By Sean O’Connor, Chief Commercial Officer, DexCare
The pandemic-driven demand for remote, accessible, and convenient care options accelerated the healthcare industry’s adoption and utilization of telemedicine and other virtual care services at an unprecedented pace. Improving access to care has become a primary need for consumers, and a necessity for providers to deliver a satisfactory healthcare experience as traditional care delivery models are disrupted. To adjust to the new normal of delivering digitally-enabled healthcare and ultimately compete in the COVID and post-COVID era – health systems must overcome new challenges that require them to adjust and evolve existing care processes and operations.
While more and more point solutions popping up in the concentrated digital health space, many fall short on their promise of enabling seamless digital transformation for health systems and optimizing the digital healthcare journey for patients. However, with the implementation of comprehensive data intelligence platforms, numerous health systems are achieving the ability to deliver highly effective, efficient digitally-enabled care that improves the consumer experience and satisfaction through a unique combination of access, navigation and optimization.
The value of data intelligence for health systems
The legacy processes and systems used by health systems lack the critical infrastructure needed to scale and optimize enterprise operations to fully support digitally-enabled care across business lines. The secret sauce that many organizations are beginning to realize is the unique combination that can be achieved when implementing a comprehensive data intelligence platform that augments the gaps of disparate solutions. Leveraging a platform powered by a data intelligence engine can make consumer access, consumer navigation and provider resource optimization work for all parties involved – all of which feed into the cycle of providing and receiving digitally-enabled care.
When it comes to accessing and navigating healthcare for patients, the application of data intelligence addresses key barriers by providing a fully-digitized, unified experience that routes patients to the most relevant and effective care options while leveraging a health system’s existing resources, such as legacy EMRs and other HIT solutions, to do it. While it’s important to serve as a digital front door, an optimized patient journey doesn’t stop at the initial access point. Data-driven patient routing, or intelligently guided navigation, gets patients to the right care setting to ensure they have a seamless, end-to-end care experience every time.
Optimizing operations, capacity and care delivery is key for health systems to efficiently provide digitally-enabled care. Augmenting legacy systems with data intelligence capabilities provides a new level of flexibility that enables traditional health system business models to seamlessly evolve in the dynamically changing digital health landscape and operate more efficiently, while achieving a healthy return on investment (ROI) on their latest and past digital investments.
With this new level of intelligence, health system capacity and digital demand are strategically orchestrated across all lines of care, and available resources are strategically flexed and automatically optimized to meet consumer digital demand and health system business goals. This unified, automated process empowers health systems to deliver exceptional patient access aligned with existing business operations and clinical resources, which is key to making digitally-enabled care effective and sustainable.
Adopting this critical infrastructure enables health systems to evolve their traditional care delivery models into a digital, consumer-centric ecosystem built for the current hybridized healthcare landscape. As a result, health systems are equipped with the insights and intelligent capabilities needed to improve patient satisfaction, increase revenue and reduce operational and administrative costs.
Conclusion
The pandemic-driven push from traditional, in-person healthcare to digitally native, accessible, and convenient care options require providers to augment legacy operational processes and systems to meet new patient expectations. Data intelligence platforms, serving as health system’s digital operating systems, are helping organizations successfully scale their businesses to meet new demands and provide greater care access for patients both digitally and in-person in the new era of consumer-centric care.