Series Authors: Tom Kiesau, Dr. Sam Bhatia, Paul Griffiths
This series explores the uncomfortable reality that this adaptation will likely span a longer period than the authors believe has been widely expected. Three leading organizations — Salesforce, Perficient, and The Chartis Group — have come together to share bright spots within the healthcare community that can point the way to building the necessary capacity to adapt.
We identified Six Key Commitments, and here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth articles.
Today, we turn our attention to:
The SIXTH COMMITMENT
Deploy patient triage and routing tools that extend across virtual and physical sites of care to assign to appropriate clinical tracks
Change in Investment Strategy
Prior to COVID, health systems acquired brick and mortar to create an ecosystem to retain revenue. It was common practice to buy a competing health system, build a new women’s clinic, or provide EHR access to ambulatory practices at “no cost.”
The investment strategy for health systems during COVID, however, has shifted to digital.
This same shift has been occurring within retail for over a decade and has taken precedence over building storefronts. It’s a shift towards digital networks.
A digital network is a platform that is dynamic enough to handle a variety of transactions; in healthcare, this would include virtual care, digital engagement, consumerism and retail offerings. This platform is dynamic enough to handle a patient portal as a revenue generator for the health system but also intuitive enough to enable a self-directed, personalized journey for the patient via self service tools.
Managing Dynamic Events
Our environment is constantly changing. Health systems must respond in real time in order to manage the current needs of the patient.
A digital network provides you the platform to address what we see as tangible.
- Demands of the Pandemic – Responding to and resolving patient inquiries faster and with guided workflows is expected. Consider the consumer experience with Amazon – we know every step of our package’s journey to our doorstep. This same experience is expected by healthcare consumers, both patients and providers.
- Contact Tracing – Contact tracing is exploding as you read this. Children around the country are going back to school and their parents back to work. It’s a dynamic event that constantly changes with new associations. To respond effectively, providers need immediate access to disparate data like bed capacity and COVID positive and COVID negative hospital staff.
- Evolving Regulations – Each state has their own guidelines for managing this health crisis. Providing trusted information in real time to health systems and government health agencies is critical. We are pulling in data from multiple sources siloed from one another, yet we need a comprehensive and consumable experience.
- Accelerate Elective Care Delivery – Patient leakage is a threat to the financial viability of a healthcare organization. Most patients don’t want to go anywhere near a hospital right now. So how will you refer and retain the associated revenue?
There are just a few milestones that we will see during the current health crisis that will require prescriptive execution to service your patients in an efficient and empathetic way.
Commit to an Analytics Strategy
We need a comprehensive view of this global crisis — a COVID command center if you will — and this requires data access and delivery that is intuitive and consumable. Such a command center should be able to concurrently handle things like EHR and regulatory data from state data resources, the number of ventilators and which ones have been used on COVID patients, exposed doctors and nurses, and available PPE. As an example of a COVID command center in action, take a look at the University of Chicago Medicine, who is using the analytical platform Tableau.
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Now What?
Our goal is to help catalyze current adaptive plans into longer-term strategic advantages. By leveraging thought leadership and framing decisions as Commitments, we can help you explore organizational strategic alignment first.
If you agree these Commitments are important, we want to assess how you’re taking action. We’re looking for success stories for our forthcoming Whitepaper to share.
