From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
That includes both hands-on care and the steps they take to encourage healthy habits after patients head home. The odds of consumers achieving better health increase with the use of such products as smart patches to gather vital signs continuously, with little or no need to train consumers to use them. Further lifting these technologies out of the realm of mere curiosities are advances in the analysis of large amounts of data for trends, warnings and suggestions regarding personal health.
For health care providers, engaging consumers throughout the health management process is the first step to monetize the emerging health care economy. For example, one large health care provider reduced its costs by using care management software to track a specific patient population suffering from chronic conditions.
From group monitoring chronic illnesses to individual best outcomes
It started with the grouping of people with similar chronic illnesses and specifying types of medical interventions and patient self-care that a certain illness called for. Then the progress in making sure these things happened was tracked through extensive care management notes enabled by the software.
The upshot: the organization identified what health care interventions tended to work for which condition, and for which consumer profile. The true success in reducing costs was in engaging patients, honing interventions and discouraging costly procedures.
Consumer-centric shifts are making an impact on the major components of health care. For payors, the long-time dependence on taking medical information from insurance claims is being replaced by continuous feeds of health status data required for timely patient care. For medical devices, the shift means they must be integrated into the system to feed data to the overall system.
Entities throughout the health care value chain will have to navigate a new world emphasizing documented excellence, customer obsession and solid health data to monetize the consumer-centered payoff in delivering a truly coordinated and differentiated set of services to the consumer.
About the author: Bipin Thomas is a global thought-leader on consumer-centric health care transformation. Thomas is the chairman of ICURO, a consumer-centric care outcomes research and digital health management organization, where he is redefining personalized care delivery by connecting all stakeholders in the emerging consumer-centric health care ecosystem.
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