January 9, 2018 — In a new health policy statement,[1] the American College of Cardiology (ACC) identifies how to best support healthcare advances in three arenas — digital health, big data and precision health.
Healthcare transformation is the product of a shared vision between a broad range of stakeholders to establish the future of care delivery and to develop new models that are patient-centered, evidence-driven and in which value is rewarded over volume, according to the ACC. Important within this transformation are newly developed and rapidly evolving technology-based innovations, including:
- Digital health - wearable, smartphone and sensor-based technologies;
- Big data - the aggregation of large quantities of structured and unstructured health information and sophisticated analyses with artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing techniques; and
- Precision-health - approaches to identify individual-level risk and the determinants of wellness and pathogenicity.
In September 2016, the college convened an inaugural healthcare innovation summit to provide a framework for determining how the advances in these three arenas can meaningfully transform the delivery of healthcare. It was designed to understand the needs and perspectives of stakeholders across healthcare including patient advocacy groups, clinicians, academia, government, healthcare administration, business, entrepreneurship and industry.
"Healthcare transformation requires collaboration," said Sanjeev Bhavnani, M.D., physician scientist and cardiologist at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation and chair of the document. "The ACC Roadmap for Innovation harnesses an 'Innovation Collaborative' between key stakeholders that allows early phase ideas to grow into scalable solutions, facilitates new stakeholder partnerships, promotes collaborative efforts to identify unmet clinical needs and implements new ideas."
The college's priorities for healthcare transformation are developed upon human-centered design principles and the key factors important to various stakeholders within five main categories:
- Identification of the high priority clinical problems to solve;
- Facilitation of meaningful communication and information exchange;
- Heightening patient, caregiver and physician activation;
- Streamlining healthcare resources and information technology infrastructures; and
- Promoting cultural empowerment.
As new healthcare innovations are developed, the college proposes several key accelerants for organizational governance as new programs are designed in research and patient care. These accelerants include developing new methods for data transparency and data sharing for patients and clinicians, recognizing the role of patients as partners in new technology-enabled models of shared care, moving from episodic care to virtual and remote monitoring, and utilizing big data and data analytics in next-generation learning health systems to improve clinical workflows.
"By organizing new developments in digital health, big data and precision health, and by creating learning methods that lead to continuous performance improvement and optimal practice management, the ACC will be well-positioned to bring value to patients, clinicians and stakeholders and to play a key role in the future delivery of health care," Bhavnani said.
The 2017 Roadmap for Innovation – ACC Health Policy Statement on Healthcare Transformation in the Era of Digital Health, Big Data, and Precision Health published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
For more information: www.acc.org
Read the related article "The Future of Cardiology: 17 Technologies to Watch.”
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July 29, 2024 
