“Information at Your Fingertips” was the theme of WashingtonExec’s breakfast roundtable, held earlier this month at The Tower Club Tysons Corner with guest speaker Vish Sankaran, former Senior Advisor at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Sankaran spoke to a small group of technology executives and entrepreneurs about the paradigm shift of healthcare, specifically occurring within CMS. Historically, healthcare has traditionally been a pay for service industry, Sankaran hopes to see a shift to pay-for-performance healthcare services model. Sankaran also called on participants to advance CMS from a 5,000-employee unit with a plethora of data researchers and analysts, to a steward of data and transparent, trustworthy partner for consumers of CMS information.
Basic takeaways from the roundtable discussion:
-There is no one correct system or database for CMS
-Increased automation and self-service is the future of CMS
-An application store similar to the ones used for smart phones and tablets is needed at CMS
During the Q&A portion, Sankaran also told participants that Hadoop is not “the silver bullet” to Big Data problems, that all contract providers should receive the same access to healthcare data, and that his main concern is improving CMS tools and insights so that the Center can better serve the American people by enabling outcome-based revenue models.
Acknowledging that CMS has a lot of work ahead, Sankaran assured participants, “the march is on.” Sankaran ended the program by saying, “we have to think differently and manage from the bottom up.”
Sankaran served as Senior Advisor at CMS from August 2010-September 2012.
