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future health 100

Medium
#61
Daniel Sands
Director of Healthcare, Internet Business Solutions Group
Cisco Systems
San Jose, CA

Innovation:

The Double Agent. In addition to his primary care practice affiliated with Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, where he is a staff physician, Dr. Sands is a medical informatics advisor and head of healthcare-related business solutions for the network equipment giant, Cisco. In this role, Dr. Sands helps Cisco and its business partners with clinical transformation using IT. An early adopter in his own right, Dr. Sands wrote the first peer-reviewed article on the benefits of using email in clinical practice, in 1998. He also architected Beth Israel's PatientSite, one of the early EMR-EHR web platforms to integrate "social networking" for doctors and patients. Dr. Sands was also a primary physician in the care of e-Patient Dave, whose web chronicles of an ordeal with late-stage cancer elevated both men to minor celebrity in the healthcare industry. Since e-Patient Dave's recovery, Dr. Sands and Dave DeBronkart (his real name) have become a vocal duo in the campaign to formalize patients' roles in medical decision-making and healthcare reform. Dr. Sands is also an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and when he isn't teaching, splits his time between Boston, and Mountain View. We figure he hides the cape in his closet.

On the slow pace of IT adoption:

“What it boils down to is a business case for the individual physician. We’ve done a poor job of educating physicians on the fact that there are benefits here for their bottom lines. You’ll probably cut down on phone volume. You will make patients happier. But [doctors] still ask, ‘what do I get out of it?’ In medicine we’re not generally being held accountable for our patients’ happiness. In real business we would be."

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