Riding The Healthcare Technology Maturity Curve To Better Outcomes

By Damon Auer, VP, Tribridge Healthcare Practice

Healthcare providers are awash in data. And that’s certainly a good thing, but many in the industry still wonder when the big benefits will start coming. What they need most now is patience and perspective. They are, after all, riding a maturity curve, and the journey upwards is well worth the investment, but change won’t happen overnight.

Even before the much-publicized Affordable Care Act reforms, which many believed would reduce patients to mere data points, few would have described their healthcare experiences as personal. Change was desperately needed, and with the ACA came concepts/models such as “population health management” and “accountable care organizations.” Despite sounding impersonal, however, new approaches that seek to manage all aspects of health from general wellness activities to complex care are forcing – in fact, enabling – providers to look more closely at the individual. And it’s is no longer about a single episode of care; care must be holistic, perpetual, and more personal than ever.

In this new paradigm, the patient is the only constant. Comprised of electronic health records (EHRs), health information exchanges (HIEs,) and so forth, the system now generates a swirling cloud of data (increasingly in “the cloud”) that providers must harness. The key isn’t just more data, however, it’s using what’s already there more effectively, and that’s going to take new approaches, training, and thinking. A shift from fee-for-service reimbursement to pay-for-performance demands this now.

The healthcare industry is moving along a “care maturity curve,” but such a massive undertaking requires time. To better understand where we’re heading, it helps to consider the necessary stages of progression along this curve: digitization, unification, attention, optimization, coordination, and personalization (individualization), which is the pinnacle.

• Digitization – at this point we’re getting the clinical data organized and making it accessible (EHRs); the effort at this stage is provider-centric, not consumer centric (that happens later).
• Unification – integrate and reconcile multiple data platforms that are often disparate and don’t look like or talk to one another; begin to unify both provider and consumer access.
• Attention – begin paying attention to what consumers and providers are saying; use social listening in social channels to mine real-time feedback on care experiences and perceptions.
• Connection – start to demonstrate action on the things we’re hearing in multiple channels; make changes visible to consumers and patients; manage the mass customization of consumer and patient communication and feedback.
• Optimization – now that we’re unified, listening and connecting, let’s begin to take the friction out of individual care processes; tasks as simple as appointment scheduling can be dramatically simplified for the consumer and now we’re able to offer useful self-service tools and proactive alerts that simplify consumer’s interactions with providers.
• Coordination – at this stage we’re investing energy in managing experiences and outcomes across the continuum of care for individuals. We may, for example, proactively identify those at risk for type-2 diabetes and/or hypertension and create and coordinate personalized care plans for those individuals.
• Personalization/Individualization – now care is guided by much more than individuals’ clinical data alone. Fully coordinated care is personalized, and patients feel a shared sense of wellness ownership with the care team and will leverage personal resources to drive collaborative outcomes. Easy, convenient and rich access (portal, mobile, wearable) to health system resources supports this ongoing collaboration.

Consumer-driven healthcare won’t be easy on providers. They’ll need to be more agile and they’ll require new platforms that digitize, unify and coordinate processes in ways that leverage “big data” more effectively. Most important, all this can and must be delivered in such a way that each patient feels as though the system was built entirely to serve them.

About the author
Damon Auer is a 20-year technology and consulting services executive specializing in helping healthcare organizations achieve business performance improvements. As VP of Tribridge’s Healthcare practice, he oversees projects ranging from cloud-based Care Coordination and Electronic Medical Records systems implementations to process and systems integration consulting for healthcare delivery, pharmaceutical and medical device organizations.