While the impact of Covid-19 on the healthcare industry continues to unfold, it’s undoubtedly driven new approaches to engaging patients at home.
Consider recent news items:
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- Earlier this year, researchers at McKinsey & Company reported that up to $265 billion worth of care services (representing up to 25 percent of the total cost of care) for Medicare beneficiaries could shift from traditional facilities to the home by 2025.
- On November 11, 2022, the American Telemedicine Association co-led a letter signed by 115 organizations urging the federal government to avoid a “telehealth cliff” by ensuring that patients who now remotely access care do not have interruptions to this model when the public health emergency ends.
- In a 2023 Predictions Report from Forrester, analysts stated that a quarter of the US adult population will be treated with remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools for chronic conditions. They cite research showing the global RPM market reaching $175.2 billion by 2027, up from US$53.6 billion in 2022, at a compound annual growth rate of 26.7%. Additionally, they highlight studies showing that today, six in 10 Americans live with at least one chronic disease, and the annual economic burden of the most common chronic diseases is more than $1 trillion.
An increased focus on home-based care management and delivery will, ideally, bode well to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Caught up in this seismic shift, however, are today’s consumers and clinicians who seem overwhelmed by an ever-expanding array of on-the-go health offerings including mobile apps, connected devices, and digital front doors.
Too many point solutions
Point solution overload is real. It hampers effectiveness and productivity across provider, payer and other health care organizations (HCOs.) And it mystifies individuals who know and expect streamlined digital engagement in other aspects of their lives.
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Stressed young woman in checkered shirt sitting near chalkboard with electronic documents and internet icons. Concept of information overload. Toned image
HCOs face very real technical and operational challenges when identifying, deploying and managing a range of point solutions. To best serve patients at home, HCOs should seek to coalesce disparate communication, education, RPM, and care management offerings and present them cohesively via a single easy-to-understand digital care engagement interface.
What is this interface — and how does it help patients, their loved ones and members of the care team manage health journeys?
Single-screen access at home
Exactly one screen is needed to support effective healthcare engagement in the home. Unless remote controls change radically, this screen cannot be a person’s television set. And while the cell phone seems to have become a bodily appendage for many, these device’s screens are simply too small and difficult to navigate to address complex needs, especially for the aging and infirmed. Computer screens could be used. But according to Pew Research, four in ten adults with lower incomes do not own a desktop or laptop computer.
The tablet device is a logical choice and can effectively serve as a home’s “digital health hub” with one caveat. It must be configured to holistically meet the needs of targeted populations – quickly, easily, affordably and securely. And, it must be out-of-the-box-ready for end users spanning any level of technical receptivity and aptitude.
Australian researchers: Digital health hub makes sense
In an article published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (August 1, 2020,) researchers at the University of Adelaide describe the concept of a web-based personal digital health “hub” and highlight its implementation around a cohort of hip fracture patients.
The team said it created the hub “centered on patients’ and carers’ needs” and described it as supporting “a lifelong approach to healthy aging through lifestyle approaches, while addressing injuries or illnesses as they arise.”
Using input from clinicians, non-clinical experts and patients, they designed the hub to improve education, service integration, data exchange and engagement of all stakeholders including patients and healthcare providers.
“The health hub could allow important advances and efficiencies to be achieved in workforce practice and education; patient and care engagement in self-care; and the collection of patient-reported health data,” they stated.
In introducing their work, the researchers said, “By viewing multimorbidity as a person-centered concept we acknowledge that the impact of a condition is influenced not only by health-related characteristics but also by socioeconomic, cultural and environmental factors, as well as patient behavior. Addressing these complex and often interacting biopsychosocial factors therefore requires a shift in treatment for multi-morbidities from a physical damage model towards person-centered integrated care with increased patient agency. Such a model allows patients to have greater responsibility for and control over the management of their care.”
ACP funds can bridge gaps
Allowing patients to have greater responsibility in their care makes sense. Digital home engagement is necessary. And a single-screen hub-based approach will emerge. Broadband access issues remain, yet programs such as the FCC’s $14.2 billion Affordable Connectivity Program are squarely aligned “to help ensure qualifying households can afford the devices and broadband they need for work, school, healthcare and more.” On November 10, 2022, the FCC released a notice of funding opportunity making $70M of funding available to eligible applicants including medical/healthcare providers.
In working over the past decade with customers across a range of HCOs, many have asked us to support key strategic initiatives by developing software functionality that increases patient agency and behavior change. These requests come amidst newer commitments among HCOs to identify and address socioeconomic, cultural and environmental factors influencing health.
Looking forward
We must move past traditional “patient experience delivery.” We must think beyond “engagement” toward “activation.” And we must open new doors beyond “digital front doors” via environments that mobilize purposeful intelligence-driven action among key stakeholders.
A “digital health hub” approach in the home can bring significant value to HCOs as they seek develop and retain long-term customer relationships with a focus on advancing health equity, improving outcomes and driving financial success.
Platforms are needed to improve collaboration and decision-making among patients, their loved ones, and members of the care team both clinical and non-clinical, especially in emerging hybrid models. More robust capture, analysis and use of patient- and caregiver-reported data especially via home-based hubs will be necessary.
I agree wholeheartedly with the University of Adelaide researchers who wrote the following:
“Increasing access to digital technology could result in further patient and community empowerment and influence the balance between vertical (institutional) and horizontal (community) governance systems. This synergy between patient desires, digital technology and health-care expertise could provide innovative solutions and change the direction in which health care evolves.”
Photo: ismagilov, Getty Images
Nir Altman, co-founder and CEO of Equiva, has spent more than a decade pioneering cost-effective approaches to advance digital patient engagement, with a keen focus on helping healthcare organizations create, nurture and retain long-term customer relationships, He’s passionate about supporting initiatives to improve patient and clinician experience, advance health equity, improve health outcomes and drive financial success. In addition to co-founding an award winning non-profit focused on helping individuals use their skills to advance non-profits of their choice, his experiences include leadership roles with Deloitte Consulting and American Express. He studied economics at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and holds an MBA in finance from New York University.
