In healthcare, the benefits of technology are tremendous, such as enhancing patient care and providing more accurate and timely analytics for improved outcomes. However, there is a rising concern that technology is replacing personal interactions, by minimizing the amount of time patients spend with providers and in turn dehumanizing healthcare. Amongst all the challenges healthcare providers are faced with, they must also find ways to keep a personal touch in the digital healthcare world. A patient-centered model starts with a Physician who listens to their patients.

Unfortunately the new healthcare system isn’t geared toward human interactions. Healthcare providers spend more time starring at a computer screen and checking boxes than communicating and more importantly listening to their patients. It reminds me of the scene in Patch Adams where the late and great, Robin Williams’ character is talking to a Doctor and he can clearly tell he isn’t listening so he starts rattling off ridiculous statements. Listening to patients and providing compassion and support can go a long way in keeping a personal touch in the digital world of healthcare. The use of technology will continue to rise but we must be sure to keep the CARE in healthcare.

Perficient’s Health Analytics Gateway is a robust solution that accelerates data integration by more than 50% and automates the population of the IBM Healthcare Data Model, which helps healthcare organizations generate  insightful and actionable analytics much quicker. This innovative solution delivers rapid results from the Enterprise Data Warehouse and provides business intelligence and analytics that can help manage readmissions, evaluate the cost of care, increase operational performance and improve population health management capabilities.

This Perficient Health Analytics Gateway:

• Expands IBM Information Management tools
• Reduces data integration time by more than 50%
• Populates key functional areas meeting the needs of many top use cases
• Provides standardized data for BI reporting

In recognition of the Health Analytics Gateway, Perficient recently received a 2015 IBM Beacon Award for Outstanding Information Management Solution. This top honor is awarded to a select few elite IBM Business Partners who have delivered exceptional solutions to drive business value and transform the way their clients and industries do business in the future. To learn more about Perficient’s Beacon Award visit the Perficient IBM blog.

UNC Health Care System recently leveraged the Health Analytics Gateway to accelerate data integration from their legacy systems and Epic by more than 50%. The Health Analytics Gateway also helped UNC Health Care System:

• Eliminate dependency on older technologies
• Integrate the platform to enable efficient data management
• Complete integration between data from legacy systems and Epic
• Develop a comprehensive data warehouse to support future analytics requirements

In addition to the Beacon Award recognition, Perficient was recently awarded the IBM Big Data & Analytics Worldwide Business Partner Excellence Award. We are excited to be recognized for our innovative solutions that are positively impacting healthcare organizations across the country.

Anthem followed industry standards and encrypted the medical information that was shared outside of their database, but because they failed to secure their on-premise data, hackers gained access to up to 80 million records that include social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, email, employment information and income data for customers and employees. Scrambling personal data makes it less valuable to hackers, but also makes it more difficult for healthcare employees to track trends and share data with other healthcare providers and states.

Other industries such as the financial services industry keep personal information in separate databases that can be closed off in an attack. Avivah Litan, an analyst for Gartner who specializes in cyber-security, said healthcare organizations “are generally less secure than financial service companies who have the same type of customer data.” For example, the attack on JPMorgan Chase last summer compromised the personal information of over 80 million households and small businesses, but the breach was limited to non-financial information because the more sensitive information was walled off, which meant hackers could not penetrate it.

Unfortunately, in healthcare the question isn’t whether the next data breach will occur but rather when will it occur. Balancing out the health information exchange teeter-totter will continue to be a challenge for the healthcare industry. The criminal value of the information that healthcare organizations store combined with the slow adoption of security measures make healthcare organizations prime targets for hackers.

Perficient recently worked with a large healthcare system in Ohio to develop and implement a custom readmissions solution that predicts readmissions across all diseases and conditions. To learn more about this innovative solution, Stephanie Banks, Marketing Manager at Perficient, interviewed Senior Solution Architect, Dale Less. Read the interview here.

Ninety percent of all of the world’s data has been generated the last two years and that statistic will be blown away in 2015 and the years to come as the IoT continues to grow. In fact, Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30% from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020. Leveraging the invaluable insights enabled by the connection of these devices is what the Internet of Things is all about.

IoT  is a powerful force transforming the way healthcare organizations do business by allowing them to leverage the cloud to reduce operational costs and generate valuable data-driven insights. IoT starts with the data, devices and services within a healthcare organization including EHRs, claims and financial systems. The data from these various sources is combined with new sources of data like wearable devices and in-home monitors, providing a complete patient view across the entire continuum of care. Healthcare organizations are using the cloud to leverage the IoT to reduce operational costs with predictive maintenance and real-time monitoring of medical devices and to lower readmission rates with predictive insights that identify patients who need additional clinical intervention.

Healthcare organizations that implement a strategy to leverage the Internet of Things will improve efficiencies by spending less time managing processes and systems and more time delivering high-quality and cost-effective patient care. Check out 10 Trends Impacting Healthcare in 2015

An Increasing Need for On Demand Care - In years past on-demand care meant dropping into a retail or walk-in clinic to get checked out or to get a prescription. Today, on-demand care means online, from the comfort of your home, even in your pajamas if you wish. More and more people are preferring to email their provider questions or video chat rather than stopping into a near by clinic.

Healthcare reform has provided insurance to more than 40,000 individuals who do not have a formal source of care, making them prime candidates to use telehealth. Additionally, there continues to be a growing need for primary care physicians, in fact it is estimated by 2020 there will be a shortage of 20,400 primary care physicians.1 Telehealth provides a great opportunity to expand primary care capacity, tackle the physician shortage and provide convenient and affordable care.

Healthcare Consumers Driving Their Care - Healthcare consumers are becoming more savvy with their healthcare in terms of leveraging their resources and directing their own care based on personal judgement. They are more accountable for their care and taking responsibility for their preventative care plans. Telehealth may just be the solution to meet the needs of the new healthcare consumer who is seeking convenience and ease as they juggle their busy lives.

Regulatory Barriers Being Addressed - The regulatory environment continues to change to help knock down barriers that have stood in the way of telehealth in the past. Reimbursement eligibility for telehealth services is expanding geographically and new laws are ensuring that certain virtual visits are reimbursed the same way in-person visits are. In addition to government mandates, professional groups are focusing on setting guidelines for evidence-based telemedicine and insurers are partnering directly with telehealth vendors to provide virtual care.

An Emphasis on Customer Experience & Continuum of Care - Healthcare consumers are  frustrated with the increased time they spend in the waiting room and the lack of time spent with the healthcare provider.  With an emphasis being placed on customer experience healthcare providers are expanding their hours to accommodate for the demand, however, this is not sustainable. Telehealth also provides a channel for delivering healthcare that can bridge the gap and provide care across the entire continuum leading to better outcomes and an overall improved customer experience.

Telehealth engages healthcare consumers, provides valuable insights for population health management and offers an option that addresses rising healthcare costs and healthcare provider shortages. The time for telehealth is now and providers must leverage it to transform their business models, improve care management and tackle rising healthcare costs.

Look for telehealth to have an enormous impact on healthcare in 2015. Both healthcare providers and health plans need to start embracing telehealth. Check out 10 Trends Impacting Healthcare in 2015

Sources:

1 Healthcare IT News
2 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Since its inception, the health insurance industry business model has been a B2B operation based on premiums and reimbursements. Today, health insurance organizations are in varying stages of a journey that is transforming them from platforms for purchasing insurance into health management bodies striving to engage their members and provide resources to help them change their health and wellness behaviors. In order to attract new members and retain existing ones, health plan organizations must think like B2C organizations and transform their business models to improve the overall customer experience. They must shift their focus from providing customer service to finding ways to engage their customers.

Health plans must strategically address these technology imperatives, at an enterprise level to enhance the customer experience and succeed in the new world of healthcare:

Digital Strategy - Develop a strong enterprise vision with a road map that utilizes a multichannel enrollment approach (web, mobile, social).

Data Management Strategy – Develop a data management strategy and infrastructure that integrates ALL data, including clinical, and transforms it into actionable, secure and useful insights.

Mobile Strategy – Develop a mobile (mHealth) strategy that embraces mobile applications and leverages them to engage and empower customers.

These technology imperatives must be considered from a strategic perspective in order to meet the true needs of the business.

Healthcare companies in the digital age are now responsible for vast amounts of data. This data is created and acquired on a daily basis, and the volumes are increasing substantially with each patient visit or interaction.  Some information is stored in pre-determined, structured fields within Electronic Medical Records (EMR), claims or financial systems and is readily accessible with traditional analytics.  Other information, such as doctor’s notes, patient surveys, call center recordings and diagnosis reports is saved in a free-form, textual format and is rarely used for analytics due to the limitations of traditional business intelligence solutions.

Experts suggest that up to 80% of enterprise data exists in an unstructured format, which means a large majority of critical data isn’t being considered or analyzed. Without accounting for this significant percentage of available information, healthcare organizations will find it challenging to make accurate and well-informed decisions that impact patient care and organizational operations.

Join Perficient for a webinar on January 20th, to discover how technology can help transform unstructured data into better healthcare outcomes.

Read Mark’s entire post here and I would also encourage you to read What the Market Says You Need in Your Patient Portal, a great post by Melody Smith Jones, Manager of Perficient’s Connected Health Practice.

Patient portals shouldn’t just be implemented to meet a regulatory requirement, they should be used as an engagement and empowerment tool for patients.

Rule #1: Don’t allow clinicians to calculate cost savings. Finance and clinical counterparts should partner together using transparent calculations and data.

Rule #2: Ensure quality reporting is comprehensive. If a hospital can report financial data for every department, they should be able to report quality data. Make the data available across clinics and define system wide measures.

Rule #3: Ensure quality-control resources are adequate. By demonstrating the business value of quality improvements, the quality department should be able to secure the resources needed to build quality control processes.

Rule #4: Equate Chief Quality Officers to Chief Financial Officers. If it takes the CFO level position to ensure the financial health of the hospital, why wouldn’t we want an equal position to ensure that effective quality control procedures are established?

The common thread here is data and leadership isn’t it? On the data side, enterprise data warehouse solutions are important to source data for common measures for the hospital. This intersection of quality and finance also will be affected by the upcoming conversion from ICD-9 to ICD-10 coding methods. By permitting more-specific coding of patient conditions, it may be possible for care management organizations to identify which members require disease management and to tailor programs more precisely to their conditions, thereby raising the efficacy of disease management and saving both lives and money.

This article initially attracted my interest because of my background in finance and operational analytics, but I also had an unfortunate encounter with a mid-size hospital system recently with a family member that shook me to the core. There was no Quality Officer and no incident reporting process in place and no one to turn to after a life threatening situation unfolded with a close family member. My heart sank not only for my loved one, but for those who would encounter this in the future. I did report this to the Joint Commission and I hope that the culture has changed for this organization.

@teriemc