How informatics can help improve productivity, outcomes, and patient experiences in healthcare?

All healthcare stakeholders agree that the global health system is in danger of collapse.

These statistics are not easy to read. Global healthcare spending is expected to rise at an annual rate of 5.4% between 2017-2022, rising from USD 7.724 trillion down to USD 10.059 trillion [1]. This is in addition to the rising demand for healthcare. It is further complicated by high levels and unexplained variation in treatment and outcomes. The US alone accounts for $1 trillion of the $3 trillion in healthcare waste each year [2]. The problem is compounded by high staff burnout, excessive administrative complexity, and widely varying prices.

It is now essential to transforming healthcare financing and delivery

You will likely have seen the wastefulness of the healthcare system firsthand if you’ve recently received treatment or helped a friend or family member to do so. Overburdened hospitals are characterized by long wait times, repeat procedures, and insufficient information.

You might also have noticed that healthcare systems focus on emergency and acute situations. Advanced disease prevention and management strategies are not being implemented. We are currently in the middle of a global crisis when you add access restrictions and unhealthy lifestyles.

Global healthcare is seeking urgent solutions and strategies to balance the status quo. We have reasons to be hopeful, despite the challenges. Healthcare professionals work together every day to move away from siloed and inefficient care delivery and toward more patient-centric and productive healthcare. We need to move faster!

Value-based care is the answer

Harvard Economist Michael Porter first developed value-based care. It is a delivery model that improves health outcomes at a lower cost. It is based on patients’ needs and allocates resources according to the system’s health outcomes. Value-based care, when implemented, can increase efficiency and quality standards by focusing on patients’ needs and allocating resources according to their results.

It encourages quality, safety, patient experience, and participation in care team decisions. Value-based care aims to reduce unnecessary diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. It can be executed well to support cost-effective care delivery and adhere to evidence-based guidelines.

This is in contrast to the fee-for-service model, where you pay for each process step every time you visit a doctor or have a procedure performed. This payment (or reward) depends on whether the diagnosis or procedure was successful. It also doesn’t matter if the steps taken were high-quality or considered best practice. Traditional healthcare does not always serve the patient’s best interests.

Value-based healthcare seeks to resolve this paradox by reorganizing healthcare around patient value, not volume. Access to care is an equally important aspect of the equation. This is what the Philips Future Health Index measures in a “value measurement” [3]. It evaluates care delivery against the Quadruple Aim of better patient outcomes, improved patient experiences, higher staff satisfaction, and lower costs.

What are the key building blocks of value-based healthcare?

One of the first steps to value-based care is standardizing the measurement of (patient-reported) outcomes related to costs per head. This will align incentives and processes. Start by measuring the outcomes that are important to a specific population segment. Then, you can use those insights to tailor and enhance interventions throughout the care pathway. This is the foundation for care pathway innovation taking off in healthcare. The final piece is the allocation of an objective payment. This payment is weighted based on how the system performs for the patient.

This approach was difficult to implement in the past because of health systems that were characterized by silos, broken ways of working and legacy IT systems. Another problem: when electronic health records were introduced, many clinicians found themselves overwhelmed with data and unable to understand large amounts of digital information.

Let’s go back a few years, and I can tell you that the situation is rapidly improving as the digitalization of healthcare gains momentum. Furthermore, I believe we have the opportunity to standardize care and bring value-based care to a larger scale. My optimism is due to the continuous integration and advancement of health informatics.

Health informatics is best described as a powerful data analytics network that connects clinical processes and workflows. Informatics can enable clinicians to use data visualization and configuration capabilities to help them interpret and make informed decisions in real-time.

A value-based approach has three benefits:

• Integrated health informatics is a tool that can be used to support medical staff in making decisions, teamwork, and communicating with one another. This will allow for clinical excellence at its best.
• Health informatics is a second tool that connects operational processes. System administrators can optimize and analyze almost all aspects of the health system.
• Health informatics, which is crucial for value-based payment, can be used to support the systematic measurement of patient outcomes. This is crucial to ensure that performance-based payments are driven and incentivize patient-centricity, safety, and quality.

Complex work requires everyone involved in the system (clinicians and administrators, technicians, technology partners, supply-chain partners, tech partners, and technicians) to agree to the “measure optimize repeat” lean method. There are many platform and system integration issues that must be addressed. For example, to achieve seamless connectivity, it is necessary to have a common architecture that integrates software (analytics tools), hardware (databases and devices), and services around interoperable data formats.

These factors, while not impossible, are slowing down adoption and scaling. The healthcare industry must address these issues, particularly as the medical Internet of Things is matured, and next-generation 5G connectivity is available.

Innovative technologies that support value-based care

In the meantime, in addition to accelerating value-based healthcare, digital innovation and health informatics are enabling vital data aggregation analytics, thereby changing how patients and staff access and experience healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating trend. While we are still years away from ”true’ AI in healthcare, AI applications have already helped clinicians and systems make sense of more data. This is why I believe that AI, in conjunction with health informatics platforms, will continue to make healthcare more personalized, predictive, and precise.

• Personal Health Coaching With the help of increasingly sophisticated medical devices, sensors and health apps, patients can manage better and understand their health and well-being. Since the original generation of pedometers, heart rate monitors, and heart rate monitors were introduced, there have been remarkable advances. Providers now can provide clinical-grade and behavioral insights in various health areas, including heart disease, diabetes, and elderly care. The Philips DreamMapper offers coaching and feedback to patients suffering from sleep apnea. This app and solution allow users to track their therapy progress and help them improve it over time. Philips also has over 2.7 billion hours of data on sleep from its worldwide users. This data can be analyzed in the cloud by [4]. This valuable data can stratify and improve Philips’s sleep and respiratory care innovations. This access and delivery model will continue to grow as technology improves.
• Affordable genome profiling – This trend is causing positive disruption in the health system as they strive to provide first-time correct precision diagnosis and treatment. Consider cancer diagnosis. Clinicians can create a complete view of a patient by integrating their genetic information with the patient’s history and data from many specialties and modalities like digital pathology, image acquisition, and immunology. This kind of oncology informatics helps in diagnosis, collaboration, and support between care teams and clinical departments and allows for personalized treatment selection through the development of algorithms that target specific disease states. This is a promising area, but we need to ensure that researchers access large amounts of secure, high-quality patient data.
• Predictive Monitoring – Data aggregation, analytics and data mining are two key innovations in high-acuity patient monitoring. Nursing staff in high dependency wards can become overwhelmed as they monitor patient progress against vital metrics such as blood pressure, heart rate and temperature. Solutions like the Philips IntelliVue Guardian, which uses algorithmic analysis to analyze vital signs, can be used to identify, predict and combine deviations. After verifying the trend accuracy, the solution converts this information into an early warning score which notifies caregivers in case of concern. In 2017, a solution study found that severe adverse effects were reduced by 35%, heart arrest by 86%, and ICU readmission rates by 24% in the general ward.
• Telehealth is the technology that supports “hospital to home” care delivery and lower-cost care. It’s a rapidly growing field that helps to increase access to high-quality and specialized healthcare. Telehealth is also changing how hospital care is delivered by using powerful digital communications networks and remote monitoring. The ICU is an example of centralized patient monitoring and care coordination to improve quality and efficiency for patients most at risk. Secondary prevention, which is also a promising area of telehealth innovation, can be done in ambulatory settings. Monitoring and treating at-risk patients, such as those with multiple disabilities, at home is one example. This patient subset is often the most expensive and draining on system resources. However, remote monitoring and telehealth consultations can help patients better manage their conditions. This can help reduce hospitalizations and emergency episodes.