Chronic diseases in the United States are responsible for 90% of the $3.5 trillion in healthcare spending each year, led by increases in obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 60% of U.S. adults are living with at least one chronic condition today, and those numbers are expected to climb as the oldest Baby Boomers reached 75 in 2019.
At the same time, the U.S. healthcare system will be facing an acute shortage of medical doctors in the next decade—up to 120,000 less than the population requires.
Clearly, the current reliance on in-clinic visits, phone, and email to diagnose and treat chronic disease isn’t efficient enough for healthcare practitioners, or effective enough to deliver desired patient outcomes and stem the tide—and these situations are only going to get worse.
Accelerating the digital transformation of clinical care
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of healthcare, disrupting traditional engagement models, and forcing providers and patients alike to replace in-person experiences with a variety of digital tools and healthcare platforms.
Providers then can take advantage of this unique moment in time and replace traditional in-person visits with more holistic Digital Clinical Care solutions—eliminating or automating some of the more mundane patient follow-up tasks in the process—will be in a much better position to deliver superior patient care, improve outcomes and increase revenue.
For example, let’s say your organization is beginning a program to treat patients with chronic kidney disease. A Digital Clinical Care platform from Persistent Systems would enable you to:
- Identify a cohort of highly specific patients that have kidney disease but don’t require dialysis by quickly scanning your enterprise data warehouse for patients with certain biomarkers, diagnoses, and treatment protocols.
- Communicate with, educate, and enroll interested and eligible patients without having them set foot in the office, by relying on telehealth tools.
- Determine the specific clinical protocols that best match each patient’s unique situation quickly and accurately, using enterprise data and machine learning.
- Assign a care navigator or coordinator for each patient to help keep program adherence rates high. By relying on digital tools—including the potential for remote patient monitoring (RPM) through connected wearables and in-home devices—each care navigator can successfully support a larger cohort of patients without compromising outcomes.
- Optimize patient adherence and care navigator productivity by setting unique engagement cadences for each patient, increasing digital and remote engagements through RPM, and automating some follow up tasks.
Some patients may require weekly telehealth visits with daily prompts by phone, text, email, or text-to-speech devices like Amazon’s Alexa in order to get the patient to control more quickly.
Others may require monthly telehealth visits at first with automated action prompts weekly, then decreasing the visit cadence to every three to six months based on their biomarkers and lab results.
In each case, the schedule and format of interactions is adjusted in real-time based on the ongoing analysis of the individual and cohort’s responses to the therapies and protocols.
Superior patient experience, clinical and financial outcomes
Digital Clinical Care not only delivers improved program adherence rates and patient outcomes, but it maximizes the productivity of your caregivers by optimizing follow-up cadences and engagement methods. This provides breakthrough results in three areas: patient experience, clinical outcomes, and financial outcomes.
- Patient experience – Patients love these digital experiences because they’re getting unique plans based on their needs, not a one-size-fits-all protocol. More importantly, they’re communicating with their care navigators regularly in a manner that’s convenient and comfortable for them without requiring them to come into the office.
It’s patient care on their terms. As a result, they’re more likely to follow the recommended protocols and see the benefits of doing so firsthand, improving their overall satisfaction.
- Clinical outcomes – Frequency of engagement with the patient directly leads to increased compliance and adherence on the patient side. So, any method of increasing engagement, without increasing workload or headcount, will deliver more favorable clinical outcomes.
For example, prostate cancer patients at one Persistent customer— a radiation oncology clinic in Boston—must be continually monitored with blood tests and other biomarkers over a long period of time, post-op. Many of them had to drive several hours to visit the office on a regular basis, simply to conduct these routine exams.
With Digital Clinical Care, these patients are engaging with care providers quickly and easily using telehealth and RPM tools, increasing the frequency of engagement, improving patient adherence and outcomes, and saving time for caregivers and patients alike.
- Financial outcomes – Digital Clinical Care allows your organization to maximize revenues by:
- Automating routine follow-up tasks, freeing up caregivers to focus on higher-value activities.
- Optimizing the frequency of interactions on a patient-by-patient basis, ensuring a minimal investment of resources for maximum results.
- Leveraging telehealth and RPM technologies to allow caregivers to support more patients more effectively, thereby increasing billing opportunities.
- Ensuring patients receive the right level of care for their chronic conditions. For example, many chronic condition treatments begin with a comprehensive evaluation of the patient, led by an MD.
However, as interactions decrease in acuity, those engagements can automatically shift to other caregivers, ensuring the highest-value interactions are reserved for the highest-value care providers.
Persistent Systems: your award-winning digital healthcare solutions
If your organization wants to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity to digitally transform your current care model to improve consistency of care and patient outcomes at a reduced cost, you need Digital Clinical Care by Persistent Systems.
Digital Clinical Care is built on Persistent’s unparalleled experience delivering digital healthcare solutions, including:
- 15+ years of broad healthcare industry experience and understanding
- 5+ years of specific solution development for cloud- and mobile-based healthcare systems
- 20+ years of large-scale, complex integration and development experience for global organizations
- An award-winning track record of providing “exceptional customer-centricity in the delivery of core technologies across all geographies” in the healthcare industry.
Know more about Digital Clinical Care from Persistent Systems.
