Consumerism, autonomous operations, interoperability, access to healthcare, health equity – these are some of the top issues facing healthcare CIOs and other health IT leaders face 2023, according to Pega’s Vice President of Healthcare Life Sciences Susan Taylor.
We spoke to the medical IT provider executive for her expert views and 2023 predictions on these issues and other topics like social determinants of health. and EHR optimization. Her take on these important topics with full information can help guide leaders throughout the year to come.
Q. What do you think will be the top priority for healthcare IT for 2023?
ONE. As we move into 2023, healthcare organizations are still overcoming COVID-related challenges, addressing severe staffing shortages, and facing strong inflation in supply chains and labor. . The constraint on medical IT to deliver immediate value has never been more severe, and the opportunity for technology to deliver value has never been greater.
With that in mind, organizations are focusing on areas that will provide them with the agile operating platform under which to drive innovation and results.
Having problems creating autonomous activities. Labor shortages among clinical and administrative staff continue to affect organizations’ top and bottom profits, while leaving employees frustrated and burned out. I recently spoke with a CMO who shared that health system MDs are operating below their capacity due to a lack of administrative staff.
Another exec said they can no longer afford traditional call centers: “By the time employees get trained, they’re gone.”
Re-imagining operations to optimize workloads with automation and improving administrative impact through insights is a trend in high-volume, high-value operations. An effective strategy for healthcare organizations to address a critical administrative staffing gap is to employ all the automation tools that dramatically accelerate the work and operations of the service business. other service.
From automated agents to workflow automation, get work done even when no one is tracking an organization’s location to ensure every employee is operating at a high level of training and productivity while also contributing the most to the organization’s results.
At the heart of the problem in healthcare outcomes is consumerism. As we enter 2023, digital consumer participation in healthcare will emerge as a cost-effective option for care participation. COVID has accelerated the transition to digital health as a channel of visit, including a sustainable transition from in-person chronic disease care management to telehealth.
With an open digital channel for access delivery and evolving CMS regulations that put the patient’s consumer experience first and center for both payers and providers, there will be tremendous pressure to scale to expand digital services and meet patient expectations for a personalized, empathetic care experience that addresses the holistic well-being of people, building the trust needed to long-term compliance and outcomes for patients and healthcare providers.
Holistic health will truly become the holistic health of people. In considering the compelling impact of healthcare facilities’ financial burdens on consumer healthcare behavior, it’s time for empathetic financial relationships to become an important component. importance of personalized holistic health.
Increasing consumer confidence in their ability to manage all aspects of their health – clinical, financial and administrative – can be easily supported by existing technologies and can be used used to engage, evaluate, and adjust in real time, when the patient needs it.
Then there’s the ability to interact in key moments. Years of acquisitions, service-flow-based investment strategies, and incremental technological advancements have created islands of information among healthcare organizations.
Patients and staff have been forced to navigate these islands to understand care. For patients, this creates friction, wasteful use of care, and even experiences that erode trust and can lead to abandonment.
EHR optimization starts to solve this but can produce long projects with slow ROI due to mountains of data being moved while only a small amount of data will be used to drive care. patient. To move faster, organizations are beginning to leverage results-driven models to ensure the best business information is available when needed.
It will require interoperability and agility to create integrated digital records for consumers as their healthcare technology continues to accelerate.
For example, access to dental records outside of the health system will aid in the meaningful exchange of information to manage the link between oral health and overall health. Or interoperability to support prior authorization, as proposed by recent legislation, would accelerate access to care.
This will happen as payers rethink the impact of syndication organizations on their consumer satisfaction scores. When they meet with payers, they see the impact of providing services to patients on consumers and their bottom line and bottom line. They are rethinking the relationship of interoperability and looking to leverage technology to streamline the experience for their members and providers.
Q. How might the democratization of care – accessible and equitable – progress by 2023?
ONE. When I started using computers, it took years of study to become a proficient programmer who could optimize the amount of storage needed to compute the answer.
In my career, the common themes that have led to the explosion in access and availability across semiconductors, satellite meteorology, and healthcare have been the best results to come from (1) reviews real-time dynamic context, and (2) focused on empowering end-user experiences in achieving their goals. The ability to create new technology has created a new world of interaction for developers and their customers.
I have had this experience throughout my career in healthcare IT. My first project, in 1995, enabled telegraphy for radiology with the transfer of images and digital data to a centralized medical center to create accessibility to care. .
The next project demonstrated integrated benefits by using smart card technology to provide consumers with a portable benefits profile, containing WIC, EBT, Head Start, and immunization data.
Today, digital experience technologies, including voice technology, are available to create personalization at a scale that empowers and informs consumers to ensure they always take good action. follow-up to communicate their health outcomes and address their health-related problems – regardless of the source.
In Pega’s 2021 survey, nearly half of consumers polled said they trust AI to help doctors make better decisions about their healthcare. Today, digital connections to community resources, support services, or even telehealth advice are all happening but not universal.
Widely deployed and must be prioritized. With all this opportunity, technology also runs the risk of bias.
As we deploy technology to open access and address equity issues, it’s important to emphasize ethical AI with transparency and explainability.
Q. What role will technology play in better understanding social determinants of health next year?
ONE. Technology has the ability to recognize and act in real time on SDOH issues as they arise. Moving from assessment to action plan for consumers with complex needs requires the ability to quickly review all potential actions and recommend the most immediate action – whether it from the consumer care or instruction team.
If that action involves a CBO, leveraging technology like Aunt Bertha can enable digital interactions to manage that complete handover and, ultimately, timely follow-up.
With richer consumer data self-management and data collection capabilities, healthcare machine learning can assist beyond Z-code collection to consumer data analysis and ultimately accelerate the development of predictive and adaptive models to engage and address SDOH issues faster when it makes sense for consumers and their health outcomes.
Ultimately, the most significant return on investment that communities can get with SDOH programs is the effectiveness of empowering consumers to manage their health and wellness plans, including including compliance. Digital experiences can be used to provide incentives to support continued compliance with consumer preferences.
An NIH study showed a positive compliance effect on compliance rewards distributed periodically and at the time of interaction. This concept holds promise for technology that enhances health outcomes.
Q. What is the future of EHR optimization? What can it unlock?
ONE. EHR optimization can create a layer of flexibility that unlocks the insights needed to address holistic health more deeply. The potential for EHR optimization to identify gaps in more effective care or the potential for duplicate care would be a significant contributor.
The COVID-19 pandemic has unraveled pre-existing problems in the healthcare delivery system and taken a toll on the US physician workforce. Taxed to their limits, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in job burnout and a decrease in job-life satisfaction – affecting quality care, turnover and reduce work effort.
Findings from the Mayo Clinic show that ongoing efforts to reduce physician burnout are critically important to the US health care system.
However, the best short-term outcome would be to optimize EHR as a tool that can be used to innovate governance practices. Well-positioned, such an effort would significantly reduce the administrative burden on healthcare workers – administrative and medical staff – leaving them with more time to care for patients and care for themselves. needed to build a resilient health care system.
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