technology displays.

In total, the event was attended by Members of Congress, Congressional staff, program staff from NIH, patient organizations, imaging society leadership and academic radiology research departments.

I’ve spoken before on how mobile health apps and devices can expand the ability of healthcare providers to customize treatment for patients. An important part of making that happen is the ability of app developers to quickly get innovative products to market. But one big hurdle has been the uncertainty around regulation.

The healthcare industry amasses a tremendous amount of clinical data from which it gets far less value than it should. One issue is the lack of consistent, or perhaps I should say persistent, data stewardship with many errors and omissions negatively impacting clinicians. A second issue is a failure to put clinical data to work in meaningful ways, including the identification of trends and patterns (your most at-risk patients), or — at a much higher system level — reducing network leakage and creating effective measurement initiatives.

I recently returned from GE Healthcare Digital’s major customer meeting, Centricity LIVE. While at this meeting, which provided many opportunities to speak with customers about their priorities, I presented on the new CMS Quality Payment Program (QPP) called for by the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), which sets out a path to value-based Medicare physician payment.

Ask a physician about prior authorization and you will probably get an earful. Called “time-consuming, expensive and frustrating,” prior authorization is the biggest headache facing doctors today. Healthcare providers are acutely aware of the headaches that prior authorization cause and the resources it consumes. Some physicians are forced to hire dedicated administrative staff to handle prior authorizations just to keep up.

Have you seen the show “Shark Tank?” I had the chance to act as a “shark” this week for an innovative challenge where entrepreneurs took to the stage to pitch their best health tech ideas. I have the privilege of representing the AMA as the secretary of the eHealth Initiative (eHI), a non-profit multi-stakeholder organization committed to improving health and healthcare through information technology. The group just held its iTHRIVE Challenge, receiving 60 “pitches” from entrepreneurs.

Disrupting business models is in vogue; wherever you turn there’s a new startup, a new idea, and another way to turn healthcare on it’s head. The symbol of this new way of thinking, a veritable talisman representing the crux of disruption, is a company called Uber, a yardstick by which every enterprise must be measured. It’s become hard to pick up any media without reading about the “uberification” of healthcare, the ways in which these disruptive business models will fundamentally remold medical care delivery, but does the hype exceed our expectation?

Drawing on her long track record of innovation and forward-thinking, internist Dorothy (Dody) Fisher, M.D. has joined Forward Health Group as Chief Clinical Officer. With the goal of helping Forward Health Group client physicians make the transition to value-based care, Dr. Fisher will work to help physicians and care teams maintain their deep sense of mission, to help them deliver one-on-one care in this new era of population health management.

There are two constructs of care networks. One is the network analysis and perspective of a group of clinicians having either a direct or indirect set of relationships that leads to a flow of patients; and then there's the behavioral flow of patients.