Wellstar Health System

Thomas Draper

Cardiovascular Innovation Architect

Thomas Draper is the Vice President, Administrative Lead, Clinical Service Lines of the Wellstar Health System. With decades worth of experience in the cardiovascular space, he is currently recognized as a leading innovator working to transform and grow clinical program development with top physician recruitment and retention, financial management, resource optimization, and more. Moreover, his accomplishments are crowned with numerous publications and presentations, making him a national expert in the cardiovascular space. At Wellstar, his responsibilities fences operations to strategies. He looks after planning programs and operations for optimum patient care by aligning with the organization's strategies.

Could you walk us through some of the ongoing trends in the cardiovascular space? Innovation has always been a pillar in the cardiovascular space, but the emergence of COVID-19 and its ramifications have accelerated them. From the past 20-24 months, we have started to witness a massive drive of providing patient care in an outpatient setting. For example, due to hospitalbed unavailability during COVID-19, trends like same-day discharge for coronary interventions became the inevitable option for providing cardiovascular services. Moreover, healthcare facilities like ambulatory surgery centers (ASC) were optimized, enabling patients to have procedures performed in a relatively low-cost, non-inpatient setting. Such trends empowered healthcare organizations too, and they were able to bring in more complex cases within the hospital's facilities that were once delayed because of the occupied beds.

However, these outpatient services have also created some economic concerns for several organizations. As several revenue-generating operations were shifted to a lower-cost and lower-reimbursement setting, earnings for hospitals received a sudden downgrade.

 Virtual care service is another aspect that was boosted during the pandemic by making some rudimentary changes in traditional healthcare regulations. And, even as the pandemic lessens, we are trying to grow it vigorously so we can provide care to a larger, more diverse population. In the near future, we aim to provide virtual management for hypertension control, lipid control, remote monitoring for electrophysiology, and cardiovascular medication management.

In the cardiovascular ecosystem, the integration of technology and medicine is a much-awaited trend that has started to revolutionize daily operations of the space. As a fiveyear strategy, AI and natural language processing are being induced to identify a larger section of patients with a trial fibrillation, aortic and valve diseases, and several others that couldn’t be earlier detected or treated.

In light of the recent market changes, what will be your advice to your peers?

 Any medical personnel should step out of the quagmires of their own operations and start connecting with their medical peers. They must build networks with colleagues across the country to have an alternative look at the concurrent issues and explore other ways to deal with them. Furthermore, they must seek collaborations with different industry partners like digital health professionals to explore the potentials of the digital wave in the cardiovascular space.

What will be your strategies for the future?

Within the next year and a half, I am looking forward to optimizing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to identify under-managed patients. During the pandemic, ample patients stopped reaching out to medical facilities, as they feared the spread of COVID-19 infection. Consequently, their cardiovascular complications have elaborated and they will require proper medical attention soon.