Building your Digital Healthcare Backbone in the face of a Pandemic
Many healthcare organizations have launched their Digital Transformation journeys ahead of schedule to respond to COVID-19. Now is the time not to slow down, but rather continue building digital health infrastructure to enable providers to continue developing innovative healthcare solutions for our affected communities.
2020 has massively disrupted healthcare delivery. In a matter of weeks, institutions found themselves on the front lines of containing a global pandemic, forcing a shift in how care is delivered. Simultaneously, the importance of providing equitable care to underserved populations took on an increased and more deserved level of attention.
To understand how the industry is dealing with these challenges, Slalom had conversations with several physicians, administrators, and healthcare innovators. Throughout our conversations we found that organizations have been forced to innovate and launch their digital transformation ahead of schedule: Telemedicine went from a “niche service” to absolutely critical and corresponding reimbursement policies were transformed almost overnight. Online portals for patients and caregivers took on new importance as waiting rooms were converted to socially-distant doctor’s lounges. In general, digital healthcare roadmaps accelerated from years to weeks:
As healthcare organizations adjust to these changes, they now face three challenges:
- How to bring patients back into their facilities, ensuring the safety of all involved and work through a backlog of elective and chronic care
- How to transition from quickly stood up digital responses to more robust long-term digital care solutions that support equitable care without further disrupting the patient experience
- How to prepare for a potential broader second wave of COVID-19 building on the digital assets created for the initial wave at the beginning of 2020
The answer to these challenges lies in continuing to push forward with greater digital health adoption. A hybrid model of care that provides both virtual and in-person support will be key to providing safe, reliable care in an era of greater patient worry, and limited physical space.
Regardless of the rate of adoption for digital transformation to meet the most acute needs, it is imperative that healthcare organizations do not lose momentum or revert back to the hesitancy that once prevented many organizations from pushing the technology envelope. As the world faces successive waves of this pandemic, organizations will need a strong digital backbone to support adapting to the fluid, changing environment brought on by the lingering COVID crisis.
Where to start
Investments to support continued digital transformation should focus on four key areas: establishing single patient views to support multi-platform patient experiences, providing patients with equitable options to engage with healthcare institutions; building a secure and scalable architecture in the cloud, and investing in analytics and data visualization.
Build a single patient view to power consistent, quality experiences.
In order to connect with your customers across digital and in-person channels, you will need to partner with your patients to bring together all of their information into a single point of view. Katie Barrett, a health policy leader and consumer advocate, noted the importance of defining quality in interactions: “Some patients may want to be seen in-person by a clinician, even if their preference has telehealth listed as the default. The opposite is true for other patients. It’s now more important than ever to engage with the patient on their true preferences during this pandemic. This will help you co-define quality with your patient: There needs to be a shift from doing virtual care because that’s only what is available to shifting to virtual because that’s what is needed at this point in your care.”
Patients will inherently form an expectation that they will receive a consistent experience across multiple platforms. Meet these expectations with patient relationship management platforms that provide you with single view of the patient and allows your team to speak in one voice to patients across their care journey.
Give people equitable options for how they can engage with you.
Delivering a hybrid virtual and in-person experience should be a cornerstone of your organization’s approach. In particular, this will allow you to provide care even for those populations who may have limited digital access. Marcy Simoni, Director of Telehealth Strategy and Regulatory Affairs at Massachusetts General Hospital, observed that her work was not limited to setting up video visits, “Our team found that there was significant use of the phone among patients. When telemedicine became THE WAY to see a doctor, we learned that so many patients are disproportionately disadvantaged. If your digital health literacy was either non-existent or you shared one device amongst the whole household, or you were a non-English speaker you all of a sudden faced insurmountable barriers and had no choice but to resort to the phone for care.”
As you open up more methods of interaction, through digital or legacy analog means, patients will feel empowered to pick and choose how they will seek care. Now is the time to connect these new options through a single patient record and build the infrastructure to support all populations.
Invest in a transition to the cloud.
More digital interaction with patients means a greater institutional need for security, scalability, and reliability in uptime and performance. Accelerating your organization’s move to the cloud ensures that you are able to handle the increased demands that come with remote work, virtual care, and digital engagement. A cloud transformation also provides the ability to develop new capability for patients and providers at a speed that matches the ever-changing layout of our times. Designing and building innovative care solutions used to take months — now can take days, hours, or even minutes in the cloud.
Centralize operational and environmental data for visual analytics.
Data visualization is a powerful tool to understand your organization’s resources, capacity, and efficiency. It can also be enlightening in analyzing forward looking trends for strategic planning. David Boyce, MD, medical director for Mass General Waltham, an outpatient care facility in Greater Boston, notes the priority for understanding if there’s a pending demand, and how to respond to it, “Predicting volume is my biggest concern because I don’t have a good handle on the lifestyle impacts of this pandemic. When people stop playing sports, our orthopedic volume will decline. When people lose their jobs, they also lose insurance and can’t pay for the previously scheduled surgery. Maybe people do get a new job, but they don’t want to take more time off for surgery recovery. It would be helpful to create some predictive modeling to help determine what’s coming so that we can make some informed decisions.”
A centralized repository of data is essential to unlocking this value through visualization, building a modern culture of data, and creating a path towards self-service enablement.
These initiatives need investment at a time when institutions are already dealing with financial hardships from responding to the pandemic, but they are essential to providing a consistent, trustworthy patient experience gaining efficiencies, and operating with the flexibility to respond to a rapidly changing environment.
Taking advantage of the digital investments already made in 2020 and building on them will allow healthcare organizations to rapidly climb up the innovation curve. Moreover, these organizations will be able to have infrastructure that can respond not only to the next pandemic but also to efficiently support day-to-day operations of this next version in healthcare delivery.
Cabul Mehta is a Client Service Leader in healthcare and life sciences with Slalom. His experience includes operational process improvements, data and analytics implementations, strategic transformations, and population health interventions. His clients include health systems, physician organizations, cancer institutes, academic medical centers and community hospital settings throughout the United States. His research interests span across multiple areas in the industry including shared savings programs and accountable care organizations, personalized medicine, medical technology innovation, data platforms and analytics, and enhancing the overall patient and caregiver experience.
Patrick Lally is a customer strategist who helps organizations engage with their customers and stakeholders through automation, personalization, and technology. He has experience working with life sciences companies and medical device manufacturers on how to best engage with physicians and patients through digital channels.
Meaghan Schmieding is an experienced project manager and business analyst with a demonstrated history of aligning organizations for success by leading the delivery of complex initiatives in the healthcare, medical devices and life sciences industries. Her professional expertise includes electronic health record implementations, technical integration effectiveness and clinical testing. Meaghan also has experience with brand planning and marketing activities relevant to the critical path for a commercial drug launch.
