The Script: Health care goes digital

Janel Shoun-Smith | 04/11/2018

Lipscomb brings innovation and scholarly approach to advanced technological innovations in health care

Training on and understanding the latest technology is not just a luxury, it’s a requirement for today’s world, and Lipscomb is heeding the call with two new partnerships: one with IBM Watson, the same technology that beat Jeopardy’s top champions at their own game, and one with Hashed Health a company pioneering the use of blockchain technology, the secure distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin.

These partnerships have already paved the way for students to engage in a number of software development projects, database mining projects and other real-world applications that could change the way health care is provided now in the future.

Watson Analytics

In April 2017, Lipscomb University’s College of Pharmacy became the first college of pharmacy in the nation to provide students full access to IBM Watson Analytics and trainings as part of its curriculum, providing student pharmacists an in-depth understanding of data and business analytics before they enter the health care workforce.

Today health care companies expect individuals at all levels of an organization to act on data-driven insights, so future pharmacists need to analyze and understand data to help deliver more informed answers in patient care, said Dr. Roger Davis, dean of the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences.

“Offering access to Watson Analytics gives our student pharmacists a market advantage in predictive analytics and data mining, learning, and research,” Davis said. “The knowledge they will gain from this collaboration will help provide the competitive edge needed to succeed in largely data-driven health care careers.”

So how does the artificial intelligence technology that helped Watson win Jeopardy apply to health care? It’s all about working through the rising flood of data currently available, recognizing patterns and communicating them in a way to the user that makes sense and sparks new ideas, revelations and ultimately better patient care.

The Watson platform uses advanced cognitive computing capabilities like natural language processing to guide users through predictive analytics without letting human personal bias seep into the analysis. Students learn how to analyze their dataset as well as integrate new external data sources into their existing data to uncover the insights they need.

“Organizations no longer need to rely only on data scientists or information technology (IT) personnel to prepare and interpret data,” said Randy Messina, Global Public Sector Leader, Watson Analytics, IBM. With Watson Analytics, “Health care professionals along with marketing, sales, operations and human resource professionals can get answers they need from all types of data – without the need for a data scientist.”

For example, what if researchers and clinicians could identify genes and genetic mutations that affect cancer treatment by sifting through health data from thousands of patients? According to Dr. Joe Deweese, associate professor of pharmacy, identifying relevant genetic mutations is a major challenge to anticancer therapy. He and one of his students, Renee Menzie, fourth-year student pharmacist, have been examining cancer genomic databases seeking for a way to use Watson’s technology to streamline data analysis.

“At some point in the future, when a person gets diagnosed with cancer, what we would like to do is provide a specific therapy that is designed for their cancer. So until we more completely understand the genes and mutations involved in those cancers, we can’t really do an individualized therapy. Such a therapy could increase the rates of survival and decrease costs,” Deweese said.

“In Watson, you enter data using an Excel spreadsheet and it can do the various statistical analyses and find correlations between columns of data,” Deweese said. The program does these analyses in response to natural language prompts, like “Is there a correlation between age, gender and cancer type?,” instead of a line of code, and then provides resources such a charts and graphs pre-designed for the user to tell the story of that data.

“The ability to rapidly ask many questions in natural language that Watson can generate figures from is really useful,” Deweese said. “Watson is the beginning. It’s a very robust platform for data reduction, and uses massive data sets, analyzing hundreds and thousands of patients at a time for many different variables.”

Since this past spring, every student in the College of Pharmacy and the Master of Health Care Informatics program have their own account to access Watson tutorials, to use the Watson program and to earn a credential for their resumes in the use of Watson Analytics.

Blockchain Technology

Lipscomb followed up its partnership with IBM in June with a new membership in the Hashed Health Consortium, a group of organizations led by Nashville-based Hashed Health devoted to leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to transform the health care industry. Lipscomb was the first academic institution to join the consortium.

Membership will allow Lipscomb faculty and students to partner with innovative companies to develop internships or other experiential learning, research and entrepreneurial opportunities involving blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies, said Dr. Kevin Clauson, associate professor in the health care informatics and pharmacy programs.

In the world of collecting and using health care data, security is key, Clauson said. Blockchain is the framework that underlies Bitcoin, and so far, Bitcoin has never been hacked, he said.

“Blockchain technology offers unprecedented ways to secure patients’ data, opening up opportunities for patients to share their data and researchers leveraging data to impact patient outcomes,” he said.

Currently the field is wide open for innovators and researchers, including Lipscomb faculty and students, to explore how to use Blockchain technology in various ways such as tracking medications from the manufacturer to the patient, thus ensuring the legitimacy of the medication and strengthening protections against counterfeit medications.

In addition, the more comfortable patients and providers become that their health data is secure, the more they will be willing to share useful data or provide data through technology (imagine a wireless Fitbit-style monitor for a certain health condition), said Clauson.

“Blockchain technology holds amazing promise to engage patients in their own care, making it a participatory effort to improve health outcomes,” said Dr. Beth Breeden, chair and associate professor of the health care informatics master’s program.

Involvement in the consortium has already paid off for pharmacy and informatics students who attended the Distributed Health Conference and Code Camp in 2017, the first conference held in the world on blockchain technology in health care. Three students participated in the Distributed Health Hackathon, using blockchain technology to create VacVerify, a secure database system for vaccination records, and later presented their work to all Lipscomb’s student pharmacists.

Blockchain technology creates a chain of data blocks, and no single block can be changed

without the change being recorded and reflected throughout the whole chain. So no change to the data can occur secretly, an important factor when it comes to referring to and analyzing past health data, said Tom Wilson, a third-year student in the dual Pharm.D. and MHCI program, who attended the conference and helped create the VacVerify pilot along with classmates Hassan Alwan and Austin Fulwood.

Another student in the MHCI program, Stuart Lackey, has already been tapped as CEO and

co-founder of Nashville-based blockchain company Solaster Health, which aims to harness blockchain technology to give rise to an alternative global health economy by incentivizing innovation and value exchange.

In addition, a group from Lipscomb in partnership with Hashed Health have already developed an innovative system using Ethereum, another type of distributed ledger technology, to allow potential employers to verify the academic credentials of Lipscomb’s health care informatics and pharmacy graduates.

The program is designed to combat the increasingly common problem of job applicants claiming academic credentials they have not actually earned.

“Hashed Health is enthusiastic about expanding its collaborative work with Lipscomb to help tackle problems around graduate medical education verification,” said John Bass, CEO of Hashed Health. “With the combination of Hashed Health’s expertise on the intersection of health care and blockchain technology, and the research capability of Lipscomb, we are driving the next revolution in health care.”

MHCI ranked No. 11 in the nation

Lipscomb’s adoption of Watson and blockchain technology into its health science programs is the most recent accomplishment to position the university’s health care informatics master’s program as one of the best in the nation, a goal already achieved according to Top Master’s in Healthcare Administration (www.topmastersinhealthcare.com), which ranked Lipscomb’s program No. 11 in the nation in May 2017.

Lipscomb ranked above the University of Kansas, Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Missouri and Duke University, among others.

This ranking was created using the National Center for Education Statistics’ College Navigator database. From a list of qualifying schools offering health care informatics degrees, the top 20 programs were selected and ranked based on four criteria: accreditation, emphasis on character, comprehensiveness of curriculum and contemporary focus.

“This ranking is evidence that our faculty is preparing our students in the classroom and through research opportunities at a level of which the nation has taken notice. We are on the front line of pharmacy education across the country,” said Dr. Roger L. Davis, dean of Lipscomb’s College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences.

Lipscomb’s MHCI program has enrolled more than 120 students since its launch in 2011 and has a job placement rate which exceeds 99 percent, said Dr. Beth Breeden, chair of the program. After establishing the master’s program, Lipscomb then became only the second college in the nation to offer a dual Pharm.D./MCHI degree.

Lipscomb’s Master of Health Care Informatics was developed to meet a strong demand for health care technology professionals in Nashville.

“Our city is recognized as the nation’s health care capitol with more than 400 health care companies calling Nashville home, said Beth Breeden, chair of the program. “We are preparing the health care informatics workforce of tomorrow and see significant opportunities in this field in many cities, but especially locally with more than 1,000 technology positions currently available in the area.”

While developing the program, Lipscomb faculty reached out to corporate executives and community leaders to determine the informatiics skills and competencies most needed, Breeden said. The resulting curriculum was deigned to provide advanced education and training in information technology, health science and business analytics, a combination that has proven popular with both potential students and employers, she said.

“In the health informatics field, one needs to become educated in and comfortable designing new solutions that are innovative,” said Breeden. “We work to provide opportunities that students will not find anywhere else, and in the process, provide platforms for them to become change agents in the field.”

To learn more about the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences click here.