UCLA Health Advances in Digital Healthcare: Pioneering Telemedicine, Genomic Integration, and Secure Patient Platforms
UCLA Medical Center was established in 1955. In 2008, upon the full operational launch of its new hospital building, it was renamed the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (hereinafter referred to as “UCLA Medical Center”). Since 1990, the hospital has ranked among the top five in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Hospitals” list for 26 consecutive years, underscoring its undisputed medical excellence.
One of the secrets behind UCLA Health’s ability to maintain top-tier medical standards for so many years lies in its capacity to keep pace with evolving trends in the healthcare industry. As digital health has become a major focal point in today’s healthcare sector, UCLA Health is certainly not content to lag behind. Let us now examine the hospital’s initiatives and achievements in the digital health industry.
The World's First Hospital to Introduce Telemedicine Robots
UCLA Health has always been bold in adopting emerging technologies, such as beingThe World's First Hospital to Introduce Telemedicine RobotsThis robot can replace doctors in monitoring patients. With the help of its built-in camera and accompanying video software, patients and their families can connect to the doctor’s computer via the robot when needed, then initiate a video call to consult with the doctor face-to-face.
In terms of teaching and talent development, the UCLA Medical Center has also made considerable efforts. To ensure that physicians maintain a high level of concentration, traditional surgeries were conducted in closed environments. However, with advances in information technology, the UCLA Medical Center can now transmit the entire surgical procedure to external audiences without distracting the surgeons. Keeping surgeries performed by world-leading physicians in closed environments and preventing young doctors from observing and learning would undoubtedly constitute a waste of high-quality educational resources. When planning the construction of a new building in 1994, the leadership of the UCLA Medical Center took this issue into account and specificallyforof the New BuildingThe operating room is equipped with a surgical live-streaming system.. With continuous technological upgrades, anyone with authorized access can now watch the entire surgical procedure at the UCLA Medical Center from anywhere via this system.
In addition to independently developing and introducing telemedicine technologies, UCLA Medical Center also leverages its group advantages to advance telemedicine.
In the 1960s, the UCLA Medical Center gradually formed an alliance with other hospitals affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, establishing the “UCLA Health System” (hereinafter referred to as “UCLA Health”). To enable broader access to high-quality medical resources within the alliance, UCLA Health has long prioritized the development of telemedicine. To date, UCLA Health has established a relatively comprehensive telemedicine service system, offering three main categories of telemedicine services:
Telemedicine:Provide online consultation, diagnosis, and treatment services to doctors and patients at other hospitals through technologies such as video conferencing and cloud computing.
Remote Consultation:The clearer patients are about their medical conditions, the more easily they can recover—a principle that ULCA Health has always upheld. Guided by this philosophy, ULCA Health offers online consultation services to patients worldwide, enabling them to better understand their health status. For patients seeking treatment at hospitals within the ULCA Health network, their therapeutic journey with these prestigious institutions begins the moment they receive remote consultations from home.
Telepathology Diagnosis:Leveraging its own diagnostic equipment and technology, ULCA Health began envisioning the provision of remote pathology diagnosis services to other hospitals in 2010. Since launching this service in early 2011, ULCA Health has served approximately 900 institutions. Notably, ULCA Health successfully entered the Chinese healthcare market through this service. In 2014, ULCA Health partnered with Centre Testing International Group Co., Ltd. (CTI) to establish the Shanghai CTI Aipu Medical Laboratory in the Shibei High-Tech Park in Shanghai. In 2015, it collaborated with the Sixth People’s Hospital of Zhengzhou to launch the Zhengzhou International Remote Consultation Center. In addition to these two entities, several Chinese hospitals had begun collaborating with ULCA Health since the inception of its remote pathology diagnosis services, including the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine and Beijing Cancer Hospital.
Crafting a Premium App
In terms of app development, the UCLA Medical Center has also fully leveraged the advantages of its health system, contributing its expertise within UCLA Health and collaborating with other institutions in the alliance to create high-quality apps. For instance, in the field of cardiology, the UCLA Medical Center has consistently ranked among the top ten in the United States. Moreover, as of 2014, it had received the “Get With The Guidelines®-Heart Failure Gold Plus Achievement Award” from the American Heart Association for six consecutive years. Currently, among the three medical apps prominently promoted by UCLA Health, one named “Heart Failure Risk Score” is designed to calculate the risk index for heart failure. It can be inferred that the UCLA Medical Center provided substantial medical data during the development of this app. (The figure below shows the user interface of the Heart Failure Risk Score app.)
Integrating Genetic Information into Electronic Health Records
UCLA Health began using electronic medical records (EMRs) early on within Centricity, the hospital information system shared across its network. However, the EMRs in this system were designed to be used in conjunction with paper charts and therefore did not contain patients’ complete medical information. This limitation hindered, to some extent, the exchange of patient medical information among different hospitals.
On March 1, 2013, UCLA Health began implementing its new hospital information system, Care Connect.Under the CareConnect system, UCLA Medical Center digitizes all patient medical information and archives it into an electronic health record. These electronic health records can be freely exchanged within UCLA Health and several other hospitals.
In addition to digitizing all patient medical information into electronic health records (EHRs), ULCA Health is also considering incorporating genetic information into EHRs to assist physicians in treatment. According to news from May this year,ULCA Health Has Partnered with Emerging Gene Sequencing Company ActXAn experiment will be launched shortly. In this study, ULCA Health will integrate genetic information into the electronic health records (EHRs) within its system. As envisioned, physicians will leverage these genetic data to assess patients’ drug allergies, tolerance, and other relevant factors, thereby formulating optimal treatment plans for each patient.
myULCAHealth Portal
Similar to CareConnect, the myULCAHealth portal was officially launched in the summer of 2013 as part of UCLA Health’s digital management initiative. This robust portal offers significant convenience to UCLA Health patients.
Below is a brief introduction to some features of myULCAHealth:
A Patient-Owned Medical Record Management Platform:ULCA Health patients can view their medical records stored in CareConnect via myULCAHealth, share them with other physicians, and grant family members and friends access to review these records.
B. Patient Medical Affairs Management Platform:ULCA Health patients can not only search for and schedule appointments with doctors within ULCA Health through myULCAHealth, but also use it to request prescription refills, pay medical bills, and more.
Information Security Assurance
As the digital healthcare industry develops, a growing array of products—such as telemedicine and electronic health records (EHRs)—are bringing greater convenience to patients. However, due to negligence in information security, patient privacy is becoming increasingly vulnerable. Recently, UCLA Health issued a statement disclosing a breach of its information security. In the statement, UCLA Health confirmed that its network had been hacked, affecting the EHRs of approximately 4.5 million patients across four hospitals, including the UCLA Medical Center. Hackers may have accessed patients’ personal sensitive information from these records, such as names, home addresses, and Social Security numbers. Fortunately, thanks to UCLA Health’s timely response, there have been no reports of patients suffering financial losses as a result of this incident. UCLA Health has since strengthened its information security infrastructure, not only by increasing staff in its information security department but also by engaging a third-party cybersecurity firm to provide affected patients with one year of complimentary identity theft protection and credit monitoring services.
Although the recent incident involving compromised patient privacy was handled appropriately, it has served as a wake-up call for UCLA Health and even the entire digital healthcare industry,Information security should be a key consideration for institutions developing digital health technologies.。
From the development of digital health at UCLA Health, we can see that leveraging group advantages is a valuable experience to learn from, while neglecting information security issues is a lesson to be heeded. In other words, in the digital health industry, leveraging one’s own strengths and collaborating with other institutions is an important pathway to achieving industry leadership, whereas information security technology should be given sufficient attention during the development of digital health products.
Text | Zi Junwei
Editor: Mo Renying