Digital health has tremendous potential to increase access to care, improve outcomes and promote healthy lifestyles among low-income Americans, but it’s important to understand the needs of safety-net populations, according to a new report from the California HealthCare Foundation.
“[For] developers to succeed, they must offer products and programs that fit the needs of safety-net consumers in ways that are useful, accessible and comfortable for them,” said the report, written by health economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
People in the safety net are at higher risk of chronic diseases than those in the general population and are more likely to have multiple chronic conditions, Sarasohn-Kahn noted. They don’t fit the model of in-person care during normal business hours, but they also might lack home broadband Internet and have limited English skills.
That’s where mobile phones come in. Low-income people who do own smartphones often rely on their mobile devices as their primary source of Internet access. Even people without smartphones are easily reachable by text message.
Safety-net patients have responded to e-mail, patient portals and other ideas that improve communications, particularly in their native languages. Apps that combine healthcare and social services or that gives patients a “trusted human being” on the other end have potential in this area as well, the report said. So does passive data collection through wearables and smart home medical devices.
Safety-net care providers and Medicaid managed care plans are noticing. Sarasohn-Kahn listed a series of apps and platforms that have proven their worth in this sector, including HealthCrowd. Text4Baby, Healthify, Omada Health, Proteus Digital Health and the University of New Mexico’s Project ECHO. Even ride-share services like Uber and Lyft have helped connect low-income people to healthcare.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“The safety net, under the new value-based payment environment, can be a valuable launching ground to prove the worth of quality-enhancing, cost-reducing technologies,” Sarasohn-Kahn wrote.
But the report also cautioned against “shiny new things,” citing Aman Bhandari, executive director of data science and insights at Merck. “The new sexy is scaling what can work,” Bhandari said. “What if Google worked with the American Public Health Association?” he wondered.
