Kimberly Noel, MD, MPH Telehealth Director, Deputy Chief Medical Information Officer Stony Brook University Hospital

Dr. Noel is a clinical researcher, physician, and telehealth specialist. She is an appointee to the New York State Department of Health Regulatory Modernization Initiative Telehealth Advisory Committee and serves as the Director of Stony Brook Medicine Telehealth and the Deputy Chief Medical Information Officer. She provides leadership to all telehealth activities of the institution, working to build a telehealth infrastructure in collaboration with all key stakeholders of Stony Brook Medicine (SBM). She leads the Telehealth Workgroup, an interprofessional organization tasked by the Senior Executive Group to create policies and procedures for all medical interventions and services delivered by telehealth.

Interoperability

Interoperability is the future. It is the patient’s right to access their data, and that can sometimes be made difficult if there are more multiple different healthcare systems involved in a patient’s care. What interoperability does is democratize the data and be able to have the patient access their information regardless of where they decide to see care. There are big initiatives such as the Regional Health Information organization that are working to be a central repository of that very valuable data.

Interoperability offers the promise that patients will be able to go to seek care wherever they want to and be able to have access to their data. That being said, we should all be looking at how to optimize data to improve patient outcomes.

Data & Privacy

As a healthcare system is more important that we help not only shepherd the patient through understanding the importance of privacy in healthcare data, but vetting vendors and other third parties to know how they’re going to be using the data if we are going to help them get it, and if the patient is at the center of all of these changes in health care, the idea that the patient will have access to their own data, the patient will be at the center of the care plan.

Patients

How we engage the patient is the most important piece I think of in this equation, particularly for chronic care managers. There’s a lot of investment being made in helping people motivate behavior change, helping them reach goals, for example smoking cessation goals or getting cancer screening. There’s a secret sauce to be able to get people to be excited about engaging in their healthcare. And it’s very important that we do that in a personalized and culturally sensitive way. I think patient advocacy is the future of a successful implementation of technology and the future of healthcare.

This interview was filmed at NODE.HEALTH Digital Medicine conference