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Heard at HLTH 2024: Insights from Innovative Healthcare Executives
Executives from Imagine360, Verily, BrightInsight, Lantern, and Rhapsody shared their approaches to reducing healthcare costs and facilitating digital transformation.
Recently I wrote about my first experience with a patient portal. It was disappointing.
Dr. Joseph Kvedar explained what Apple will have to do with HealthKit to avoid the dead ends that Microsoft and Google ran into when they tried to create a health data experience. He is cautiously optimistic.
I can see the progress in the patient experience, but it is not happening fast enough or consistently enough or well enough.
For most people, trying to get possession of and then manage and understand personal healthcare data is a mess. We are still stuck in the world of missed phone calls and just-out-of-reach test results.
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Finding a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s is a slow process and will take time. But the experience of visiting a doctor’s office and managing your own health can be fixed right now. It requires all payers and providers to start giving data to patients. Do not delay because some people will not know what to do with the information or will not even process it.
Making the experience of healthcare work for patients — on-time appointments, easy access to information, better communication — is a sign of respect. It shows that payers and providers value the patient’s time. It shows that payers and providers want all patients to start paying attention and making better decisions.
If a system works, people are more likely to use it and payers and providers both need patients to start using the system in a smart way – not a “The ER is my primary care provider” way.
These startups are making the healthcare experience better. Hospitals and doctors and payers should be paying attention to this work and actively supporting it with money and pilot projects.
Axial Healthcare is working to fix the pain management problem in America by getting doctors to follow evidence-based medicine and by helping patients get the right kind of treatment and avoid what doesn’t work.
InvisAlert Solutions is developing a less invasive way for caregivers to monitor people who are at risk of committing suicide.
LuminaCare Solutions is working to make hospitals safer for patients by using predictive analytics to diagnose hospital-acquired infections faster.
HealthCrowd is building a patient communication system that actually seems to have a sense of humor — something desperately needed in the world of healthcare.
eWellness is working with people with pre-diabetes to stop the progression into full-blown diabetes with a convenient program that combines telemedicine with a workout program that can be done at home.
These are the changes that need to happen now.
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[Image from flickr user Next Twenty-Eight]