Cedric Truss, DHA, MSHI, Director Health Informatics Program and Clinical Assistant Professor at Georgia State University
Cedric Truss is an experienced, highly adaptable healthcare professional with cross-industry experience in data analysis, project management, healthcare operations and IS design and implementation. His expertise in generating accurate and insightful reports that facilitate strategic business planning, financial, and clinical decisions, contributing to quality improvement and regulatory compliance. Highly accomplished in streamlining operational processes, enhancing systems interoperability, and liaising across departments to yield tangible outcomes aligned with organizational objectives. Knowledge of Health Policy, Qualitative Research, Change Management, Meaningful Use requirements, HL7 standards, HIPAA, FERPA, and common healthcare IS applications (Clinical Data Warehouse, CPOE, EMR/EHR, LIS).
Improving Patient Engagement
The way that we are working with digital now using wearables etc., a lot of patients and consumers alike are both utilizing these tools to get things done and track their health. For example, you have the Apple Watch, Fitbit, and the Samsung watches, they’re all smart devices that you can connect with their smart devices. Almost everyone pretty much has a smart device these days and so they’re able to use those to build on and track their health. For example, they can to see how what works for them, what does not work for them, and they can share this information with their physician, their provider, whoever they may have, or just to curate some better practices for themselves.
Improving Health Outcomes
Digital health tools are beneficial because they allow the patient for one to see what they have done where their help started, how it has improved, or what things they can do to kind of move in the right direction. You might have patients that have high blood pressure or may need to lose some weight, they can use these devices to encourage them, remind them to get up, be active and promote behavioral change. You may have patients with diabetes, they can track information and there, their medications, their water, and food intake with many of these devices. For these reasons, digital health tools are important right now because patients can track them with their smart devices. They can also go to different applications on the web and review what they have done.
In the past we were not using technology to the best of our ability and the way that we are using it now in healthcare, I think there is an improvement. I think healthcare will continue to get better, more patients will continue to use technology on their own and improve their own health.