Dr Bobby Green: How Technology Can Help Clinicians Make Decisions

While technology and electronic health records will one day be used in a variety of ways can help improve the delivery of care to patients, this may take a long time, said Bobby Green, MD, MSCE, senior vice president of clinical oncology at Flatiron Health.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What technological advances do you want to see improve how you deliver care to your patients?

I think ultimately electronic health records and technology have an opportunity to help us in a variety of ways. The first is in finding and accessing information—that needs to be much easier. The second is in how we document that information, both for ourselves and how we share it with others. The third is how we process that information to help us make decisions. And, the final is back to that concept of learning the healthcare system, which is really an evolution of the first 3—which is taking the data from the point-of-care, generating knowledge, learning things from it, and then feeding that knowledge back to the clinicians is the ultimate end game.

How long might such a change take, and do you think you’ll still be practicing medicine by then?

I hope I will still be practicing by then and I think I will still be practicing by then. I think these things will certainly happen to some degree in my career. They’re not going to happen tomorrow and they’re not going to happen in 2018, but what does really excite me and it’s what I was so excited to talk about this weekend in Las Vegas [at Flatiron Health's OncoCloud '17, held September 15-17], is that we really are seeing now, concrete information and knowledge that was generated from a network of community oncology practices that can actually come back and help inform care. And that’s actually, even though it’s early, and even though there’s only a handful of cases, that’s a really big deal.