Posts by Claudia Williams

“Data is the new oil,” British data scientist Clive Humby once said. “It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.” I thought about that line recently when I met with the chief medical officer of a large health system. “I don’t want more data,” she told me, “we are already drowning in it.”…

In the middle of California’s fire season, it’s hard not to think about the role healthcare organizations can and must play when it comes to providing and coordinating care for patients during a natural disaster. These events will become more frequent and intense as the impacts of climate change increase. Natural disasters like the fires…

The path to value-based care is arduous. For health plans, their ability to manage care, assess quality, lower costs, and streamline reporting is directly impacted by access to clinical data. For providers, the same can be said due to their lack of access to claims data. Providers and health plans are increasingly demanding integrated claims…

On a cold January day high above Rockefeller Plaza a small group of technology pioneers coined the term Blue Button – denoting giving patients easy access to their own electronic health records. It’s a simple and transformative concept, central to our vision of patient-centered healthcare. It was an honor to be there that day. And…

It still seems magical that Spotify creates a personalized music track for my life. Similarly, I now get personalized suggestions of what books to read, what recipes to cook, and even where to travel. This is the way we’re living our lives except for healthcare. It represents almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy and…

Amazon has transformed the way we read books, shop online, host websites, do cloud computing, and watch TV. Can they apply their successes in all these other areas to healthcare? Just last week, Amazon announced Comprehend Medical, machine learning software that digitizes and processes medical records. “The process of developing clinical trials and connecting them with the right…