Why Patient-centred care is key to Digital Health Adoption
"Patient or customer-centred care" is often used but not frequently delivered in the #healthcare sector. Service models still ask patients to navigate through systems not built around them.
Thus, healthcare organisations and solution providers must embark on a journey that makes patient-centricity a reality to improve #digitalhealth adoption. To achieve this, we must move "patient-centricity" from a relatively passive process driven by industry needs into a more active and collaborative process conducted by the needs and preferences of both parties.
As the healthcare industry evolves, it creates an excellent opportunity for solution and #healthcareproviders to support value-based and user-centred care models to drive this digital transformation.
To put medicine's new potential into practice, we need to optimise workflows around the desires and priorities of the ultimate stakeholder - the party most interested in how it evolves: the patient. We must work with patients to build this new world of practice and care. The only efficient way to make this happen is to act as true partners combined with patient-driven design.
Digital technologies can transform #caredelivery , making health services more accessible, flexible, and person-centred, providing a better experience for patients and staff while improving efficiency. However, these positive impacts are only guaranteed once digitally enabled services are inclusive and meet expectations.
Digital inclusion is vital
Digital inclusion does not begin and end with providing access to devices, data, and developing skills. People's needs change, so it cannot be assumed that digital services will always be appropriate for individuals.
Improving digital inclusion means that everyone is equally able to access all public services, including health and care services.
It's vital to structure services according to people's needs and preferences. A one-size-fits-all approach or a rigid service with no customisation choices means the service is more likely to exclude groups of people. People have changing needs and preferences, and by understanding those, healthcare providers can lead the development of different digital options. This approach means that services can adapt to patients' evolving expectations and changing needs.
Below, we present a possible approach to help design or redesign digital and inclusive services.
How to take action
We ensure that we spend enough investment and time to be adaptable, flexible and learning-oriented to provide patients with the experience they deserve by offering services with different levels of digitalisation without losing our focus on #valuebasedcare .
The patient experience must be put at the centre of strategy, operationalised, and incentivised.
Patient-centred learning healthcare powered by AI
In addition to hurdles such as disintegrated care models and outdated technology, healthcare providers must now deal with changing patient expectations.
A patient should be involved in decision-making about their health. To achieve this, understandable information about the disease and treatment options must be available. The social determinants of health, the causes of #healthdisparities , #chronicdisease profiles, and emerging comorbidities need to be better understood.
Patient-centred care is about treating the person, not the disease.
Underlying translational mechanisms must be redesigned to respond to existing and future health challenges and emergencies and to deploy appropriate resources to improve #globalhealth . Therefore, enabling collaboration with data-linked innovation is critical.
Artificial intelligence (#ai ) has become the foundational component for extracting meaningful information from this vast amount of data to drive better patient-centred outcomes and give healthcare providers an edge in digital transformation. AI can impact and add value to many areas of patient-centred healthcare and is vital in achieving such a future of precision and sustainability.
Here's how AI is helping the healthcare industry become more patient-centric:
Physicians need real-time access to clinical data to make informed patient care decisions. For example, in a patient diagnosed with heart failure, the physician should be aware of the history of heart attacks, blood clots, and other related clinical data. However, in most cases, physicians lack the patient's #clinicaldata , and that's where AI comes in.
AI can act as a single advisor, tracking the patient's data, learning from the patient's experience, and developing the best solution. In addition, AI can help patients adhere to post-hospitalisation recommendations to stay healthy.?
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AI in healthcare is ideally suited to improve #carecoordination . For example, it is possible to train an algorithm to predict peak hours in an emergency department and help them coordinate admissions.
How about software that can identify the most acute cases and prioritise those patients? AI-powered care integration also offers excellent opportunities.
Improving the patient experience requires using technology and data-driven insights. Data is the fuel for any organisation's customer-centricity. Data points can include system, device, customer, and inventory data to provide a 360-degree view that accelerates customer-centric decision-making and optimisation. In this context, #bigdata and AI technologies fully support the collection, sorting, management and use of this data.
This ability to gain deeper insights is vital to understanding a customer's health journey and designing outstanding experiences.
Besides monitoring population health, data analysis with AI technology helps doctors make more accurate diagnoses and create more successful treatment plans. Providers can search for symptoms they may not have seen before and get opinions from thousands of physicians across all related specialities.
It means better patient treatment outcomes when providers can access virtually unlimited data. Still, patients can avoid treatment altogether with access to the same data. Through #telehealth devices, AI in healthcare can allow patients to search for the same trusted data sources to determine if their symptoms demand a doctor's visit.
#patientengagement is critical to the #patientexperience , which is why AI-driven apps are becoming increasingly popular with patients and providers. These apps should have a more consumer-friendly front end to empower patients to make better decisions and be more proactive in their healthcare.
AI-powered cloud-based solutions are a standard in modern software systems. They enable interoperability among stakeholders and work well with remote work sites by unifying all branches of a #healthcaresystem . Hospitals and professional healthcare providers should consider platforms that allow accessible communication and access to real-time health data.
AI in cloud-based systems and communication platforms can enable fast and secure data collection, integration and synchronisation. Data compiled from clinical, financial, and operational departments should be used to develop new metrics for quality, #patientsatisfaction , and healthcare performance. The resulting data can be used to provide medical advice and treatment plans for individuals based on the metrics.
AI solutions automate and simplify time-consuming, mundane tasks and help healthcare providers and retailers analyse and manage large amounts of data. For example, applications that leverage AI can be used to analyse exam reports, CT scans and X-rays and diagnose complex conditions and diseases. This allows faster disease detection and availability of patient records and medical histories to save time for both the patient and the healthcare provider. As a result, diseases can be diagnosed quickly, and treatment interventions can be initiated promptly. This ensures that patients' health needs are quickly identified, and treatment processes are holistic.
More and more healthcare organisations are using AI chatbots to triage patients and guide them to the right help. Chatbots are generally considered a more accurate and reliable alternative to patient-driven online searches for symptoms, helping patients who may not otherwise know where to get the best care. These chatbots first collect basic information from patients to then provide, based on the input, more information about their condition and suggested next steps.
AI chatbots are designed to help clinical teams manage heavy daily workloads. Some bots can even suggest a virtual conversation with a doctor after analysing #patientdata , rather than a visit to the doctor's office, and forward the patient's case to a live provider via video call.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry has seen tremendous changes quickly, and we took notice at knokcare .?
At knokcare , we believe AI can impact and add value to many areas of patient-centred healthcare, with new potential applications surfacing almost every day. Well-designed AI-powered tools are the right way to engage patients and their care teams before, during and after visits to drive better health insights and outcomes.?
How is knok doing differently??
By collecting more than 150 data points, we offer a comprehensive patient dataset leveraged by AI which will enable clinicians to get a more holistic understanding of patients - medical and environmental circumstances to identify what they can influence in delivering better #healthoutcomes .?
With our white-label solution, Panacea, we can create the right #patientjourney while changing how healthcare providers better use AI within their platforms to communicate and interact with their patients and improve their health.
This approach helps establish relationships and builds continuity of care, more #personalisedcare plans, and ultimately – well-informed and happier patients. It empowers every existing healthcare-related company to explore new opportunities and scale their business models by adopting patient-centred solutions beyond their assumed boundaries, with a far greater understanding based on data to maximise return on investment, impact, scalability and sustainability.?
In summary, this is how we bring a tailored patient-centred solution to help our customers reinvent their relationships with their patients.?
Ready to build the ultimate patient experience?
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