Guest post by Adnan Ahmed, president of the health IT solutions provider CNSI.
Each year, health IT experts and state health officials from across the country convene at the Medicaid Enterprise Systems Conference (MESC) to discuss the latest technology solutions for serving a diverse and growing Medicaid population.
This year’s event was held the week of August 18 in Denver, CO, bringing together state, federal and private sector individuals who provided the latest insights for the exchange of ideas related to Medicaid systems technology.
With seven million new Medicaid recipients this past year alone, state Medicaid systems face the challenge of onboarding a high volume of newly enrolled recipients, but also benefit from the opportunity to collect a wealth of data that IT systems can utilize to help government health and human services departments optimize managed health care and patient service.
While Medicaid has long been known simply as a system of payments, IT solutions increasingly present the transformative ability to develop and experiment with new value add-ons that will introduce cost-cutting efficiencies while also improving patient care.
Adnan Ahmed is co-founder and president of CNSI. He is responsible for the overall health of the company and leads CNSI’s management with an emphasis on identifying new strategic markets and leveraging relationships with customers and partners. Under Ahmed’s direction, CNSI has experienced extensive growth in the healthcare and federal markets. Ahmed is credited for CNSI’s expansion into several new verticals, including the State Medicaid and CMS Medicare markets.
Ahmed brings vast experience in federal government and strategic growth areas. Prior to founding CNSI, Ahmed started the federal product sales division for INET Inc., a government systems integrator, growing it to $30 million in three years.
Adnan Ahmed is a board member of the Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), The Organization of Pakistani American Entrepreneurs of North America and is an active supporter of The Citizens Foundation, USA (TCF-USA).
Tell me about CNSI and its relation to healthcare. What’s your footprint and what are some of the organizations you’ve worked with?
Happy to do so and thank you for the opportunity to engage in this dialogue.
CNSI delivers business transformation and business technology solutions to a diverse base of federal and state government agencies. Some of the agencies we are working with include health and human services departments for Michigan, Maryland, Utah and Washington. Within that space and working with those agencies, healthcare takes up the majority of work we are involved in today.
For every project we undertake, our mission is to deliver high-quality, innovative solutions that improve performance. In the healthcare industry, our goals around performance are twofold: we aim to introduce solutions that dramatically cut down on costs and also make for a stronger, more connected experience between the people administering and receiving healthcare services.
From your dealing in the space, what are some of the most pressing issues you’re seeing? What needs to be addressed that’s not receiving the attention it deserves? Anything overblown?
With healthcare poised to make up a fifth of our total economy by the year 2020, the industry and each individual it serves has a lot to gain from the implementation of cutting-edge, cost-saving technological solutions.
One area we’ve seen as having so far prohibited the full potential health IT has to offer has been around interoperability. A lack of industry standardization makes it difficult to share and utilize information across platforms and deters a complete capture of standardized healthcare data.
The more interoperability, the more opportunity for healthcare systems, primary care providers, specialists and patients to benefit from avoiding from duplicitous tasks and capitalizing on available information.
The following infographic outlines the growth of mobile tech, which is revolutionizing healthcare with mobile devices and also the growth of Medicaid enrollees with a few interesting stats, including:
Smartphones will account for almost 70 percent of mobile traffic data in next five years.
Fifty-two percent would use a mobile phone to monitor their health.
About 35 percent of folks are concerned about security of the electronic health records.
However, surveys show that 66 percent of adults would consider switching to a physician who offers access to medical records through a digital connection.
According to CNSI, publisher of the graphic, “as the population ages and smartphones become more ubiquitous, we can expect that the number of people who wish to access and work with their healthcare providers through mobile tech will also rise rapidly.”
CNSI developed the myHealthButton app, which extends the CMS Blue Button initiative for use on iPhones, iPads and Androids. With this technology and more like it, how will this space continue to adapt?
