Personalized Healthcare And The Next Generation Digital Infrastructure
The Next Generation Of Patient Engagement Requires A New Generation Of Digital Logistics
Illumination publication Initially publicized this article on Medium!
Patient Journey is the comprehensive outlook of the goals recognized by every patient and their physician. It pertains to the detailed visual view backed by an information matrix about the patients' road map from the initial visit to the follow-up and healing.
With the ever-increasing healthcare costs, patient expectations, and physician workload, it is more than ever vital to personalize the healthcare delivery model. That is, at least in part, thru proper patient engagement in their medical care and walking their journey with them throughout their entire medical care. That includes finding and meaningfully managing intricacies like lack of access to timely medical care, a shortage of health literacy, and other factors that may hinder patients from reaching their healthcare goals.
Engaging in highly personalized medical care brings excellent value to the patients and the physicians. That further sweetens the patient journey by securing their trust in the system and their physician, thus paving the road for better quality medical care, lower healthcare expenditure, and fewer medical errors. One prominent example of how personalized healthcare can reduce healthcare costs and ensure better outcomes is the reduction of patient readmission to an emergency room after discharge from the hospital.
The nationwide online survey conducted by McKinsey between December 5, 2019, to January 6, 2020, suggested that engaging patients in their care and walking them through their journey significantly reduced hospital readmission, increased patient satisfaction, and saved many healthcare dollars.
Indeed, avoiding unnecessary emergency room, clinic, and hospital visits and ensuring timely admission to those resources "when really must" are two significant values. These are decreasing costs and ensuring that the patient is healthy enough not to require those resources in the future.
As easy as it may sound, patient engagement requires special considerations. Those pertain to cultural, socioeconomic, geographic, and personal attributes.
In personalized care, there is no room for profiling and a one-size-fits-all concept that often follows population health modalities. Because understanding patients' journeys are about comprehending their personalities and connecting with them on the grass, thus it may even require learning their mindset and engaging them with an individual or group who understands their circumstances.
Establishing a personalized medical care system, the next generation of patient engagement within, and "walking the walk" with patients throughout their journey also needs the next generation of digital healthcare logistics infrastructure.
The next generation of patient engagement tools reaches beyond creating continuity of care and connecting with patients personally. It reflects the real-life clinic experience away from the clinic. It takes the point of care (POC) out of medical clinic exam rooms and nursing stations and puts the amenity in the patient's home.
The next generation of digital logistics is a hybrid medical care territory for patients, a hybrid work setup for medical staff, and a secure virtual corridor for health information exchange.
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Once the proper digital logistic infrastructure is established that accommodates transparency, accountability, and realization of the implied workflow process of the patient journey, one can expect genuine, personalized healthcare delivery.
The next generation of digital logistics is open resource, scalable, interactive, hybrid, real-time, and collaborative.
Patient engagement is one of our epoch's most liberally used and abused buzzwords. While we should maintain our course toward healthcare personalization, we must never fail to realize that one can never achieve patient engagement on the insurance industry terms or quality metrics set by those organizations.
Quality metrics and value of medical service must be the pure outcome of the patient's subjective perception of the journey on the roadmap they created together with the physician based on the physician's objective conclusions.
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