Omar Shaker: Interoperability concerns in healthcare (JPM week exclusive video)

• 10,000 attendees and over 450 private & public companies attend JPM week.
• Digital health startup BetterDoctor hosted a Nordic-themed social mixer (with sauna!) on the Embarcadero on Tuesday.
• Omar Shaker of Clarity Insights, shared his concerns with interoperability in digital health.

Omar Shaker: Biggest Concern for Digital Health in 2018

On Tuesday we attended the BetterDoctor social mixer on the Embarcadero. While there, I got a chance to catchup with Omar Shaker, Healthcare consultant with Clarity Insights.

Here's the transcript from our conversation: 

Omar Shaker: My biggest concern is interoperability. I think it's one of the biggest concerns of American healthcare in general. A lot of our insurance companies have the will and the resources to bring in clinical data from all the hospitals they work with. There's a lot of problems with standardization and with incentives that make this really hard. I think this is really where the potential in digital health lies. Where you can be able to integrate data from a lot of different sources and being able to kind of look at a patient through all these different layers of data. I think that's the single biggest challenge right now. There's so many EMR's out there and there are so many standards. I think with the new HL7 FHIR standard it might get much more interoperable very soon. But it's obviously going to require a lot of effort, a lot of resources, and a lot of know-how. I think that's kind of the bottleneck right now.

Hoala Greevy: Got it! Thank you.

About Omar Shaker

Omar Shaker describes himself as a Physician by Background, an Entrepreneur at Heart, and a Data Geek by Training. We first met a year ago at the Norcal HIMSS Innovation Showcase Conference. He is also the co-founder of Health 2.0 Cairo.