The pandemic reshaped care delivery, proving that flexible, patient-centered engagement strategies are the way of the future. But as digital health tools continue to proliferate, experts warn that clinical value —not hype — must guide adoption, and collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem is crucial to sustaining progress.
Below are three key principles that are currently guiding health system strategy, as told by a panel of experts on Wednesday at MedCity News’ INVEST conference in Chicago.
Be flexible with the ways you engage your patients.
During the pandemic, providers made a huge pivot to virtual care. Care delivery models look a lot different now than they did in 2020, but telehealth is still a hard-wired component, noted Angela Orsky, senior vice president of value-based care and clinical integration at South Carolina-based Prisma Health.
In her eyes, one of the biggest lessons to be gleaned from the pandemic is that there are multiple ways to engage with patients — and that different approaches work for different groups.
“My daughter is a physician assistant in a specialty GI group at our organization, and she leads an inflammatory bowel disease specialty program. She has a lot of patients who, for convenience — for their work schedules, for transportation issues — have found that having that virtual connection is important to them. We didn’t have that as hard-wired as we wanted it to be, so we scaled quickly,” Orsky explained.
Prisma has also begun scaling its remote patient monitoring efforts as another way to keep patients engaged in their healthcare, she added.
Don’t adopt a digital health solution because it’s getting a lot of buzz — that doesn’t mean it’s producing a clinical benefit.
Providers need digital tools that create value — actual value beyond just generating returns for investors, said Jesse Ehrenfeld, immediate past president of the American Medical Association.
He pointed to a report released last year by the Peterson Health Technology Institute, which found that diabetes management solutions typically fail to deliver meaningful clinical benefits while also increasing healthcare spending. This is despite the fact that many of the companies offering these solutions — such as Livongo, Omada Health and Virta Health — have done quite well in terms of garnering investment and contracts.
“Companies that are doing really well — getting a lot of money — have zero clinical impact, and that’s not sustainable. There’s a disconnect. One thing that’s really, really important to us at the AMA is: How do we make sure that we have tools that actually work — that have evidence behind them?” Ehrenfeld stated.
Remember that collaboration is key to improving clinical outcomes in the long-term.
The country is in the midst of a chronic disease epidemic. Each year, millions of Americans become newly eligible for Medicare — and the majority of them have two or more chronic conditions, pointed out Samson Magid, CEO of HealthSnap, a startup that helps providers care for chronically ill patients through its remote patient monitoring platform.
Many of the well-known platforms for chronic disease management sell to payers and employers, but HealthSnap partners with providers, he noted.
“Our thesis from day one was that to actually make a difference at a systemic level, you need to partner with the providers, which is very difficult to do. Our focus was, how do we clinically integrate this? How do we ensure we don’t disrupt clinician workflows? How do we improve the clinical ROI, and how do we prove the financial ROI?” Magid explained.
In the past couple of years, HealthSnap has realized that scaling remote patient monitoring for chronically ill patients requires a lot of collaboration — and not just with providers. Just last week, the company announced a remote patient monitoring coalition with seven of its direct competitors.
The coalition seeks to advocate for greater access to remote patient monitoring, as well as partner with lawmakers to share data and accelerate adoption.
“We recognize the value and impact of these programs for chronic conditions in our country — and on the current trajectory, they will be unsustainable in the long term, and they will not exist. That is a lose-lose for everyone,” Magid stated.
Photo: Nick Fanion, Breaking Media
Editor’s note: The panel discussion mentioned in this article was sponsored by HealthSnap.
