Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Transform: Health and technology need to bridge poverty gap to improve care

Panoramic shoot of #TXFM this year. pic.twitter.com/PPZssqLHBz — AJ Montpetit (@ajmontpetit) September 7, 2014 The […]

The intersection of health, culture, socioeconomic status and emerging technologies must be woven together more seamlessly for the healthcare delivery system to truly improve health outcomes for people who need it most. Meanwhile, consumer-focused care and the application of new data and analytics by payers and providers will only accelerate in the coming years.

Those were among the prevailing themes from the Mayo Clinic’s annual Transform conference held in Rochester, Minn., where hundreds of healthcare leaders discussed how to address unprecedented shifts across the industry.

With respect to so-called big data, even the most advanced provider organizations are struggling to cope with an onslaught of new information, and it can be overwhelming.

“We’re in the middle of an exponential data explosion like we’ve never seen before, and it’s getting faster and faster,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM Watson. “All of that information is starting to swell up.” Information is being culled from already-published data in medical journals and from drug clinical trials, to name just a few sources. On top of that, new information from EHRs and claims data is being added to the mix.

“All that information is creating an environment where we need new tools that can work with us, not in place of us,” Rhodin said, adding that it won’t slow down anytime soon.

“Information and IT is going to start being as important to medicine as the discovering of drugs to diseases and surgical practices,” he said.

But while technology and health IT will play a key role, significant barriers to health persist, including economic conditions that often portend poor health outcomes in both urban and rural environments.

“Economic parity would go a long way in overcoming health outcome gaps,” said Dr. Thomas Fisher, of the Health Care Services Corp. “We need understanding – insight into the local challenges that address each community. We need partnerships. Those of us within the healthcare system need to imbed ourselves within the community. We need technology. In a society that has healthcare that is fueled by technology, this can be easily neglected, but sometimes this can get us past the hurdle.”

Providers should increasingly seek out patients where they are – not just with communities in need, but with a wide array of patients – and stop thinking that healthcare has to be delivered at a destination hospital or medical office, numerous speakers said. And that’s where telehealth, mobile technology and increasingly common retail clinics comes into play.

Vaugn Kauffman, of PwC, cited research that said 82 percent of surveyed patients said they were “very interested” in receiving care at new, more convenient locations. And with more consumers and patients being asked to take a more active role in their healthcare spending with high-deductible health plans, providers need to adjust if they want to maintain market share.

“If we’re asking them to take on more responsibility, they need some options,” Kauffman said, adding that mobile devices will be a key piece of healthcare going forward, although that market is still in its infancy.

Geoffrey Clapp, co-founder of Silicon Valley startup Better, urged healthcare professionals to stop thinking of healthcare as a place, such as a destination hospital, and to shift more toward the retail approach and telemedicine

“We have to rethink place,” he said. “We spend $40 billion every year building new places.”

Lauren Taylor, co-author of The American Healthcare Paradox, took on population health, noting that while it’s a laudable goal, the healthcare system as a whole has a long way to go before fully achieving its potential. Despite the promise of ACOs and coordinated care, the incentives are already aligning back toward fee-for-service, which the industry should resist.

“What the ACO was really about in the early days was population health,” she said, noting that ancillary community organizations such as homeless shelters or YMCAs or community centers could be folded into the health equation in helping shift behaviors while encouraging access.

Yet much like how the U.S. as a whole has shifted away from social services including local health centers, out of the 33 measures of meaningful use, only one expressly addresses population health, she said, likening it to the shift away from once-prominent community health centers.

“This is incredibly reminiscent of the divide with health centers,” she said. It tells providers “we’ll pay you for healthcare, but other areas where you could be really innovative, you’re on your own. We see this slippage back to this notion that health and healthcare is one in the same.”

Larry Keeley, of Doblin Innovation Consultants, said innovation has to take into account both technology and public health, and that disruption should be focused on social issues, not simply one industry or one company.

“What if community health is more about economic health and status and only a little about medicine?” he posited. “Figuring out exactly what the predictive analytics are when a particular community is vulnerable for a sophisticated intervention.”

Innovation, he said, is “more about elegant integration” versus outright replacement in most cases, meaning the big data and mobile health tools should augment existing providers while being applied to the most needy populations.

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