March 2021
We are starting March with a continuing drive to get our mobile app out the door. Countless discussions with doctors, public health officials, social care workers, and patients have let us get closer to understanding the full extent of the importance of portability and acessibility as we work to roll out Curamei. After all, what good is the platform if no one can conveniently access it on the fly?
The Care Gap
There is a significant gap in the quality of care coordination that many members of underserved communities and populations face. With lower income levels, people are less likely to regularly visit a primary care provider because of other, more urgent financial burdens like paying for rent and a car. In other communities, there simply might not be enough health facilities in proximity, which in the way that food deserts see poorer nutrition among community members, leads to a significant number of people who do not have the time and money to have regular visits to a care provider.
The long-term consequence of this is an inability of members of lower-income demographics to develop care plans over the course of many encounters, to follow-up with doctors, and adhere to treatments. An explosion in the experimentation and adoption of new care coordination techniques have already been showing results with greater patient engagement and treatment adherence, but the gap in care accessibility that lower-income and underserved populations face means that millions of Americans are simply unable to see any of the fruits of the patient-centric revolution unfolding.
Our goal with the Curamei platform is to enable patients and members of these communities to be able to have a clear and consistent access to care collaboration tools. Easy access to medical history data by itself is enough to boost awarenesss and proactivity for health lifestyle choices. Less time spent moving medical records between clinics and filling out questionnaires can put more time to face-to-face interaction with health professionals to discuss emergencies and planning for wellness.
How do we plan to do this? A commitment is only as good as the plan to implement it, after all, and for a field as complex as healthcare, this question is even more important.
The first step to that was the mobile app, which we plan to roll out and publish for initial testing this month. However, going beyond having an app, this imperative of helping address the issues of underserved demographics means making simplicity and intuitive design choices the top priority in development. Members of the senior population and lower-income groups are less likely to have significant familiarity with digital technologies. For this reason, we’ve scrutinized every single screen, from the way a menu slides up to reveal information about a care provider, to the way that the user can edit their own profile. As we roll out the app, we will be working with local public health officials and social care workers so that we can gather feedback and pilot testing from the populations which we intend to serve.
Paying a Premium for Misaligned Incentives
CMS’ hospital price transparency rule is now in effect, and some hospitals have begun publishing data that highlights the challenges of reducing costs across the board in care delivery. Read more about our take on the early findings of the rule.
