Expert Spotlight: Brandon Shalton – Turning Data Into Information

Brandon Shalton, a technologist with decades of experience applying technology to solve human problems talks about AI integration as a tool to help in scaling healthcare delivery, thinking different for fostering innovation and what it takes for being a successful healthcare CTO. Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn here.

1. How do you see the role of technology evolving in patient care over the next decade?

Healthcare technology will continue to evolve itself to create in-home testing units (IoT) that can do various medical testing and then upload the results to the medical provider’s cloud for analysis and review. This trend has already begun and I experienced it first hand with a self-pay service where I received a blood pressure monitor and oxygen sensor to be used prior to online sessions to get baseline readings.

Telehealth will continue to expand in its use and services offered, to allow for convenience of waiting at home, instead of waiting in the lobby of a practitioner. Going through the COVID experience, people are preferring at-home services much like working at-home.

AI integration is on an exploded trajectory to utilize it as a tool to help with scaling. With tuned models, the AI could analyze the medical device results and create a summary for the human practitioner to use in reviewing a patient’s case. This allows the practitioner to spend more of their time with direct interfacing with patients, and saving on prep-time through the use of AI and medical device data collections.

2. Which emerging technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on healthcare in the near future?

AI/ML is the most obvious answer with the speed at which innovation is occurring in this space.  There is alot of talk about how AI/ML is going to replace jobs, which is true for certain tasks, but I also see AI/ML as giving back time.  Professionals who use AI will save countless hours in doing routine work.

I do some programming in my capacity as a CTO, more for developing quick proof of concepts to help developers, and I have used ChatGPT to give a prompt of coding task and then be able to edit the results to tune it to make it work (ChatGPT doesn’t always get things right, but it’s close). Rather than spending time looking up commands for a coding language, I can give it a detailed prompt of the task I am looking to achieve, and then be able to easily modify the code without having to remember syntaxes and parameters. This allows me to save time from that research and deliver a task in faster time.

3. What role does/will artificial intelligence play in your current and future projects?

Any project that collects data can be run through ML to create a trained dataset that can be used to process new collected data. With trained ML models, we can do proactive and reactive analysis on new incoming/input data that can generate alerts or highlighted data points for the staff to monitor for anomalies.

4. Can you share an example of a major project or initiative in healthcare technology that inspired you?

The use of in-home testing units for health (ie. blood pressure monitor, weight scale, oxygen sensor, etc) is pretty exciting in being able to have more access to our own medical data. The use of these devices can help us monitor our health. I have am on high blood pressure medication so being able to check my blood pressure and have it logged to show results over time allows me to not have to track those things manually.

I have seen more and more devices come out like personal EKG machines where if you feel like you might be having a heartache, you can instantly log readings, instead of waiting to go to the doctor’s office because by that time, the episode is over and there isn’t much to show on the charts.

I feel this area of hardware innovation that ties into machine learning, cloud-based data, and easier access to healthcare professionals, allows people to be better informed of their health and be an active participant in their medical journey, and not just a passive patient waiting for the next exam to find out how they are doing.

5. How do you foster a culture of innovation within your technology teams?

Every developer has their favorite tools from programming languages, to databases, to frameworks. Some places are set in their technology stack, but as a developer, you could get bored or stagnant in knowing just one way to do things. I like to challenge developers to try out different technologies, in creating mini projects that solve a specific problem or task that is related to the company’s scope.

This time allows for learning new things, and sometimes to think different (different, not differently, like Steve Jobs said) and explore challenges. At some point, the new technologies could be integrated, or begin the start of a migration to a new tech stack. The issue is to not let team members feel stagnant, but to tap into each one’s own creativity and desire to make things better.

6. What are the key skills and qualities you believe are essential for a successful CTO in the healthcare tech sector?

Technology is pervasive in healthcare that many times it is about using X or Y to solve Z.  All the solutions are going to be similar and be able to solve a problem.

The biggest quality I believe a CTO needs to have, is not about technology savviness, everyone is going to have that, it’s to have empathy and understanding that  patients, practitioners, administrators, etc will use the technology you create to help make someone’s life better. To walk in the provider’s shoes,  to understand what tools they need. It can even be understanding what UI/UX will work best in a given environment.

I have been programming since I was 12 on my first computer, the Sinclair ZX81. Fast forward decades of working on computing systems from mainframes, to miniframes, to Client/Server to Cloud, to mobile, the technology evolves, but the underlying magic of computing is turning data into information, in a way that humans can understand.

The users of  the system must like the tool, trust the tool,  rely on the tool to assist with their work. The data bits, that we as technology people capture, store, and process, all get utilized by people who are trying to help other people be better. For that, never losing sight of why we are doing what we are doing, not for technology sake, but for helping to make a difference.

Brandon Shalton started his computing journey when he was 15 and his father bought him a Timex Sinclair 1500 with 16K expansion card and a thermal printer where he wrote a word processor in BASIC in order to print school work. Brandon discovered the internet while attending Texas A&M, for Aerospace Engineering, in discovering USENET and chat rooms. He saw the first web browser when he transferred to Purdue for Computer Technology major. In 1995, he worked at a government contracting agency for the AirForce in connecting a web server with a Unisys frontend that interfaced to a Honeywell/Bull mainframe as a proof of concept experiment.

The last 10 years, he has been involved with healthcare companies from creating a workflow system for a Compound Pharmacy, to Mental Health system for patients and healthcare providers, to an online healthcare portal for customized private healthcare. From architecting web-based workflows to mobile app development, his passion for technology and transforming data into information continues through almost four decades of active technological innovations. Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn here.