Mike McSherry Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council Mike McSherry, CEO
and Co-Founder of Xealth. Apr 13, 2021,07:10am EDT
In-person doctor visits can be a
hassle. But health care systems only decided that virtual visits could be a
viable option when in-person visits switched from being annoying to being
risky.
Why? For all the talk around
"patient-centric care," why do health care systems think people want
to go back to the old way of battling traffic, paying for parking, sitting in a
waiting room scrolling on their phone for a 10-minute follow-up
appointment?
As someone who spent significant time
in consumer technology, I sometimes struggle to come to terms with the idea
that things I view as normal — like people using their smartphones for nearly
everything — are still relatively new concepts in health care. Just last year,
a senior health industry executive remarked to me about being too "wedded
to our telephonic method" to follow up with patients.
Is this really how health care
leaders want to connect with patients — by calling and asking them to come into
the office? Given comments like these, many people are willing to chalk up the
recent uptick in telehealth adoption as a win and call that digital
health.
This narrow focus on telehealth
hinders creativity and imagination: There are many other components of digital
health, which present a multitude of opportunities to capture the attention and
loyalty of patients.
How many things can
we call 'digital health'?
In addition to virtual visits that
remotely give medical and mental health care, digital health includes everything from
wearable devices and mobile medical apps that monitor cardiac activity and help
manage chronic disease to AI and software that supports clinical
decision-making to transportation and meal delivery to remote patient
monitoring. The latter, especially, has not been getting the attention it
deserves.
It may have taken a pandemic to get
widespread usage of telehealth, but progress cannot stop there. The best way to
serve patients is to continue supporting innovation in digital health, which
strengthens connections between providers and patients.
Digital health innovation is
exploding with payers and employers, while many medical providers are barely
getting out of the starting gate with it. That puts those health providers at a
competitive disadvantage and can limit their ability to care for patients.
This pandemic has underscored the
importance of digital health. It has shown us in stark ways that maintaining
the status quo is not an option. The health care organizations who successfully
adopt digital health as part of a broader care model have the best chance at
survival.
Where to start?
Remote patient monitoring keeps patients out of hospitals.
Remote patient monitoring (RPM)
involves using digital technologies to collect health data from patients in one
place and securely transmit it electronically to care providers in a different
location for assessment.
For example, my company worked with
Providence health system — consisting of 501 hospitals, 1,070 clinics and
120,000 caregivers and a comprehensive range of health and social services
across seven western states — to help monitor thousands of patients suffering
from Covid-19 symptoms using an RPM platform of pulse oximeters and
thermometers from the patients home. If their condition worsens, a care team is
alerted to intervene.
I like this example because it closes
the information loop. A proper RPM solution will automatically reach out to
at-risk patients via secure text messaging, phone, apps or devices to gather
live information about symptoms, and send alerts to their care team if
immediate attention is required. The underlying platform provides automation
and integration into the provider’s electronic health record workflow.
Digital health and
health equity: Expanding access to care is the right thing to do.
The pandemic highlights the
escalating need to find ways to serve people without access to proper care. It
has laid bare the glaring discrepancies in health care between urban and rural
areas and between those with money and without. Digital health provides a way
to start leveling these disparities.
Health care inequality is never okay,
and the life and death impact of such disparities is even more obvious in a
pandemic. One challenge to digital health adoption has been around
reimbursement. Commercial plans have started covering tools that help manage
chronic conditions, but Medicare and Medicaid have fallen behind. The Centers
for Medicare & Medicaid Services should reimburse providers for proven
digital health therapeutics — and continue reimbursement after Covid-19 has
been controlled through widespread vaccination.
Separately, implementing digital
health has mostly been a piecemeal operation with different departments running
disjointed pilots. Having a vendor-neutral framework in place to roll out
cohesive, interconnected digital health programs is key. This framework will
help organizations scale their digital health programs and better engage
patients.
When selecting a partner, finding one
that is willing to enable and scale your vision, offering best practices along
the way, is critical. Vendor partners too often try to reshape a customer's
goal to fit their offering. Industries as nuanced as health care require collaboration
and both sides to work together.
As we build on the momentum started
in 2020, let's not lose our nerve and go back to making our patients come to us
for everything. Let's go to them. We can think creatively, and with the patient
at the center, by keeping digital health's full picture in view and find ways
to make meaningful changes that deliver the absolute best care possible during
the pandemic — and beyond.
Mike McSherry, CEO and Co-Founder of Xealth. Read Mike McSherry's full executive
profile here.
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