For many years, we have not questioned the traditional wisdom of hospitalizing acutely ill people for medical care. But what if some acutely ill people could receive high-quality medical care in the comfort of their own homes? And what if that care actually led to better outcomes, reduced costs and enhanced patient experience?

At M Health Fairview in Minnesota, we’ve created a unique approach to emergency mental health care by using thoughtful design with evidence-based techniques. This pioneering new treatment model offers rapid, comprehensive care services in a calming environment and is improving care and outcomes for people with mental health issues.

EmPATH — or Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment and Healing — is designed to guide patients safely through a current crisis while building coping skills that will guide them through future challenges. Though it just opened in March, this unit is moving emergency mental health care in a new and exciting direction.

A Patient-Centric Model that Balances Safety and Patient Empowerment

EmPATH is a different approach to emergency mental health care. Everything — from the unit design to the evidence-based techniques our providers use — puts patients first.

The EmPATH approach is intended to address emergency mental health needs and improve patient outcomes. To accomplish this, each EmPATH is staffed by a multidisciplinary team of mental health specialists, including psychiatrists, licensed therapists and psychiatric nurses.

Using Patient Connect and Connect Care eliminates playing phone tag with patients, which means less wait time and frustration for both parties. Previously, it took an average of 1.5 to 2.5 calls to schedule a patient. Staff would have to call patients for the missing information and if the patient was unable to answer, a message would be left. Patients would have to return the call and get in the call queue to complete the information.

Now with these innovative tools, it’s a win-win situation. Patients are empowered to quickly share necessary details and schedule their appointment anytime and anywhere that is convenient to them all with the click of a button. Additionally, staff no longer have long queues of phone calls to make and follow up, again allowing them to focus more on helping patients who need more assistance.

Between January and June 2021, about 20% of referrals were self-scheduled by patients, and the average number of referrals processed per full-time equivalent per day has been increased by around 50%. We’ve also had a 40% decrease in referral processing time.

The Patient Access Suite has improved both the patient and staff experience. Overall feedback from patients and staff have been positive:

Patients and staff have long been involved in driving and shaping transformation programmes in healthcare. In the NHS, this involvement has often taken the form of patient panels, focus groups and the voice of the patient is often represented in the role of Patient Governor. Patients who have an interest in their healthcare systems also include Trust members and volunteers who form part of a dynamic network.

As we move to a new phase in digital health, it is believed that digital solutions can support a significant number of patients in taking a more active role in their own care. We have seen this in trends such as wearables, apps and on-demand healthcare solutions. It is also reflected by the programmes of work the recent Digital Pioneer Fellowship cohorts have been undertaking. Healthcare providers have looked to other industries to improve engagement and uptake of these digital solutions, which has resulted in a focus on patients as ‘consumers’ in product development.

There are two types of innovation.

First, there’s innovation in the underlying technology, tools or components that can be used to do something. Let’s call it local innovation. This ussually starts as experimentation with new ways of doing things just to see if it’s possible… to see what happens. It does not start with a specific problem and can be completely fueled by curiosity and a sense of wonder. Local innovation is important because it creates new opportunities that didn’t exist before. However, it is not the type of innovation that leads to real change in the world and we can get into trouble when we pretend that it is.

Second, there’s innovation in the way we actually do our jobs. Let’s call this systems innovation. Systems innovation must start with a problem that needs to be solved. The problem, or current state, is clearly defined and the cost to the system is well known. The desired state is also well defined, and we at least have a plan for how we will measure and prove success. The real work, and therefore real systems innovation, occurs between the current and desired state. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today.

For long time listeners of this show, you know we’re in the business of helping entrepreneurs understand how to create use case alignment, how to get over the hump of defeating good marketers with a not so good solution, and how to get the right tools in the hands of people who need them. The hurdles involved with getting permission and building consensus around which new tech to bring in slows down diffusion and implementation of needed solutions.   

Moving towards a proactive or preventive care approach requires data-driven, clinically meaningful insights to be available for a physician to make prognostic, predictive decisions early-on

By Reenita Das, Partner & Sr Vice President and Kamaljit Behera and Siddharth Shah, Industry Analysts, Transformational Health, Frost & Sullivan | Jan 05, 2020

Asclepius was the God of Medicine, according to ancient Greek Mythology; and his ‘rod of Asclepius’, the snake entwined staff, is still a widely recognised symbol of medicine. For centuries, Asclepius was (and is) considered as perhaps the greatest healer. But surprisingly, ‘medicine’ is defined a little differently: according to the Oxford dictionary, it is ‘the science and practice of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease (often excluding surgery)’. Yet, in healthcare today, we focus on providing reactive care – treating sick patients, instead of proactive care – helping prevention of diseases as well, in line with the complete definition of medicine. We are now therefore facing challenges with chronic conditions, for example, and don’t really have a Panacea (incidentally a daughter of Asclepius), at least a quick one for these problems.

AR Consultants Director Dr. Barry Newman discusses what's gone wrong with EHRs and how to get them back on the right course.

How a standard schema is the spark that’s digitally transforming healthcare.

Hear why Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR, is the new agent of change in healthcare. Organizations around the world are capitalizing on FHIR adoption, using the new data standard to kickstart their legacy modernization and digital transformation journey.

Talking Points:

● FHIR as a Change Agent
● Modernizing without replacing - The Operational Data Layer
● An agile method to digitally transform your own organization

Digital oncology solutions can help standardize and improve patient care. Learn how Roche helped set up a Germany-wide molecular tumor board.

The Marien Hospital in Wesel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany treats a number of complex oncology patients. The hospital is based at a single site, with 16 different medical departments, approximately 432 beds, and 1,000 employees. Every year the hospital treats approximately 20,000 inpatients and 50,000 outpatients.1 In collaboration with Roche, Marien Hospital explored the use of digital oncology solutions to improve patient care.

Overview 

As we are moving towards a digital world, with medical knowledge increasing at an exponential rate,2 there is a pressing need for the simplification and standardization of hospital processes to enable healthcare professionals to clearly understand and interpret available data. 

One challenging, yet crucial, process for oncology patient care is the management of tumor board meetings, which involves the handling of large amounts of cancer patient case data and requires the input of multiple specialists to align on the optimal treatment recommendations.

Adding to the complexity is the advancement in next-generation sequencing (NGS) and an increasing number of available cancer treatment options, which is further progressing the field of oncology towards precision medicine. This leads to a rising need and formation of molecular tumor boards.3, 4

Our guest writer contemplates the evolving needs of the healthcare workforce from educational competencies to health equity, and how we can identify opportunities for changing the industry and its workforce.

The goal of assuring a healthcare workforce able to support optimal adoption, use and advancement of health information and technology is complex. The range of competencies needed reflects the spectrum from healthcare delivery to pure IT, from data infrastructure to its collection and use, and from support of IT functions within healthcare delivery institutions to technology use by consumers.

The rapid change and advancement of IT broadly and specific to health IT itself, as well as rapid advances in both content and delivery approach of healthcare itself adds to the complexity. The impact of change on this complexity increases exponentially when we consider how advances in the two realms iterate and fuel each other. A final dimension of dynamic complexity comes from the social, economic and political environment in which we all operate.

The majority of Americans don’t fully understand the information their provider tells them, leading them to consult third-party resources like the internet, a new survey found.

The Dubai-based GluCare Integrated Diabetes Center has published a second set of clinical results revealing further reduction of haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels in its patients.

Remote continuous data monitoring – a personalised, tech-focused approach to diabetes management employed by one Dubai-based specialist clinic – continues to demonstrate positive results in its patients, it has been confirmed.

Enabling patients to share data that may influence health outcomes and to access their own medical records can help achieve productive care team conversations, as well as improve medication access and adherence.

Patients want to be more involved in their own healthcare but aren’t always sure how to do so. This informative infographic demonstrates the patient data accessibility gap and explores how enabling patients to share more data (including social determinants of health) can help providers consider those elements to make treatment decisions, including determining paths to medication access.

Sharing real-time patient benefit and eligibility information with providers at the point of prescribing improves medication access and, ultimately, patient outcomes.

To help patients access their prescribed medications during office closures due to the pandemic, many health plans relaxed or waived medication regulations, such as prior authorization (PA) and refill-too-soon orders.

Despite this temporary relief, many patients still experienced delays getting their prescriptions filled.

Solutions such as real-time prescription benefit (RTPB), electronic prior authorization (ePA) and intelligent pharmacy workflows can help reduce administrative and benefit barriers contributing to these delays – and improve medication adherence along the way.

RTPB technology enables providers, pharmacies, and payers to quickly exchange patient benefit coverage and out-of-pocket cost information. Relevant data can be surfaced within a single healthcare workflow that provides accurate data right from the source and can help more patients access their medications.

When providers used an RTPB solution, patients were 19 percent more adherent to picking up their medications.1

In the first installment of Healthcare IT News' newest feature series, five hospital and health system IT leaders describe how and where they're planning to spend on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

While the pandemic is still raging, the chaos of the past 18 months has calmed a bit, and the dust is starting to settle. Now the time has come for healthcare CIOs and other health IT leaders to look forward and plan their IT investments – shaped, in no small part, by the lessons of the recent past.

According to new research from HIMSS Media, the average overall 2021 IT budget is nearly $13 million, with 15% on average being allocated to IT security. While that may be a lot of money, there are many technological areas yearning for more investment.

Today, Healthcare IT News launches a new feature article series, Health IT Investment: The Next Five Years.

We speak with health IT leaders, primarily CIOs, to learn the path forward through the priorities they set with their investments in six categories: AI and machine learning; interoperability; telehealth, connected health and remote patient monitoring; cybersecurity; electronic health records and population health; emerging technology; and other systems.

Today at HLTH, panelists discussed how digital is changing the medication delivery space and who will pay for the services.

Today consumers are used to getting just about everything delivered at their doorstep. But historically, getting medication required a trip to the doctor’s office and then a stop at the pharmacy. However, digital may interrupt this paradigm. 

It’s no secret that medication adherence is a major issue in healthcare. While medication costs have often been pointed to as the main barrier to adherence, transportation is another obstacle. 

“In a lot of the surveys we’ve seen, only 16% of our patients are saying that it is financial. It's typically that the pharmacy is too far away, or I just don't have time, or they have a medical disability, or they don't have a car,” Amanda Epp, CEO of ScriptDrop, said at HLTH 2021 this morning. “So being able to provide transportation to those patients to get what they need, to provide therapy is really the first step. What we like to do is we look at the medication, where the patients are at, where the pharmacy is. We use the power of the brick and mortar pharmacy. Almost all patients are within five miles of their pharmacy. So taking in all of those data points to determine if it is an antibiotic and the patient needs it within an hour to get on therapy.”

Alternative to traditional pharmacies 

The traditional healthcare system takes a lot of time for patients to navigate, according to Dr. Melynda Barnes, chief medical officer at Ro, said during a panel at HLTH. 

“The average American will wait 24 days after they make an appointment to see their provider. They will then go to the provider and see that person for 12 minutes, and that visit will cost them over $100. On average, they will then go to a pharmacy with a wait of 45 minutes,” Barnes said. 

For health IT to benefit health and healthcare, it must be useable by – and useful to – patients and clinicians.  This is precisely where the discipline of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) serves as an essential foundation for the development, implementation, and use of high-quality health information systems and practices.  HFE improves overall performance through study of interactions among humans and other elements of a system.

Much of the data captured in healthcare is unstructured, making it impractical for providers to use in everyday practice. Natural language processing promises to transform that data into valuable insights, leading to substantial savings in both cost and time as well as improving several aspects of care delivery.

In the rush to digitize the business and practice of healthcare with minimal disruption to clinical workflows, up to 80 percent of captured data is unstructured. This data represents a wealth of potentially valuable information, but its accumulated scale makes it impractical for providers to use it in everyday practice. The leading solution for turning unstructured data into valuable insights is natural language processing (NLP). While NLP is not plug-and-play technology it can address many problems facing the industry.

I love stories, either told, written, or listened to. Songs tell stories, as does art. Blogs such as the rich content open so many doors for rich conversations. Telling stories is part of who I am.

I love stories, either told, written, or listened to. Songs tell stories, as does art. Blogs such as the rich content open so many doors for rich conversations. Telling stories is part of who I am. My father loved to tell them, as did my grandfather, whose name I took. They were called bull-sh*tters – and perhaps some refer to me that way at times. In medicine, I find storytelling to be critical. Each time we present a case, we are telling a story. Those residents and students who can present a case to me in a way that draws me in while giving me the necessary facts, but goes the next step that allows me to see that person in their life are the ones I know will be amazing doctors.

Information that goes unshared is considered information lost. However, stories need not always be shared. I encourage all of my students to write down their stories now. Memory is nasty and tends to erase such information over time in all of us. In writing a story, we capture it for ourselves and can reflect on that event and grow from it. That is more than enough. We bring concepts to reality by sharing a story by framing a lesson in a life event others can relate to. Reading about a disease pales in comparison to seeing a patient with that disease. The latter is not always possible. Hearing a case enhances learning, and this is why medical schools have drifted away from lectures to small group learning. These formats revolve around shared stories that allow each student to care about the patient and become invested in learning about the illness. In time who we saw and who we heard about become blurred – but the knowledge survives.

Propeller vet Chris Hogg writes on the go-to-market strategies for digital health companies.

The pleasure and pain of digital health go-to-market