Flipping the Script on Healthcare: Taking a Proactive Approach
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA number of industries conduct extensive product testing to ensure safety, reliability and longevity throughout the life cycle of their products. As part of the process, a third party oversees the testing to ensure the product is within industry compliance standards. The product is evaluated and improvements are made based on the results. While we have come to expect utilization of this proactive approach across many sectors, the healthcare industry has not followed suit. Healthcare systems tend to operate on a reactive, “one-size-fits-all” model.
With the use of Precision Health Insight Networks (PHINs), we no longer need to guess how a patient will respond to a specific treatment, but rather can use the right kinds of technologies to help transform health data into the signals that identify risk and drive proactive, personalized care decisions that are precise to fit each patient’s unique needs.
Being Proactive
Lab testing is the single highest volume medical activity within a health system, yet 21% of diagnostic tests are misused or overlooked. The challenge here is identifying the root cause of inefficient or wasteful practices that include high-cost, low-value, duplicative test ordering, as well as identifying missed opportunities to deliver the right test to the right patient at the right time in order to avoid re-hospitalizations or acute ER visits.
There’s a common misconception that going to the doctor means something is wrong. The problem with this mentality is that, too often, a patient will put off making an appointment until their condition worsens, making it more costly and complicated to treat the problem. Imagine what a difference it would make if data-driven care were molding the decisions to assure the right care occurs at the right time to avoid costly complications and severe end-stage presentations of disease.
Better Customer Service
Healthcare, like any industry should focus on providing its customers with exceptional service. When a patient walks into a doctor’s office, he or she is entrusting that physician with their health and accepting the physician’s diagnosis and treatment plan. It is essential that each physician has access to all the information available to treat their patients in order to precisely and effectively uncover the actionable signals needed to make informed decisions.
Large volumes of data that are siloed and scattered across multiple hospitals and numerous information systems can make it difficult to gain access to the meaningful insights that a patient really needs for the best care. Providing caregivers with access to a precision health platform can reduce the overwhelming complexity in our care delivery system, and then reduce the use of “trial and error” with patients. Instead, a physician should be given the ability to treat every patient as a unique individual in order to provide the best customer service possible.
Worldwide Tutorial
In the past 20 months, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how quickly medical developments can happen. While no one anticipated the pandemic, it generated a unique experience that surged forward our capabilities to access big data, identify data trends and establish critical insights that we use to successfully go forward. The technology surrounding COVID-19 test results and vaccinations has been instrumental in proactively fighting this virus.
Years ago, our healthcare data systems were designed to operate like old paper processes – in a bulky file folder structure making it difficult for physicians to easily access, and even harder to effectively review within the time frames of a brief appointment. If we have learned anything from COVID-19, it’s that we need to make actionable information more readily accessible across the healthcare spectrum at the point of care. Imagine the care delivery system where differences in a person’s unique gene structure, living environments and lifestyles are instantaneously delivered at the point of clinical service to formulate precise, personalized treatment and prevention strategies each time, every time, for every patient.
A state-of-the-art healthcare product should be externally tested, provide caregivers with access to critical quality metrics and deliver instantaneous awareness of the unique individual patient complexity. That well-engineered, tested system will help avoid wasteful practices and usher in a new era of personalized, high-value precision health.