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Five pain points personalized care can address while increasing ROI

 

What if you could reduce medical errors by 70%, achieve $1M in corporate savings from better care coordination, and generate new revenue from genomic insights, all without changing your existing EHR infrastructure? These outcomes are all within arm’s reach, but challenges stand in the way.

Today’s healthcare organizations still struggle to utilize data from EHRs and other systems, and they often find their technology portfolio ends up being incompatible with existing workflows. A new approach is required—one that brings solutions together seamlessly to support key business initiatives and drive ROI.

Personalized Care from Microsoft delivers powerful benefits on a unified platform. These solutions integrate with existing systems to accelerate innovation, cut costs, and improve patient outcomes—all while solving five crucial challenges facing healthcare organizations today. From precision medicine to patient engagement, let’s take a closer look at these challenges, and how you can transform care across the patient journey.

#1 Difficulty moving away from generic treatment to precision medicine
While many healthcare organizations want to use genomics to develop personalized care plans, a knowledge gap exists between researchers and clinicians. The volume and complexity of genomic data makes it difficult for providers to interpret insights. Only 29% of providers are able to use genomics, environment, and lifestyle data to tailor treatment decisions.

An important step toward developing individual care plans starts in the lab. BC Platforms GeneVision helps convert complex genomic data to action, delivering user-friendly reporting at the point of care for clinicians to determine personalized options for patient treatment. For example, reporting provides genetic risk scores (GRS) that offer insights into risks for specific diseases in comparison to others in the same age group, and treatment reports show how likely a patient will be to react to certain drugs.

Genomic insights have the potential to make significant inroads in personalized care, and by combining genomic data with clinical analytics, care teams can build a more holistic view of their patients and populations.

#2 Higher costs and readmissions due to inability to use insights to predict at-risk patients
Healthcare data often lives in silos across organizations, holding valuable patient information that cannot be universally accessed or easily applied to care plan decisions. As a result, 30% of healthcare executives name turning data into actionable insights as one of their most pressing challenges.

KenSci Clinical Analytics plugs into disparate data entry points, aggregates them, and applies predictive analytics with machine learning to generate actionable insights. By combining artificial intelligence with patient data, Clinical Analytics improves clinical decision-making, automates processes, and reduces operating costs. Organizations can better identify at-risk patients and empower care teams to prevent costly hospital visits with proactive care plans. Using Clinical Analytics, health providers such as the National Health Service (NHS), Beaumont Health, Evergreen Health, and Rush University Medical Centre are already delivering improved outcomes.

With predictive analytics uncovering risk and informing clinical decisions, care teams receive the information they need to determine better treatment options and provide proactive patient care from anywhere, at any time.

#3 Redundancies, gaps in care, and increased hospitalizations from inadequate coordination between providers
Patients often see care team members at different times, and with the geographic reach of today’s teams, many operate on separate systems. If a patient’s primary care provider and referred cardiologist operate on systems that can’t communicate, for instance, critical medical information may be lost at the point of care, resulting in gaps, redundancies, or ineffective treatment. Globally, 33% of patients experience gaps in care coordination, which is associated with increased likelihood of being hospitalized or visiting the emergency room.

DXC Health360 Care Coordination alerts care team members to gaps in care and provides support and intervention in near real–time. The solution complements EHRs by analyzing and aggregating more inclusive patient data to help care teams improve diagnoses and personalize treatment plans. With DXC 360 Care Coordination, healthcare organizations are able to realize up to a 56% reduction in readmissions, 23% reduction in ER utilization, and $280 reduction in monthly per patient costs.

Intelligent care coordination connects providers across different systems and locations, enabling teams to communicate more efficiently across the care pathway.

#4 Outdated processes and lack of collaboration among health teams leading to medical errors
Although patient data has become more automated with EHRs, collaboration across the health continuum lacks the same streamlined approach. Between 70–80% of serious medical errors are the result of teamwork failures (e.g. failures in communication). Without a centralized collaboration hub, outdated communication methods prevent care team members from readily sharing ideas.

Microsoft’s Health Team Collaboration brings teams together virtually, empowering them to exchange ideas and share valuable information instantaneously with virtual chat, video conferencing, calls, and group discussions in a secure, compliant environment. The solution also provides dashboard capabilities to visualize and track the business impact of new ideas implemented. Care teams don’t need to worry about their current workflow being interrupted, because Health Team Collaboration integrates into existing systems and streamlines collaboration efforts.

With effective care teams working together to manage care quality, providers can successfully pave the way for better patient engagement.

#5 Lack of visibility into clinical and patient-generated data causes low patient engagement
As costs for chronic disease continue to climb, healthcare organizations recognize that patients need to take more control of their health and give their care team a more holistic view of their progress. But building good habits isn’t easy—nearly 47% of clinicians and executives say low rates of patient engagement are their biggest challenge in improving patient outcomes.

At the same time, 90% of patients want to manage their own healthcare through technology. With widespread accessibility to smart phones and devices, delivering healthcare remotely removes time-consuming manual processes and communication challenges between patients and providers. Ellie Patient Engagement and Care Management from Get Real Health was developed to provide greater visibility into care plan compliance and patient-generated health data while seamlessly integrating into present workflows. The solution works in the background to push notifications from real-time data between patients and providers.

Ellie connects to mobile devices and automatically updates health data, freeing the patient from manual input. Using intelligent care coordination, patient health data also feeds directly into the provider workflow, making near real-time updates to ensure information gets where it needs to go. Once patients leave a clinician’s office, Ellie gives them the ability to contact their care manager for support, as well as browse education and resources tailored to their unique condition.

Start delivering more value with Personalized Care from Microsoft
Maximize your EHR investments with intelligent, cloud-based solutions that extend your healthcare organization’s impact and drive value-based, proactive healthcare. Regardless of your short or long-term objectives, Personalized Care from Microsoft enhances existing health systems across the digital transformation journey. Built on a dynamic and highly secure platform with a flexible infrastructure, Personalized Care helps support your regulatory and compliance needs. Learn more about Personalized Care and check out the demo on the Microsoft Enterprise Health website.

To explore each of the five solutions, visit AppSource:
GeneVision for Precision Medicine (BC Platforms)
KenSci Clinical Analytics (KenSci)
DXC Health360 Care Coordination (Tribridge, a DXC Technology company)
Health Team Collaboration (Microsoft)
Ellie Patient Engagement and Care Management (Get Real Health)