EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
The Digitization of Healthcare Five questions with Cardinal Health’s Dan Baker
Dan Baker recently joined Cardinal Health WaveMark™ Supply Management and Workflow Solutions as vice
president of Global Commercialization and Sales. In this role, Baker will provide leadership, talent management and culture-building initiatives across the WaveMark™ business. He has responsibility for defining WaveMark’s™ vision and commercial strategy and will lead the creation of new commercial growth initiatives to expand the business’ presence on a global scale.
In the following interview, Baker offered his insights on how digital health has evolved, industry challenges, lessons learned amid the pandemic, and more. Repertoire: In your 20 years of experience, what have been some of the biggest benefits of the digitization of healthcare? Dan Baker: Digital health has certainly evolved the last 20 years – and this evolution has presented incredible, worldchanging benefits. Looking back 20 years ago to a world where most clinical documentation was done on paper and stored in manilla folders, it’s incredible to reflect on the progress that’s been made. The aughts were still the early days of electronic health records, bookended by rapid adoption through “meaningful use” stimulus credits afforded by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Widespread electronic health record (EHR) adoption really laid the groundwork for the digital health ecosystem we know today.
Record digital health investment is resulting in literally thousands of new software companies, all fighting for provider mindshare. As core clinical data began to be captured at scale, population health and data analytics became the next best opportunity to impact care, allowing provider groups to practice more proactive and preventative versus pure traditional diagnostic care. I was driving adoption on the front lines, realizing the power of these growing data sets. 8
October 2021
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Dan Baker
Like any meaningful change, it was hard work, but we saw tangible clinical and operational improvements. The opportunity to unlock additional value for health systems from their EHRs, as well as from other clinical and ancillary systems, remains massive. As a personal example: I led a team that helped scale a precision medicine
