SPONSORED: Have we reached the tipping point for connected care?

By Gerry Bannister, FNP-C, senior advisor, IDNs, Intersystems

We’ve been hearing about the benefits of connected care for years. But now, with aging populations worldwide that are often living longer, with multiple chronic conditions, the need for connected, more coordinated care is becoming critical. So this is a good time to ask, are we there yet?

Whether you're a provider or payer, caring for these patients is a team sport on a constantly changing playing field. Health systems have to become more collaborative to deal with chronic conditions effectively. Information and services must stretch across and beyond traditional organizational and disciplinary boundaries in a seamless fashion. In other words, interoperability is required.

Achieving interoperability across boundaries and connecting providers for collaboration is a long process, but we are getting closer. Here are a few examples of customers where our interoperability technology is improving care and outcomes.

- Healthfirst, a regional, not-for-profit health plan in the New York City area, is owned by a consortium of healthcare providers. They are enhancing collaboration across their entire care network, beginning with medication management and gaps in care. To do this, they’ve deployed an information exchange and clinical portal that includes information about general practice, acute, community, mental health and social care.

- Coordinate My Care (CMC) is a clinical service for end-of-life care, hosted by The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London. It helps patients and family think through and document their wishes for end-of-life care, and then share those plans with urgent care providers such as ambulance services. By automating this information sharing, CMC is helping patients across the London region achieve their goals for end-of-life care. At the same time, costs associated with that care are declining for the National Health Service.

- Chilean Regional Health Services is leap-frogging traditional health IT approaches. Primary care and hospital providers from two regional health services, Talcahuano and Concepción, are piloting shared access to records across EHRs and geographic regions to create a connected health community, reduce duplicative testing, decrease service times, improve patient safety and reduce costs.

In all three cases, we see how connections and information sharing makes a difference for patients, providers, and payers. As more organizations see these benefits and adopt the technology, the network effect kicks in. With more organizations to connect to, participating organizations become more efficient at delivering high quality care across boundaries, drawing in more participants. The value of the enabling technology increases, and the cycle becomes self-propelling.

At InterSystems we believe that the industry is at this tipping point. From a technology standpoint, it will be the maturation and adoption of the FHIR standard, and products that support it, that will supply the final push.

For more on connected care, start here.