Lenovo

Blood and organ donations and scientific research are essential for delivering fast, effective and life-saving care.

As the amount of clinical data continues to grow, in size and scope, clinical platforms must be able to reduce the time needed to access data, expand as the amount of stored data increases and avoid downtime.

Versiti is a non-profit blood health organization with locations across the Midwestern U.S. that facilitates blood donation, research and diagnostic testing, as well as organ and tissue donation.

Providers should lean on their technology partners for leveraging AI, RPM and more.

Telehealth, remote access, and distributed workforces requires a shift in tactics.

The third gathering of the Health Innovation Think Tank brought together a diverse group of leaders, innovators and policymakers to identify best practices that can move the industry toward key clinical models associated with value-based care, connected health and virtual care.

Technology is ubiquitous in today’s healthcare environment. Yet hospital and healthcare organizations’ struggle to make the most of their technology investment is equally pervasive.

As the population ages, the demand for clinical care is rising rapidly. At the same time, the healthcare industry is dealing with a shortage of physicians and nurses. It’s a difficult equation, at best. “How can healthcare organizations provide the right clinical resources to a larger patient population while maintaining or improving the quality of care? It’s not easy to bend the cost curve when there are so many challenges in the healthcare delivery environment,” said Tom Foley, director, global health solutions strategy at LenovoHealth. Thought leaders gathered at The Health Innovation Think Tank, Adoption and Policy at a Crossroads, held at the UPMC Center for Connected Medicine in Pittsburgh on October 10th, pointed to the fact that virtual care just might be the factor that can help to solve healthcare’s current conundrum. Co-hosted by Lenovo Health, Justin Barnes Advisors, Center for Connected Medicine (CCM), Inventiv Health and HIMSS Media, the event brought some 50 healthcare delivery system, payer organization and healthcare IT vendor thought leaders together to offer their insights on myriad industry issues. Indeed, virtual health solutions can help to extend provider’s reach and close the care gap that is currently making it difficult to meet value-based care’s call to improve outcomes while simultaneously reducing costs. For example, as part of its Re-engineered Discharge (RED) program, Boston Medical Center is using “Louise,” a virtual patient advocate to deliver discharge instructions and education at the bedside. Louise communicates directly with patients, teaching them about components of their care, such as their prescribed medications, follow-up appointments and diagnoses.  “We know that nurses don’t really want or have a lot of time to do patient discharge,” said Brian Jack, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center. Yet, properly conducting thorough patient discharge sessions can significantly help to improve quality and reduce costs. In fact, some 20 percent of patients experience post-discharge adverse events and about 20 percent of Medicare patients are readmitted to the hospital, according to Jack. A virtual solution could help providers offer a better discharge experience and, in turn, improve quality and reduce costs. “Peter Drucker would have said that this is an enormous problem with billions of dollars on the table and the solution is to just teach the patients what to do when they come home from the hospital,” he pointed out. Through the RED program, Boston Medical is doing just that and, as a result, has experienced a 20-percent reduction in readmissions and 25-percent reduction in emergency department (ED) visits, according to Jack. Considering the fact that 75 percent of homes are expected to have smart speakers by 2020, the potential for virtual solutions to close the care gap in a variety of scenarios is great, according to Bill Rogers, CEO of Orbita. Because everyone is accustomed to using voice, virtual assistants can engage patients in a natural way and “lower the friction” when used to teach patients about diseases such as diabetes; act as a personal assistant to help patients book appointments or record symptoms; or serve as a lifestyle coach to help people track fitness goals and stick to diet plans, Rogers said. While virtual solutions can be used in many ways, Sylvan Waller, MD, principal at Waller MD, pointed out that healthcare organizations must rely on virtual care and telehealth best practices that “have been developed over the past 30 years. This is not just an overnight success,” he said. For example, telehealth solutions work best when they are integrated into the “fabric of care delivery,” not when they are used as a stand-alone solution. In addition, organizations must implement change management programs that secure the physician and care team buy-in needed to support virtual health initiatives. While interest in virtual care is on the rise and its potential is great, Jack suggested that more widespread adoption might not be realized until value-based care actually becomes the dominant payment model. In fact, despite the fact that value-based care is gaining ground, many health organizations are still operating under predominantly fee-for-service models. As such, Jack noted, some leaders want to learn how to use virtual technologies to improve care and reduce readmissions but don’t want to “actually flip the switch” until they have stronger value-based incentives to do so.

While it’s difficult to predict what will happen next in Washington, there is certainty around one thing. The industry needs to “move from volume to value-based care. Everyone is on the same page about that,” said Jeff Coughlin, senior director of federal and state affairs at HIMSS. Coughlin led a discussion at The Health Innovation Think Tank, Adoption and Policy at a Crossroads, a one-day event held at the UPMC Center for Connected Medicine in Pittsburgh, and co-hosted by Lenovo Health, Justin Barnes Advisors, Center for Connected Medicine (CCM), Inventiv Health and HIMSS Media. The Think Tank brought some 50 healthcare delivery system, payer organization and healthcare IT vendor thought leaders together to offer their insights on a variety of issues. Under the emerging value-based care model, which clearly centers on improving clinical care outcomes, what happens outside of the traditional care setting is becoming more important than ever before. As a result, HIMSS is supporting initiatives such as the “Creating High-Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic (CHRONIC) Care Act of 2016” and the “Creating Opportunities Now for Necessary and Effective Care Technologies (CONNECT) for Health Act of 2017.” CONNECT is specifically designed to remove barriers to the use of telehealth and other healthcare technologies such as remote patient monitoring, resulting in greater access to high-quality care, improved continuity of care and better value for patients and the Medicare program. The pending legislation could help to accelerate  delivery of care organizations’ connected health efforts, as they continue to focus on finding ways to “increase patient empowerment,” which will help to traverse the existing care gap, said Tom Foley, director, global health solutions strategy at LenovoHealth. “Sometimes, it’s not what happens in front of a physician or while on the phone with a care coach, it’s what happens during the time when patients are on their own – and that’s where connected health technologies come into play,” he pointed out. Indeed, the goal for health systems and hospitals should be to “keep patients away from the hospitals and sustain them in the trajectory toward wellness as opposed to only curing illness,” said Rasu Shrestha, MD, chief innovation officer at UPMC and executive vice president at UPMC Enterprises. As such, the healthcare industry should move toward the “bedless hospital,” a model that focuses on delivering more care in the patients’ homes and less care in the hospital setting. The easier-said-than-done proposition, however, requires a strategic approach that moves beyond simply uttering “buzz words.”  To start, the key to successfully sustaining a bedless hospital lies in “incentivizing the behavior changes that will sustain the residents of the community toward wellness,” Shrestha said.  To do so requires “leveraging some of the principles of design thinking and engaging end-users. It is really important to engage them in the design of the solution before a single line of code is even written,” he added.   Such efforts could help to more precisely meet consumers’ needs. For example, by working closely with chronic care patients, leaders at Livongo have discovered these patients actually “hate dealing with their diseases” and don’t necessarily want to engage more. Instead, they want to “engage less and experience better health,” said Jim Pursley, chief commercial officer at Livongo. To this end, the company is re-engineering chronic condition management to elegantly integrate everything patients need into an experience they will love – which requires providing patients with the optimal level of engagement.  Such efforts could mean providing patients with the opportunity to pass data via a variety of devices to care providers in an effort to “liberate data in the intelligent home environment,” according to Chris Fickle, director of sales at Qualcomm Life. “When we talk about the connected experience we look at anything and everything being connected – disposable devices, patches, smart phones, tablets, personal assistants. Things that we don’t necessarily think about being connected today could be connected tomorrow,” Fickle said. To truly enable intelligent care, however, organizations need to adopt variety of best practices to ensure that data is connected, continuous, (near) real-time, secure, highly reliable and liquid. By adopting these and other best practices that were uncovered during the Think Tank, the healthcare industry can truly move toward the successful realization of value-based models and can “create a connected ecosystem that supports a virtual care environment and ultimately brings value to all constituents – providers, payers, and most importantly patients,” Foley concluded. 

The Health Innovation Think Tank, Adoption and Policy at a Crossroads, held at the UPMC Center for Connected Medicine in Pittsburgh, on October 10th, discussed how healthcare organizations can truly embrace value-based care.