EMERGENT I N D U S T R Y One Tulsa center is poised to take health data analysis — and this city — into a new frontier. BY SCOTT WIGTON
IT’S HAPPENING IN RURAL AREAS ACROSS THE COUNTRY: Medical clinics, doctor’s offices and even hospitals are struggling to keep their doors open. Since 2010, at least 83 rural hospitals have closed, including three in Oklahoma, according to Becker’s Hospital CFO Report. As a result, the delivery of health care services to rural patients is in steep decline, and the health of millions of Americans is at risk.
William Paiva, executive director of Oklahoma State University’s Center for Health Systems Innovation, wants to do something about this dire situation before more lives are avoidably lost and communities are hollowed out economically. “The way I look at it, rural health care challenges are both a health and an economic development issue,” explains Paiva at the center’s downtown Tulsa office. “If a community loses its ability to deliver health care by losing a hospital, what happens is you often lose the town. You lose economic vitality. People leave.” The worsening trend in rural health care has hit Oklahoma especially hard, exacerbated by state cuts to funding and a resistance to accepting federal Medicaid expansion money available under the Affordable Care Act. 34
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In the process of improving rural health care for millions of people in Oklahoma and across the nation, Paiva and his team want to turn Tulsa into what he calls the “Silicon Valley” of rural health care and health data analytics. “This is an industry with huge potential that is getting ready to explode,” Paiva argues. “And we have a head start.”
Dismal state of rural health care
Data explosion is key to transformation
According to two 2015 studies cited by OSU-CHSI, Oklahoma ranked 50th overall when it came to access, affordability, prevention, treatment and avoidable hospitalizations. Additionally, rural rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular deaths remain high across the state. Beyond the closure of rural hospitals and clinics, it might surprise most people to know, Paiva says, that 76 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties have a shortage of mental health and/or primary care providers. The only exception is Oklahoma County. “We want to arrest this downward spiral and improve the health of rural Oklahoma,” Paiva says. “Quality health care really is an economic lynchpin for rural communities.”
Harnessing that imminent “explosion” and making Tulsa a big player in an emergent, technology-driven industry is what the OSU Center for Health Systems Innovation is all about. Founded just four years ago, it exists between OSU’s Spears School of Business and the Center for Health Sciences. It aims to facilitate a data-driven, entrepreneurial approach to solving health care problems. Its vision and mission are clear: to transform rural and Native American health and accomplish it through the implementation of innovative care delivery and IT solutions. “Throughout my career I’ve been involved in the business of science,” says Paiva, who straddles the line
between academia (he has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Oklahoma) and the world of business. Equipped with a Dartmouth College MBA, Paiva spent 20 years in the health care finance, entrepreneurship and innovation industries as an investment banker and venture capitalist, helping finance startup companies in the health care field. “I’ve always been interested in the implementation of science and how to use it to change people’s lives,” he says. Changing people’s lives on the scale, and with the impact, envisioned by Paiva has only been made possible by the recent digitization of health care information formerly stored as paper files by hospitals and clinics across the country. “In 2010, only 15 percent of hospitals used digital data, and today 90 percent of hospitals use systems to capture health information digitally,” Paiva says. “The digitization of the health care system has resulted in mountains of data and really opened up the field of health data analytics.” Annually, over 14 million terabytes of medical data are now collected, creating a huge data resource that is growing rapidly.