Is it time to stop thinking about healthcare in terms of doctor visits? HealthIT News published an article posing this question recently in conjunction to the kick-off of the Patient Engagement Summit in San Diego. The article goes on to say that “healthcare” takes place in between visits, and away from the doctor’s office. Dr. Daniel Sands, MD, an instructor at the Harvard School of Medicine and co-founder and co-chair of the Society of Participator Medicine, who kicked off the opening keynote went on to say that Healthcare is a collaboration. “We have this visits based system that was developed 100 years ago. People didn’t develop chronic conditions, everything was acute. That doesn’t make sense in a world of chronic conditions”. He also noted a study by Alicia Staley, Chief Patient Officer at Akari Health, in which patient-generated data differed significantly from data entered into the patient record by a nurse who was prone to filtering the data provided by the patient.1
In my recent blog “Communicating with Care Givers via a Self Service Symptom Checker”, I described a self-service symptom checker solution powered by Oracle Service Cloud implemented within the Web Self Service & Nurse Chat project at Kaiser Permanente. KP OnCall provides 24/7 integrated programs in remote care management, or ‘telehealth,’ to providers, health plans and employers. KP OnCall is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kaiser Permanente and the nation’s leading telehealth provider. The solution enables patients at KP OnCall to interact on-line with the symptom checker to determine next steps based on their history and their condition. The KP OnCall solution empowers members with a choice of self-assessment versus waiting to speak to a nurse on the phone or go in for an appointment. Using a rules engine based on how the patient answers questions, the symptom checker may determine that no action is needed, that a phone consultation is needed, or it may order a prescription or even instruct the patient to go to the ED. Learn more by watching the on-demand webinar.
This technology can be leveraged to build a full contact center to facilitate customer interactions, social media capabilities to extend outreach and improve communications with customers and increase channels for patient engagement. Perficient specializes in implementing digital technologies in Healthcare and we’d love to talk to you about how we are helping clients solve these challenges. We will be at Oracle OpenWorld this year so stop by booth #1809 in Moscone South to see our demo and discuss our use cases for cloud budgeting and forecasting.
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1 Healthcareitnews.com; October 13, 2015; Time to phase out physician office visits?
