Healthcare IT Game Changers to Watch: SRA’s Paul Nedzbala

Present: Vice President and Director, Health Programs, SRA

Past: Nedzbala began his healthcare career with United Information Systems (UIS), where he served as vice president of IT services as the company expanded its Department of Defense (DoD) footprint into health. UIS was purchased by Constella Group in 2001, and, in 2007, Constella Group was acquired by SRA, where Nedzbala continues the legacy company’s focus on enhancing human health.

Personal: Nedzbala and his wife are fans of geocaching, a high-tech treasure hunt that employs a handheld GPS device to locate any of the half million caches scattered around the world. GPS coordinates recently led Nedzbala to a strong box in the Arizona desert. Ask him what was inside.

TIPS

• Medical records aren’t the only game in town. “I think we will also start to see contractors play a larger role in the analytics of the data that is being created throughout the healthcare system,” says Nedzbala. “For example, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) we’ve leveraged solutions to help detect incidences of fraud, waste and abuse in CMS’s reimbursement programs.”

• It’s not just about healthcare providers. “As the public gets more sophisticated about managing their own health, there’s a need to develop tools to target individuals,” says Nedzbala. “When individuals go to a doctor and are given diagnosis about a disease or condition they may have,  there’s a need for tools that help people understand their disease, what they can do in terms of behavior modifications, how they can track their own health between doctor visits … there’s a whole world of patient-centric tools to be explored,” he says.

• Find your niche. “Health IT isn’t just about electronic health records,” says Nedzbala. “As an example,” he adds, “HHS funded several demonstration grants where they wanted health information exchanges to demonstrate their use of the National Health Information Network … as a contractor, we generally don’t apply for grants, but we saw an opportunity where we could add value and helped two of the grantees (nonprofit organizations who hadn’t previously worked with the federal government) by providing program management support. We were able to find a niche in that one particular example where we could add value as part of a collaborative team.”

FULL INTERVIEW

ExecutiveBiz: There’s been a lot of press about The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which SRA has been collaborating on with industry partners and researchers. What’s next?

Paul Nedzbala: The program’s success in cancer research has received attention from the other institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Part of where the thinking is going now is, how do you extend or replicate something like this for other cancer types, or even other disease areas? One could envision how this model could be successful for supporting research on other diseases, such as heart or lung diseases, where the objective is to share genomic and other molecular and characterization data in a way where researchers can collaborate with one another.

ExecutiveBiz: In other news, this past year brought concerns regarding the H1N1 pandemic flu. This is reminiscent of the 2003 SARS epidemic where you teamed with the CDC to provide support in quarantine stations at international ports of entry. Where does that program currently stand?

Paul Nedzbala: We have greatly expanded our staff supporting that program in a variety of areas. We are not only in the ports of entry, but also are at CDC headquarters in Atlanta working on efforts such as health communications, flu exercises, and related program activities. The success we had supporting the SARS epidemic reinforced our public health capabilities. Since that time, we’ve maintained a core project team, so that when H1N1 became a more visible threat, we had the ability to scale up … we were able to reach out through our networks — organizations like Emory University in Atlanta (they have a public health program that is fairly well-known) — and staff up very quickly with high-quality folks.

ExecutiveBiz: What top technologies do you see changing the face of healthcare this year?

Paul Nedzbala: The push to automate patient medical records has created a need to look more closely at secure data exchange methodologies within the healthcare space. For example, we support a program known as the vaccine adverse events reporting system (VAERS). If an individual has an adverse event related to a vaccine, a report is sent to our team where we process and code the data. This data is then used by the CDC to analyze vaccines’ safety and effectiveness. One issue with this approach is that it’s a passive system. Somebody has to fill out the report and send it to the program team. As secure data exchange methods provide the ability to make medical data more available through integrated Health IT solutions, we can envision a process wherein we create case logic to automatically detect an event and automatically send appropriate data to the VAERS system directly. This process would be possible to support disease surveillance as well. This technology is starting to emerge, and as this data is becoming available electronically, I think we will see issues related to handling the volume of data and our ability to store, retrieve, and analyze it in ways that meet real-world needs.

ExecutiveBiz: What technologies might help sift through the data?

Paul Nedzbala: Tools such as our NetOwl text miner can help analyze and sift through what will be largely unstructured text to look for trends and support analyses. We are already starting to build applications that manipulate healthcare data using this tool.

ExecutiveBiz: What other technologies, if any, do you see transforming public health?

Paul Nedzbala: Recently, I saw a demonstration of the HHS Connect application, demonstrating the ability to establish real-time connections through different medical data sources that are linked via the National Health Information Network (NHIN). It is fairly easy to envision applications that leverage that technology and what it offers, coupled with back-end tools to support analytics. Through technologies like this, we’re going to see new approaches to supporting not only public health but also important programs focused on quality, cost, and disparities in health care – all of which are important  to this administration and the public.

ExecutiveBiz: You speak quite a bit about the wide-scale change underway in the day-to-day public health world. What’s next?

Paul Nedzbala: I know there is much focus on the healthcare world in terms of patient medical records — and I know there will be many innovations there — but I also think the execution of the public health mission will be transformed. We are many years away from a nationally connected health information network, but at the regional and local levels, we already see examples of leveraging the access to data to feed public health needs, whether it’s disease prevention, detection, or data collection for analyses. I think we will see more of that coming to the forefront both this year and in the future.

ExecutiveBiz: Where will we find SRA in the midst of that shift?

Paul Nedzbala: SRA will be right in the middle of that transformation. We will be involved on several fronts: We are health service providers involved in mission work related to disease surveillance, epidemiology and data analytics, and we also create innovative software and software tools. As we continue to bring these disciplines together, the health marketplace will see SRA contributing Health IT innovations that make a difference.

Posted by Lisa Singh on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010. Filed under Healthcare IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry