Connected Health: Napier’s Vision for Healthcare Transformation based on Continuum of Care

Healthcare evolution is in progress worldwide with specific focus areas. Though being driven by different key stakeholders–patients, providers, payers and governments, a few common themes are emerging –

1. Care Anywhere?– Healthcare is moving from hospital-centric care to hub-spoke model with integrated transitions of care across nursing homes, aged care centers, rehabilitation centers and eventually moving to?the homes of the individual themselves. This has drastically improved the convenience for patients in addition to significant improvement in health outcomes and Patient Satisfaction scores.
2. Coordinated Care?– As healthcare gets decentralized, there are multi-disciplinary care providers who gets involved in supporting and improving care delivery. Coordinating care and ensuring everyone has the right information, protocols and process becomes key to efficient care delivery
3. Monitor & Prevent?– Healthcare systems are increasing their focus on disease prevention and proactive monitoring. This is an important transition from sick care to true “health care”. Innovative technologies enable providers to collect data based on certain risk factors. This aids in early diagnosis, which goes a long way in preventing an episode or even more crucially, some additional time to work out effective interventions.
4. Connected Health is often misunderstood to be only about devices.

A holistic perspective on connected health includes these 4 areas:

• Connected Devices?– Consumer and hospital diagnostic devices, wearables, and tele-health tools promotes connectivity with patients and accurate data capturing with no time-lapses. This collects diagnostic information and transmits health records over mobile phones, IoT(Internet of Things) and onto the cloud.
• Connected Services?– Services that can be provided in association with one another and span the entire journey of a patient. This idea enables services across primary, tertiary, post-discharge, transitional and home care to be seamless for a patient.
• Connected Systems?–With a connected system, extended care teams and patients’ next-of-kin can see aggregate information, care plans, progress and protocols.
• Connected Healthcare Ecosystem?– Connecting with national or regional government-led databases, aggregations of systems, services and policies helps build a connected ecosystem

To succeed and take advantage of this evolutionary landscape, technology strategy around “Connected Health” is important and has become a key requirement.

This extended vision around connected health will accelerate the evolution, making the goals around preventive care, coordinated care and high-quality care anywhere a reality.

Two key building blocks for making connected health a reality would be:

(1) Technology strategy, solutions and its readiness

?(2) Understanding business models and opportunities

Right Technology & Strategy

Existing tools and applications, although important, need to be evaluated for their capabilities to support a connected health strategy. Most of the time the traditional systems find it hard to match up to the emerging technology with regards to the interfacing issues, usability factors, advancements & solutions.

To enable a connected health strategy, Innovative solutions and tools are needed to support some of the core principles outlined below.

• Technology architecture that is modern – Natively built as a web-based system with a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Open standards-based system with HL7 and FHIR interfaces that enables interoperability and data exchange with minimal customization adoption of a micro services?approach using an ESB to collect data from diverse sources, prioritize and create queues for data processing, identifying alerts and building consolidated dashboards
• Built-in integration with wearable’s, devices to capture activity levels, vital stats with an IoT or mobile gateway
• Mobility strategy with applications for key users (e.g. Mobile EMR access, Nurse assistant)
• Responsive user interface built using HTML 5 that conforms to the latest UI standards
• Integration with national databases and revenue cycle interfaces—NEHR in Singapore, ACFI in Australia or Malaffi in UAE and other such standards in different countries
• Ability to leverage advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create superior interfaces for key stakeholders as well as detect errors, fraud and optimization opportunities in care delivery

?Business Models and Opportunity

Connected Health is a business opportunity that can be looked at as your unique differentiator to healthcare. Adopting a strategic view of technology under these circumstances opens up innovative business models that can become new business lines with their own P&L or augment existing core businesses. It also provides an opportunity to build an ecosystem with suitable partners that allows you to leverage the expertise in your network.

The opportunity cost and impact of not preparing adequately for this transformation will severely hamper the business outcomes in many ways. It leads to :

• Losing referrals without a working referral management system that automates the ability for general practitioners (GPs) to send and track their referrals
• Significant revenue losses due to the absence of well-established interfaces with payer and government reimbursement systems such as ACFI in Australia, Shafafiya in UAE etc.
• Negatively impacting patient experience and hence patient loyalty when the patient journey between care continuum is broken
• Loss of revenue growth opportunities with new add-on services such as lab services at home, chronic care management
• Revenue loss due to unavailability of patient portals for smart appointment booking, mobile access to care reminder etc. eventually losing the Patient’s interest in your services

?With the ongoing consolidations and formation of larger healthcare networks, smaller businesses have to build on their services with trusted partners, referrals and data exchanges. The absence of such a network reduces your overall business velocity.

?The need of the hour is a good technology strategy. The right solution coupled with a patient-centric approach will boost business outcomes. Healthcare businesses can emerge stronger and better equipped to take advantage of Connected Health through technological advancements.

If you always wanted to use the latest technology but didn’t know how??Napier can help you TODAY!

Need help with more information? Reach us- https://www.napierhealthcare.com/home/contact.html

See how Healthy Outcomes benefits your patients and your practice.

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