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HomeDAS & In Building WirelessVirtual Health 2.0: Healthcare as an APP?

Virtual Health 2.0: Healthcare as an APP?

The healthcare industry is being challenged to re-assess past delivery modalities in unprecedented ways as it struggles to adapt to the current “new normal” of a pandemic. Fortunately, the industry made crucial early investments in new care pathway capabilities to deliver effective telemedicine and telehealth services, which are now exploding in demand as patients continue to seek care during mandatory shelter in place/quarantine orders from respective governing bodies. In parallel, entrepreneurial investments in digital health startups are paying forward dividends as witnessed by the meteoric growth in remote patient monitoring (RPM) services for both health and wellness ranging from behavioral health monitoring to chronic care management. These are much needed and essential vectors to support our aging population, and to ensure the continued welfare of our younger generations. Nonetheless, while sophisticated, timely, and relevant, these are largely incremental innovations that reinforce a business model built on the concept of ‘brick and mortar’ healthcare, visibly rooted in facility-based care models.

There is a myriad of challenges with today’s healthcare system including scalability, adaptability, flexibility, sustainability, and resiliency, and each of these has been severely tested in the midst of the current pandemic. Before this, the healthcare industry was making good progress in tackling many of these issues, as evidenced by quality and value-based care initiatives, technology investments in clinical effectiveness, and the growth of novel Digital Health capabilities such as virtualization of health and wellness. While these were a solid start towards reforming healthcare delivery, the pandemic has shattered the veneer of substantial progress as shown by the appearance of Emergency Department ‘surge’ tents to manage patient capacity demands, reduced availability of personal protective equipment or PPE, staffing constraints of limited front-line healthcare workers, operational challenges around effective ways to safely manage patient, visitor, and staff workflows, the creation new protocols for pathogen disinfection of equipment, re-architecting how to evaluate symptomatic vs. asymptomatic patients, how to cope with severe equipment shortages, and finally, how to address acute supply chain distribution challenges. This is especially a lot to handle for an industry that by definition is risk-averse, and such disruptions place tremendous strain on all those striving to provide on-going excellence of care. The impacts are already visible: closing facilities, furloughing of employees, and mounting losses of revenue from the discontinuation of elective procedures. Figuratively, how can we ask an elephant to move like a cheetah?

If anything, the pandemic is acting as a forcing function, prompting healthcare innovation to move at a lighting pace relative to the pace beforehand. Driven by government, industry, institutional, research, and academic partners, the healthcare industry is shaking off the shackles of slow change, and experiencing a renaissance of sorts, with new approaches to care much like a modern version of the achievements of the early U.S. Space Program that provided substantial and lasting technological developments. What this means is that post-pandemic, the healthcare industry will be completely re-tooled to address health and wellness in new ways that is would be described by consumers, physicians, and clinicians as on-demand, convenient, connected, contextual, pervasive, intuitive, affordable, familiar, and informative. To illustrate the latter, consider how healthcare can be virtualized much in the same way as that of entertainment applications (i.e., Amazon’s Prime ™ service and Netflix™), and virtual education platforms (i.e., Canvas™).

The first step is to build a portfolio of foundational digital tools that makes access to healthcare simple and convenient, eliminating the need for clunky portals and other forms of legacy service transactions that have been digitized. For consumer platform companies, what this means is creating a portfolio of conversational experience (CX) interfaces, digital assistants, and applications (APPs) that mirror successful design thinking best practices. For healthcare providers, what this means is that instead of designing digital “front doors”, such institutions are better served by building a “digital house” formed via assemblage of a mosaic of different care and wellness service “tiles” that are inter-connected. Various providers are now offering such frameworks, using digital distribution channels much how digital media is organized today, and the convenience and flexibility of such approaches are showing remarkable improvements in both patient experience ratings (HCAHPS scores), measurable quality of care benchmarks, and increases in patient retention and revenues. Similarly, Payers would be able to adopt a blend of approaches in order to promote healthy lifestyle and behavioral choices through incentive-based initiatives and/or compliance games. Examples of the latter may include healthy food choices, fitness routines, and mental acuity exercises. Ultimately, for the patient as a consumer, they will be able to employ digital tools to readily navigate to specific service fulfillment areas that are the most relevant to them, guided in part by a digital concierge/coach.

The second step is to imbue a sense of trust for all stakeholders. This means addressing patient privacy, security, and use practices that extend beyond current HIPAA regulations and includes biometric policies, patient generated healthcare data, location of care, and social determinants of care. This is particularly crucial in order to overcome barriers to adoption in terms of skepticism and reluctance on the part of stakeholders. Much as how the finance industry has been able to address these concerns, healthcare can leverage such lessons learned in order to create a higher level of confidence for patient privacy. Furthermore, continued and expanded use with drive familiarity of service awareness, which will in turn reinforce repetitive utilization, thereby accelerating growth.

The last step is enablement of personalized and ambient intelligence by putting appropriate technologies to work to create a cohesive, dynamic, and proscriptive means to optimize consumer interactions with health and wellness services. Examples include augmented intelligence to deliver more natural patient-care team interactions, capture of relational trends over time in terms of acuity levels of health and wellness, distributed sensory platforms such as wireless vitals monitoring, and the seamless use of predictive machine learning as a feedback loop to continuously improve engagement practices. Attributes may include predictive pattern recognition with early warning systems designed to trigger interventional actions (perhaps nighttime activity alerts with blood glucose monitoring that may be suggestive of onset T2 diabetes, and subsequent notification to pursue testing), location based services that reflect the consumer’s lifestyle and care decision preferences (such as where, when, and how to find care through wayfinding and self-rooming methods), and directing how the consumer health and wellness journey starts (perhaps through conversational scheduling, identification and direction to pertinent social wellness groups, and lifestyle recommendations). The combination of convenience of care with intelligent services is very powerful and compelling as it reduces waste, promotes better coordination of care, improves consumer satisfaction, and builds brand loyalty via gravitation towards services.

In summary, the future of healthcare is one that is increasingly becoming virtualized, mirroring similar trajectories in other sectors that are following digital subscription-based models. These approaches resonate strongly with consumers, and consequently, healthcare has a unique opportunity to pivot to adjust to a new future. With increasing adoption of remote patient monitoring, growing use of virtual health engagement through telemedicine and telehealth, greater personalization via digital assistants, and automated services, and “contact-less” device capabilities, the industry is poised to leap forward, delivering tremendous value and efficacies of care.

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