3PHealth Blog
The Digitization of Healthcare
Monday, October 12th, 2015
As we’ve been speaking with various healthcare organizations, the one consistent message we keep hearing is that healthcare’s required changes can be overwhelming. Frequently it requires rethinking care delivery, patient engagement, training, marketing, and IT strategies. But take heart – you are not the first to walk this challenging, but exciting path.
This McKinsey interview with GE CEO, Jeff Immelt regarding the digitization of the industrial space, is of profound importance to healthcare industry strategists and C-suite leaders. Immelt leads off with the following quote,
“So industrial companies are in the information business whether they want to be or not.”
And this is exactly the space that many health systems and payers find themselves in today. While there will always be the need for human interaction in the delivery of health services, the world is expecting the healthcare industry, just as it expects GE, to engage in new and unique ways that utilize the the latest digital advancements.
I was particularly struck by this quote from Jeff Immelt:
“We want to treat analytics like it’s as core to the company over the next 20 years as material science has been over the past 50 years. We can hire the talent. We can evolve our business model accordingly. We need to treat our service agreements to share outcomes with our customers the same way an IT company might approach that in the future. So, in order to do that, we have to add technology, we have to add people, we have to change our business models. We have to be willing to do all those things.”
Just substitute “material science” for “intuitive medicine.” This kind of change is difficult, to be sure, but very achievable. It takes vision and leadership. While most companies don’t have the same resources as GE and can’t build their own platforms and sensors in house, it doesn’t mean they can’t control their outcomes.
Healthcare companies can derive similar benefits to GE when they have a digital engagement and care delivery platforms that they can control. Platforms that offer choice and agility, reduce the impact of external change forces. When organizations select which health services to “build” in house and when to partner with best-of-breed providers for the others, they can re-claim margin control and better engage their providers and patients to improve outcomes and reduce costs.
As the healthcare industry matures and becomes more integrated into the digital world embraced by their customers and service delivery partners, it will become stronger and achieve better health and financial outcomes.
We hope you will consider reaching out to us when you are ready to take control of your digital health strategy.
Choice – The Key to Knowing Your Patients through Digital Engagement
Friday, September 11th, 2015
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of hearing Kyra Bobinet, MD speak at the HIMSS Media Patient Engagement Summit in Orlando. She is back on the speaking circuit, as noted in this recent mHealth News article discussing the transition providers must make relative to better engaging patients through understanding their motivations – not just sifting through piles of connected health data.
Dr. Bobinet urges a layered approach to engagement – with users as the “designers of their own experience.” While the focus of her discussion is on the “eye-to-eye” experience between patient and provider, for many health consumers, convenience is critically important to engaging in their health. So how can you uncover key health motivators (such as giving up cigarettes before the first grandchild is born, or losing 40 pounds before next year’s 20th high school reunion) with limited face time? How can you begin to “know” your patients in today’s rapidly evolving digital health environment?
When evaluating technologies to complement this eye-to-eye experience, be sure to look for a high-degree of flexibility and personalization in your patient engagement solutions. The kind that lets you start slowly, as Dr. Bobinet proposes, and then accelerate the types and frequencies of engagement based upon each patient’s needs – at that particular moment in time. It should respect and enable engagement in all it’s digital forms – making it easy for patients to choose a phone call, video chat or sending connected health data to their doctors. To only support one mode of communication is not enough to truly engage either a patient or provider, and drowning the provider in data that is not in the context of each patient, does not help them to improve outcomes and lower the cost of healthcare delivery.
Healthcare delivery is changing and the clinical, business and IT strategies to support it are changing, too. You have more control and choice than you may think when it comes to engaging your patients. Make the strategic decision to consider patient engagement technology within the context of your patients, your providers and your overall business strategies. Only then, will you have solution that can truly support improved outcomes, lower healthcare delivery costs and new digital health services for the decades to come.
Think Bigger – A Systems Approach to Patient Engagement
Thursday, September 10th, 2015
Today’s healthcare environment is all about BIG change: Big mergers and acquisitions, growing customer expectations, significant updates to payer reimbursements, big retail corner clinics and monster advancements in digital health. It can be a challenge to focus your strategy and attention on the things that really matter towards making your organization financially stronger, more competitive and more responsive to customer’s health and community needs.
Most everyone agrees that patient engagement is key to future success, but the definitions of engagement vary wildly both within the industry and inside any given organization. In this recent article from Healthcare informatics, Mark Hagland talks about the concept of “systems of engagement” that are built around healthcare consumers.
Patient engagement is more than just a portal, scheduling an appointment online, a bedside hospital chat, or any one piece of software or hardware. It’s all of this and more. To be truly effective in improving both health and financial outcomes, engagement must be core to your business, clinical and IT strategies. It must become an integrated delivery system of best practices that can be personalized by health plan, region, condition and individual. It must be centered around delivering 21st century healthcare to consumers in a convenient, easy-to-use manner, while easily integrating into legacy systems and work flows.
When it comes to patient engagement – think bigger to make it easier to navigate today’s big healthcare challenges.
3PHealth Off to a Good Start – CIO Review Top 20 and CO NextUp Accolades
Tuesday, June 30th, 2015
Our new focus on healthcare IT has proven both exciting and rewarding. We have met some amazing people over the past year who have provided invaluable feedback, support and validation to our efforts. We joined the PrIME Health Collaborative here in Colorado and are actively involved in the organization’s Inclusivity initiative. We took 2nd place in the Next Up People’s Choice “Pint” Awards for up and coming small technology businesses, and most recently, 3PHealth was name by CIO Review as one of the “Top 20 Most Promising Enterprise Mobility Solution Providers” for 2015 for our Choice® Mobile Patient Engagement Platform. Please read our winners profile. We were among 450 nominees, so feel honored to be in such elite company.
We can’t wait to see what the rest of the year brings!
Privacy & The Internet of Me
Monday, March 24th, 2014
I recently attended an industry event where analysts from Gartner and Forrester discussed some of the key industry trends. They identified two major technology categories:
- Wearable Devices – anything from Google Glass to FitBit to RFID tagged clothing
- Data Analytics – in particular, those applications and services that present data in a fashion that can be easily consumed by the average business person or consumer – without the aid of a data scientist or analyst.
The next obvious question asked of the analysts was, “What about privacy?” In unison, both chimed in that it is the pivotal issue surrounding the success or failure of certain products, services and initiatives in this space. We agree.
Connected devices provide enormous information about each of us that can be used to help us get more exercise, loose weight, manage our household security, the location of our children and elder parents and even manage chronic diseases more effectively. This information, if not managed properly can lead to unwanted marketing messages, at best, and pricing or service access discrimination by unscrupulous organizations. Technologists talk about the opportunity of the Internet of Things (IoT). From a societal and business policy perspective, the discussion is really about the “Internet of Me” (IoM).
It becomes imperative that users have a choice about the control, use and flow of their personal data. It also becomes vital that companies who collect and/or use connected device data have clear and unambiguous policies and disclosures about data use. Remember – pie isn’t free at the truck stop. There is always a cost – obvious, or hidden. So before you choose a “free” service over a paid subscription, or finalize your connected device data business plans, take to the time to understand if and how all that “IoM” data will be used.