Improving Healthcare Outcomes While Empowering Patients with Technology and Personalization
If you think it’s already hard to get the medical care you need – just wait. Experts are predicting doomsday.
More people need care as our population skews older (the 65+ group was the fastest growing age group between 2010 and 2021, with its population increasing 38%).
The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that the United States could see a shortage of between 54,100 and 139,000 physicians by 2033 (including shortfalls in both primary and specialty care).
Hospitals and urgent care facilities are already losing millions of dollars and closing due to staffing shortages. Or, to stay open, many have to depend on temporary staff (called locums), which triples costs. That is not a resilient system.
In this article, we'll highlight the perspectives of doctors, patients, and healthcare experts on the future of healthcare. These experts will also be featured as speakers at the Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Virtual Summit on May 3-4.
Effective Solutions for Healthcare: What Can Be Done?
First, acknowledge that there’s a shift in power happening.
RBC Capital Markets says the balance of power is shifting away from traditional institutions into the hands of individuals, calling this likely “the single biggest disruptive force” (“RBC Imagine: Preparing for Hyperdrive”). We see this power shift when we see empowered healthcare workers simply leaving their jobs after the stresses of the pandemic and due to low pay or other indignities.
We also see this power shift in play with more options for patients, who can increasingly approach healthcare as a consumer with more choices. Also, “advancements in science and technology have enabled the movement of devices to retail shelves that were once exclusive to hospitals, allowing consumers to track a large amount of data on their bodies,” as the RBC report puts it.
Second, consider why this shift matters in healthcare and how you can tap into it to boost the resilience of your organization, your workforce, your patients and your communities.
Medical Director Greg Brannon Urges Paradigm Shift Towards Proactive and Integrative Health Approach
Greg Brannon, MD, FACOG, is the medical director and founder of Optimal Bio. He said there needs to be a complete paradigm shift on how we approach our health.
“The paradigm shift starts with the patient being proactive and preventative instead of being reactive. The key to developing our bodies to generate this shift starts with our emotions, our spirit and our body all working in unison. We do not work best in isolation, and need to start approaching our health and wellness with the approach of the integrative lens.”
He said the patient is the most underutilized member of the healthcare team.
“And why is this? In the age of standardization, we are not evaluated as individuals. Let’s start the conversation to create a full paradigm shift to avoid sickness or delay sickness as much as possible.”
Cancer Survivors Stress on the Importance of At-Home Caregiving Options in Addressing Healthcare Crisis
I had a conversation with two people who survived cancer: Kayla Redig, a patient advocate; and Cindy Finch, LCSW, clinical therapist and author. They said to address the coming healthcare crisis, we must unleash at-home options such as prevention and caregiving.
They talked about the many barriers that keep the patient from being an active participant in their care. One of these barriers is insufficient caregiving at home. This could be because the patient doesn’t have anyone to fill that role. Or, even if they do – the healthcare system isn’t designed to support the caregiver.
This is shortsighted on the part of any healthcare system. To make your organization more resilient you have to empower your patients to be more resilient. And to empower your patients to be more resilient, you have to expand your definition of who you are treating to include your patient’s caregiver.
Caregivers are the bridge between healthcare and home. Identifying and strengthening home and community-based caregiving options can transform disease management.
Redig and Finch shared some ideas on how to enlist caregivers and support their resilience:
- Identify the point person (co-patient) for every patient, and engage the co-patient as a key player and a patient themselves by offering similar support.
- If no co-patient is identified, enlist paid caregivers from the community or medical center.
- During visits, prescribe care for the doctor to see both patient and caregiver on the same day.
- At home, give caregivers paid respite services and counseling.
- Direct them to online support groups, public health programs, and enhanced technology that could be useful to them – like AI, augmented reality, brain-computer interfaces, and blockchain technology.
- Conduct ongoing assessment and support of the caregiver’s wellbeing and resilience.
In short: treat the caregiver as you would treat a patient. This may sound inefficient but it actually could save the organization a lot of money in the long run. Even more important: it could lead to better health outcomes for people.
When good caregivers are in place and supported, patients seek earlier treatment of their disease, before their condition worsens and becomes more expensive to treat. There are fewer re-admissions to the hospital after discharge, saving resources for higher-need patients. There is more continuity of care for the whole team, so there are fewer phone calls and mix-ups at the doctor’s office and the pharmacy.
Patients are more likely to adhere to the care plan with someone there helping them. This helps recovery to stay on track, and makes it possible for the patient to return to work and other roles quicker.
Revolutionizing Healthcare Engagement: How Personalization and Technology Empower Patients and Caregivers
There are many technological tools that make it easier for your patients and their caregivers to engage with their healthcare providers, to find the information they need, and to proactively manage their health and wellbeing.
Brent Walker is SVP of marketing at Upfront, which provides healthcare enterprises with a patient engagement platform.
“One-size-fits-all approaches to patient engagement and care are ineffective across a population, because different consumer segments have unique motivations and communication preferences, requiring different engagement strategies,” said Walker. “Personalization leads to better patient engagement and outcomes, and technology informed with consumer data can facilitate highly personalized patient engagement at scale. Digital engagement meets patients where they are on their own terms, which is extremely important when most of their lives are spent outside the healthcare system.”
Sunnie Southern is Healthcare Insights Portfolio outbound product management lead at Google. She said many healthcare organizations are providing opportunities for patients to remain in the comfort of their own homes for acute conditions by leveraging remote monitoring technology systems and devices.
“These types of technologies and data collection devices have proliferated to the point that we have moved from an information deficit to information overload,” said Southern. “We need to continue to work together to leverage technology, advanced analytics, and an empathetic, learning, attitude that involves and includes everyone to ensure that we are providing technology that collects and delivers the right information to the right person at the right time using the right surface/device. Effective and efficient use of technology provides the potential to enable healthcare providers to focus on the work they love to do, caring for patients. For patients and family caregivers it can improve the care experience so that they can focus on getting well and staying well. When we get this right everyone benefits.”
Tom Wilson Ph.D, is chief technology officer for Concured, an AI content recommendation platform. He agrees that the most underutilized member of the healthcare team is the patient, and said organizations should do more to inform and engage individuals to participate in their own health, both preventatively during healthy phases and reactively while undergoing care.
“Healthcare organizations can be proactive in building these relationships before their services may need to be relied upon,” said Dr. Wilson. “Information-seekers, already overwhelmed by the volume of search results (including misinformation) available on the Internet, may find some solace in emerging AI-based technologies that disintermediate search engines to provide ‘answers.’ However, the logic behind these services is currently opaque and the provenance of the sources they draw from is often questionable. This creates an opportunity for institutions to assert their trustworthiness by delivering reliable, valuable and timely content to their followers through blog posts, articles, videos and research publications, distributed through channels such as email newsletters, healthcare apps and social media.”
Patients and their caregivers are the most underutilized – yet most potent – members of any healthcare team. The resilience of any individual health organization, and of the U.S. healthcare system as a whole, depends on how well we can empower these individuals.
