The combination of medicine and information technology have at times created dissonance and dynamic tension. Medicine has historically relied on a slow, deliberate build-up to amass a body of evidence. Whereas development of information technology is often based on quantum leaps forward that do not require the same body of evidence because the inherent risks are profoundly different.
Over the past few years, the idea of a slow build-up in medical innovation was disrupted both by advanced science and technology but also by urgency. During the pandemic, thankfully, speed was of the essence and the risk was unprecedented. Medicine had to adopt an ethos more typical in the world of information technology, “move fast and break things.”
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The Covid pandemic has opened the eyes of many in the healthcare industry to the possibility of fundamentally accelerating timelines in clinical trials and the drug approval process, the backbone of medical innovation. This process acceleration combined with the increasing speed of courageous scientific discovery itself is pushing us into what The New York Times has described as the “Golden Age of Medicine.” However, to truly reap the benefits of this new age, policy makers, private industry, health plans and health systems must work together to chart a course to the Golden Age of Healthcare Delivery.
While healthcare delivery is in dire need of what technology has delivered in other industries: reduced costs, broader, equitable access, redesigned business models, and streamlined systems, we as technologists often fail to account for the ways health and medicine are a human experience fraught with different risks and responsibilities. While breaking things for the sake of efficiency or competitive advantage may be appropriate and better serve consumers in the transportation, retail or food service industries, healthcare is different. Information technologists in healthcare must strive for not just usability but empathy for those receiving care and now, with the burnout epidemic, those delivering care. We need a system that is affordable, accessible, and equitable in addition to effective and efficient. To improve patient care and overall health outcomes, policy makers, health care providers and payers must consider and support information technology initiatives that support those noble care teams at the center of the healthcare ecosystem.
The role of policy makers in supporting healthcare delivery
Policy makers have been pivotal in the nationwide effort to convert our healthcare system from paper to electronic health records (EHRs). However, as we are learning now, recording is not enough, intelligent communications are equally required. Large public investments have driven improvements in information systems, and regulations have been developed to ease adoption and protect the rights of patients and providers. Today, more than 90% of hospitals and physician practices use EHRs. However, the system still needs support from policy makers to help stakeholders organize, manage, surface and apply various types of data.
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We are seeing continued support from policy makers on the implementation and enforcement of information blocking regulations that will ensure information sharing at scale becomes a reality. The enactment of regulations regarding the standardization of application programming interfaces and the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement is helping to bring the promise of health information to fruition and will benefit all stakeholders by easing the process of delivering healthcare. We need to see continued interest and investment from policy makers to achieve and sustain an open health IT ecosystem.
We all agree this foundation is necessary but insufficient, we must not stop here.
Providers and their staff must be heard in the migration to a better-connected world
Healthcare providers are struggling with increasingly overwhelming workloads, time-consuming administrative tasks, and insufficient staffing. Introducing a new technology, even one designed to save time and ensure quality of care, can be burdensome. Why? Because our overall systems remain highly fragmented with innumerable misaligned stakeholders. So, alignment of incentives, policies, payments, systems and communications are the new bedrock foundation of a Golden Age of Health Care Delivery.
That’s why technology and solutions design matter and ease of use is everything. Providers need intuitive delivery of the most useful information and capabilities to provide the best care in all settings. If we put the Care Delivery Teams at the center they will guide us to the best solutions for their patients.
The team must have the opportunity to participate in making health IT systems work for them. Co-creation sessions facilitated by vendors, health system administrators, payers, providers, and staff help to shape adoption and motivate and empower groups and individuals with various functions to embrace smarter ways of working. These sessions enable all stakeholders to share their goals, plans and approaches and uncover points of collaborative connection.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, provides a fascinating look into the ways that nurses, doctors and administrative staff who see where information technology systems fall short, can right the ship and ensure that health IT does its job. At Hawaii Pacific Health (HPH), a non-profit system employing 7,000 staff across four hospitals, a pediatrician serving as HPH’s Chief Quality Officer became concerned with administrative tasks associated with updating records that were eroding the time medical staff could spend caring for patients. Her response was to encourage clinicians to identify anything in the EHR that was poorly designed, unnecessary, or unreasonable. Once something was identified and qualified as unnecessary it was removed, if something was in fact necessary, it was targeted for an efficiency upgrade. Ideas requiring further review were handled by quality and EHR working groups that were representative of different hospital functions, Crucially, every suggestion from every department was considered and the system was then redesigned to better serve the humans and ultimately saved thousands of hours across the organization. This situation aligns with the findings from a recent survey of healthcare workers – 72% of workers are “extremely interested” in technology that would cut down on time spent on administrative tasks.
Payers can supply intuitive tools for managing complexity too
Payers play a crucial role in healthcare delivery by providing coverage and critical information for medical services in a complex landscape. Payers are charged with managing payment systems, disease, utilization, and care management systems while tracking performance, and ensuring regulatory compliance. The lack of smart, empathetic information sharing among clinical information systems creates obstacles for payers in accessing and facilitating necessary patient information to provide care, creating administrative inefficiencies and redundancies that lead to delayed or denied payments for care. This misalignment is not good for anyone and can be eradicated with purposeful collaboration. No one wants this mess to continue, so we all must look forward together and break the norm and find a better way,
Imagine if healthcare systems and practices of all sorts were able to have employers, government and payers as aligned, collaborative stakeholders when deploying healthcare information technologies. By prioritizing intuitive, intelligent information-sharing platforms that facilitate streamlined, coordinated communication systems we will be able to better align the goals and operations of all stakeholders together.
Why empathetic technology is right for healthcare
In many new and exciting ways, information and communications technology are becoming empathetic by design by prioritizing the needs of people, care teams and stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem by augmenting intelligence, automating processes, minimizing administrative tasks and providing real-time visibility. At my company we call this purpose- driven, human-centered design. This is meant to provide relief for healthcare professionals and bring humanity back to the patient-provider relationship.
This idea runs counter to old approaches of selling innovative technologies where profits are maximized based on ripping and replacing systems in place. Our approach is to be highly adaptive and inclusive of stakeholders and their systems so we can meet them where they are to find new ways to make significant progress together. Our goal is to improve the well-being of the humans at the center of healthcare, and we believe this can and should be the goal of all the stakeholders in a new information intelligent and empathetic technology ecosystem.
Human-centered design is inclusive and collaborative. We as human beings can and must come together to change, improve, and build on existing medical innovations and processes. To create the Golden Age of Healthcare Delivery, we need to understand healthcare workers’ pain points, personalize systems, and make information systems work for them, to ensure that the Golden Age of Medicine is fully realized for all in every community.
Photo: Philippe TURPIN, Getty Images
As CEO of Holon Solutions, Jon Zimmerman is responsible for setting the overall strategic direction for Holon Solutions and its Holon Community platform, which improves operational efficiency, care quality and the provider experience by liberating the data.
Mr. Zimmerman joins Holon after serving as president of Virence Health, which was acquired from GE by Veritas Capital in 2018 and is now part of athenahealth. While at GE he led the turnaround of the Value Based Care solutions portfolio. He initiated and drove the sale/divestiture of the division.
Mr. Zimmerman’s career spans more than 35 years with a majority spent in healthcare engaging and serving providers and payers with companies such as IBM, Siemens, CareFusion, Allscripts, Availity and GE. He holds a patent on advanced Revenue Cycle Management.
