Healthcare is evolving quickly and HIMSS19 offers a broad range of healthcare issues to explore, but will it mourn the passing of the traditional office visit and embrace new HIT driven meet ups?
New requirements for implementing HIT systems are changing as new health IT priorities and procedures emerge. Convergence in the health care sector is accelerating the need for interoperability, not just for EHRs, but also across clinical, financial, and operational systems. This need is also challenging and changing one of the biggest traditions in healthcare—the doctor-patient medical visit.
In the past, patients would simply make appointments to visit their physicians, but now the popularity of Annual Wellness Visits (AWVs) is changing the relationship. This trend is causing physicians to be the ones actively pursuing patients with both sides reaping the benefits. This new approach to the traditional doctor-patient relationship enables patients to receive better care while clinics and hospitals build up a roster of new and potentially long care patients.
Disrupting this office visit tradition are also larger, long term HIT changes such as the widespread implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other healthcare innovations such as advances in behavioral healthcare by innovators such as Zoeticx, Cerner and others. To understand these developments, we need to be cognizant of the increasing opportunities patients and physicians have in interfacing with the healthcare system.
When Medicare, Medicaid, organ transplantation and synthetic insulin were coming in vogue 50 years ago, patients had relatively limited access to healthcare. Those that did often choose to enter the system through a single physician. With the implementation of governmental and private healthcare insurance options, patients had improved access to care.
With higher costs, healthcare responded by changing the way patients interacted with the system. Beginning in the 70’s and continuing into the 80’s, the rise of HMO’s and capitation attempted to improve national healthcare, but this led to limitations in patients’ choice. It also began the concept of bundling services, cost sharing, and expansion of preventative care. Other managed care plans and a focus on utilization of care continued to decrease costs.
Although many aspects of these managed care structures benefited patients, such as preventative services and prescription coverage, access to services and specific physicians were constrained as “In” and “Out” of network coverage, limiting patient choices. The implementation of EHR’s has established the foundation upon which opportunities are and will be found to improve healthcare quality.
Evolving Relationship Drives Healthcare Revenue
While the doctor-patient relationship is evolving, hospital systems and physicians must still derive revenue which is at the core of that relationship. The healthcare industry is now looking at revenue which can be generated through the interoperability of AWVs, chronic care and service care transitions between physical and behavioral health services. Hospitals and healthcare clinics that can connect these services with technologies such as bi-directional information flow will benefit by creating new profit centers of revenue through reimbursements by CMS and private insurers.
“With annual wellness visits and behavioral care management, doctors can reach out to patients rather than waiting for patients to schedule an appointment. This flips the traditional patient-doctor relationship, enabling doctors to spend more time with patients to provide superior care and also drives hospital and clinic revenue by bringing in more patients,” said Doug Brown, managing partner, Black Book Research. “Healthcare institutions using cloud based, bi-directional interoperability technologies are a win-win for the healthcare industry.”
Driving this trend are new apps and innovations that address the payment gap caused by medical billing and collections processes with outdated EHR platforms and inoperable systems. New technologies from organizations such as Core Care Medical and others fueled by the growth of cloud computing in the healthcare industry are improving real-time communication and data exchange. Here are some examples of how this is working which you might hear about at HIMSS.
Hospital CEO Drives Revenue with Doctor Patient Visit Apps
David Conejo, CEO, Rehobath McKinley Christian Healthcare Services (RMCHS) is boosting revenue right now using this doctor-patient flipping model as a strategy to help in his effort to improve behavioral healthcare for Gallup, New Mexico’s large Indian Reservation community who suffer from addiction to alcoholism and opioids.
He integrates data from the hospitals’ three clinics using a cloud application that streamlines data from AWVs and integrates it with any EHR system without data duplication. The Zoeticx ProVizion app also allows for the management of support tracking for wellness visits, provides a physical assessments guide through preventative exams, and maps out the risk factors for potential diseases for patient follow-up visits. He can then enter the relevant data about the patient.
In addition, the app includes everything else that Medicare would recommend apart from a checkup. The app also lets him identify integrated EHR solutions that could also meet CMS and private insurers billing requirements. RMCHS’ business is growing with full or near-full compliance. And with its ACO in startup mode, RMCHS is also receiving a bonus check for $80,000 from Medicare for containing costs, in addition to the new revenues being generated.
The fact that more patients can be seen is a bonus. When the doctor comes in, they already have the requisite information about meds, compliance and other important factors, but if a physician saves 10 minutes per patient, at 18 patients a day, that’s an extra 180 minutes. More minutes, more patients.
Another organization whose community benefits from AWVs is Cardinal Innovation’s Healthcare (CIH), the largest specialty health plan in the US, insuring more than 850,000 North Carolinians with similar needs to RMCHS’s patient population. CIH works with numerous local and regional healthcare organizations in administering proactive health programs.
This is good news for patients as consumers and re-examine the doctor-patient relationship. Be it via an office visit that occurs in person, over a telemedicine channel, or passive data stream from personal health technology, information will continue to expand and be used to enhance the care delivered.
We are at the inflection point where involvement with building useful workflows that are in sync with the needs, values and channels through which patients interact with the healthcare system. When we understand the technology is not only to make our lives easier, but ultimately to enhance the care we can deliver, as measured by the outcomes and functionality to the patients we deliver our care to.