State of My Industry: The Patient at the center of the care network

Each year, as part of its “State of My Industry” series, LinkedIn asks what the hottest position in your respective industry is. In healthcare in 2016 that’s easy to answer: it’s the patient.

Health care is entering an era of digital transformation.  We can see it all around us. With the rapid adoption of technologies that can disrupt the way patients interact with the system we are on the verge of a new truly patient-centric era in care. Health care is increasingly present as part of our political debates and daily news, and much of that discussion is centered on how we provide patients with personalized and validated information as well as digital tools that will empower them as they engage and collaborate with care providers. The goal, of course, is to both improve outcomes for patients and make care more affordable.

The promise of technology now follows each step of the health continuum from prevention, through acute care and post-discharge monitoring. Mobile and sensing technologies help measure, monitor and motivate patients. This means it’s easier to give tools to self-manage conditions but also to be in touch and actively collaborate with care teams 24/7.

We are using the expertise and algorithms developed for monitoring and supporting people in intensive care units and general wards to bring these capabilities to where people live, work and play.

Social technologies can put people in touch with their care teams and extend these teams to include friends, family, neighbors and fellow patients. Widely available, low cost connectivity and secure Cloud-based compute power and storage allow us to combine and integrate health data from both the consumer and professional healthcare space: to make that data actionable and contextual for consumers and their care providers.

By combining continuous monitoring with the data from images, blood tests, pathology and genomics, unprecedented insights can be gained that will drive precision diagnostics, targeted treatment and personalized home care strategies. A closed loop of feedback from the treatment will help advance further precision.

Analysis of integrated health data enables us to predict rapid deterioration or acute events so that care teams can timely intervene with the right people and measures, instead of waiting for the cardiac arrest to happen. We are also able to prompt patients to take medication on time and help them with their diet, their activity and other behaviors that impact their health.

Technology, in short, allows us to move from a reactive care approach to a proactive care and progressively preventative approach.

This is a very different approach from what has existed for the last sixty years. Healthcare systems have largely been designed around acute events and optimizing the work of professional caregivers – nurses and physicians instead of the patient’s experience and health outcome. Today, the prevalence of chronic conditions means we need to rethink the flows. We need to acknowledge that health care is a consumer industry that requires personalized and timely services for consumers to support them to live healthy lives, deal with a chronic condition or an acute event. With the consumer at the center of the industry, the industry will reorient itself and optimize its resources with this human-centric approach in mind.

We have already seen industries that had previously provided highly fragmented experience – think taxi rides or person-to-person payments – changed into something that’s designed around what the consumer needs.

It won’t be easy. I’ve written previously about the hurdles that must be overcome. And of course healthcare is a much more serious and complex endeavor than taking a taxi. We’re talking about people’s lives.

But we can no longer talk about potential for change. The time and technology has arrived to reorient around the patient. In 2016 you will see some real progress towards just this in healthcare.