Why does health & care need a data-driven digital health platform

Did you know that often 60% of emergency admission (*) to acute hospitals are for patients with chronic conditions? Different statistics show the various percentages of how many of these admissions could be prevented. Still, the silver lining is clear - if chronic patients would be better at controlling their conditions, up to 50% of these admissions, if not more, could be prevented(*).

With a growing and aging population, there are more and more citisens with at least one chronic condition, so the burden on hospitals is only increasing, which creates issues for the sustainability of healthcare systems globally (*).

Having worked with several doctors, nurses, clinical pharmacists, and even patients over the last decade, I haven’t met anyone who didn’t think that keeping patients out of the hospitals isn’t a great idea. However, somehow, this challenge persists.

It makes me think, what is missing, that this change doesn’t happen (faster)? After all, we all strive to live longer, stay healthy, and if we end up with a chronic condition, we would want it adequately maintained so that we would still be able to lead active and quality life.

What catalyst will trigger a chain reaction towards truly patient/citisen focused health and care, and is there even a single catalyst? Healthcare, after all, is a very complex environment with many stakeholders with many different ambitions and drivers:

• Medical teams
• Healthcare organisations on different levels
• Governments and policymakers
• Insurance companies
• (Medical) universities
• Wider stakeholders addressing wider determinants of health such as social, housing, local planning, and education
• Patients

Understanding each stakeholder is important, but I can’t shake the feeling that we should all be focusing on the citisen and patients. After all, if we establish a system and an environment where citisens stay healthy longer and chronic patients are seamlessly controlling their condition to lead a quality life, getting proactive advice and treatments from virtual (and physical) multidisciplinary teams, then the life, work, and processes of everyone else involved in the wellbeing, health, and care of the patients will be “automatically” improved and optimised as well. 

And once we manage to reduce the burden on the healthcare system from the perspective of the chronic patients, there will immediately be more time and resources to take better care of acute conditions. We will end up with a more efficient, streamlined, and sustainable system with happy citisens, patients, and everyone working in this system.

I know that this change is primarily an organisational and behavioral challenge. Still, to achieve this fundamental shift where health and care are entirely focused on citisens and patients, a new breed of IT solutions will be needed to support all the different stakeholders in all the steps and areas of wellbeing, health, and care. We struggle to properly integrate all solutions within a single care provider (mind you - some organisations have several hundreds of apps and applications). It will be entirely impossible to come up with a single or best breed solution to support such patient/citisen focused care ambitions. 

And suppose we genuinely want to achieve the best outcomes for us, either healthy or already with a chronic condition. In that case, we want a comprehensive digital patient record that holds our data for life. So that we can stop carrying around our paper records and can rely upon that whenever we need advice on staying healthy or require medical attention, everyone will have all crucial information to make the best decision. I am positive that health & care teams would also feel much safer if they knew they are deciding on relevant and comprehensive patient information and that the systems they are using help them proactively identify individuals that need their help regardless of where they are.

A data-driven digital health platform underpinning an ecosystem of digital solutions that can easily and rapidly be assembled to support different “shared personalised specialty services for patients/citisens” would go a long way and open up countless new possibilities.