The healthcare industry continues down the path of transformation with the goal to provide higher quality, lower cost care for individuals and overall populations. To meet these new objectives, healthcare providers are entering into newly formed partnerships and entities, which bring regional healthcare providers together with health plans to address population health, integrated care delivery models, and health information exchanges that span outside traditional geographic or organizational boundaries. Merger activity has rapidly increased and is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. A KPMG study suggesting M&A activity will increase seven percent this year. Horizontal and vertical merger activity across health systems, hospitals and other healthcare settings is forecast to continue as larger networks seek to expand their footprint, consolidate services, and ultimately drive toward the financial benefits of increased purchasing power while reducing overall costs.
While the objective of these partnerships is to deliver better patient care, it isn’t instantaneous, in fact it is painful and consumer experience often takes a backseat amidst the chaos of M&A activity. Healthcare organizations top priority is clinical integration as providers with disparate EMRs, billing companies and claims clearing houses attempt to share more information about patients. In addition to building the foundation to support analytics and reporting for value-based care in which sharing patient history, clinical information, claims data, and demographic data between entities is common; health systems are beginning to realize the value of consumer data. When integrated, this combined data can be used to predict and then concierge consumer experiences. Unfortunately, this is a major undertaking for healthcare organizations and it takes some time for consumers to see the benefit.
While the process of creating true interoperability may seem like an insurmountable task, the end result will be worth it for the organization and their patients. Integration of disparate systems results in “Patient 360*,” whereby combined patient, cost and consumer data is leveraged not only for clinical care, but to increase loyalty from the most valuable consumers, convert passive recipients of care into active participants of care, or to drive down the cost of care by motivating and incentivizing consumer activities.
The process of true interoperability is a major undertaking but data integration is key for improved patient outcomes. The chaos of M&A activity in healthcare will continue and healthcare organizations will continue to focus their resources on data integration. However, it is critical that consumer experience remains a top priority for these organizations amidst the chaos. Patients understand there are going to be pain points in the transformation of healthcare but their expectations are higher now than ever and the healthcare organizations the can meet those expectations have competitive advantage.
