Anupam Sahai, Vice President, Product Management, Cavirin

Part 3 of 5 of “Moving Healthcare to the Cloud”

Written by: Anupam Sahai, Vice President, Product Management, Cavirin

In the last blog of our “Moving Healthcare to the Cloud” series, we discussed why it makes sense for healthcare organizations to move their IT infrastructures to the cloud. In this blog, we examine the process for defining cloud migration projects.

Although every step in the overall cloud migration process is critical, just how well you define the project at the start could very well set the stage to streamline success—or cause a lot of pain along the way.

At a high level, you first need to decide exactly what to move to the cloud:

• Which business functions? This covers the entire spectrum of the healthcare organization—from patient medical services to billing, procurement, insurance claims, compliance, human resources, marketing, communications and physical security as well as the general operations of buildings and grounds. Business processes to which end users require anytime, anywhere access from multiple devices—as well as those processes through which end users collaborate frequently—will likely benefit the most from moving to a cloud environment.

Ray Costantini, M.D., MBA, CEO and Co-Founder, Bright.md

Ray Costantini, M.D., MBA, CEO and Co-Founder, Bright.md

It’s that time of year again. Healthcare delivery systems are preparing for the onslaught of patients who will walk through the door with cough, cold, and flu symptoms in various stages of severity. This season presents providers with challenges ranging from controlling contagion and protecting fragile populations to increased workloads and supply and demand discrepancies.

So, like every year, systems are informing patients about CDC’s flu shot recommendations and then setting up clinics where patients can get them; educating schools and the rest of the community about outbreak conditions; ordering extra supplies; and staffing up for the increased number of patient visits.

Healthcare providers that offer virtual care—especially asynchronous virtual care– to their patients are often better equipped to deal with this challenging time of year. They can encourage sick patients to seek care from the comfort of their homes, reducing the number of people who they could spread the virus to—including at-risk populations such as pregnant women, newborn babies, elderly patients, and those with weakened immune systems.

While all remote-care programs can help manage contagion, asynchronous virtual access solutions offer some unique benefits. Solutions that provide automation support increase provider efficiency when treating high-demand but low-acuity conditions, like the flu. This frees up time for clinicians to meet the needs of patients with high-acuity needs or chronic conditions. Increased efficiency can also help prevent provider burnout, which is typically at a dangerous high during the fall and winter months.

Robbie Hughes, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Lumeon

Written by: Robbie Hughes, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Lumeon

When you think of one industry in particular that has mastered the creation of a seamless, digitally integrated experience for the customer journey – with automated coordination across all stakeholders and touchpoints – what comes to mind?

Despite the criticism that it receives, the airline industry can be considered a success when it comes to its ability to orchestrate the customer’s journey and improve customer experience. Gone are the days when a passenger would call a travel agent to book or manage their itinerary. We now research, book and manage flights digitally though a website or app. This allows us to check-in, upgrade and receive loyalty benefits, and keeps us up-to-date with real-time flight status, from check-in times to delays, all the way through to compensation, rebooking and satisfaction surveys. In other words, airlines are seamlessly connecting what could otherwise be a highly fragmented journey for their traveller – from exploring flight options, to completing a journey, and everything in between.

Online services now provide consumers with a simple, elegant experience, while the true sophistication happens seamlessly in the background by automating and orchestrating the engagement, with business processes and fluid data exchange. This sort of seamless and automatic, digital experience is exactly what consumers have come to expect from everything they touch in their daily lives.

Healthcare is no exception. The industry is in the midst of a movement toward the consumerization of the industry, largely driven by Millennials and Generation Z who are accustomed to our new world of always-on, instant service.

Anupam Sahai, Vice President, Product Management, Cavirin

Part 1 of 5 of “Moving Healthcare to the Cloud”

Brent Shafer, CEO Philips North America

It’s no secret that our healthcare system is up against enormous challenges, such as aging populations and growing chronic and lifestyle-related diseases, while providers struggle to increase access and quality of care. However, a brighter future is at hand with a more seamless, collaborative approach by hospitals and health technology companies that put patient care as the focus. As connected technologies continue to disrupt and transform the healthcare industry for the better, healthcare leaders must bridge the gap between bringing innovations forward that can change patient care and driving actual integration into health systems. In fact, this year’s Philips Future Health Index (FHI) data revealed that both healthcare providers (86%) and consumers (61%) believe a more integrated healthcare system would improve the quality of healthcare in the United States.

Without better integration, global access to quality healthcare will continue to decline. If broadly adopted, however, connected technologies have tremendous potential to provide solutions to the resource shortages confronting healthcare in many countries. We will be better able to track and manage the health of populations both inside and outside hospital walls, while simultaneously decreasing unacceptably long wait times, rising cost and severe staff shortages.

November 2, 2017 – Wolters Kluwer Health today announced that Baton Rouge General will deploy POC Advisor™, leveraging its clinical surveillance and analytics to reduce sepsis mortality and morbidity rates. The clinical intelligence platform will be a central component of the “Most Wired” hospital’s overall clinical and technology strategy.

“Using advanced technology is key to preserving and restoring health,” said Bennett Cheramie, Vice President of Information Technology at Baton Rouge General. “By making our front-line team members aware of patients with sepsis, POC Advisor will help us treat sepsis in its earliest stages.”

Advances in technology are essential if precision medicine is going to become reality.

Imagine a future in which, rather than using symptoms to identify a disease, your genes, metabolism, and gut microbiome inform how your individual health is managed. This is the vision of precision medicine.

Traditional medicine uses symptoms to diagnose diseases, and drugs to treat these symptoms. But precision medicine aims to turn this concept on its head.

By identifying the factors that predispose a person to a particular disease and the molecular mechanisms that cause the condition, treatment and prevention strategies can be tailored to each individual. 

So, how do we get from traditional to precision medicine? Advances in genetics and molecular analysis techniques have been a deciding factor, as has getting patients involved with managing their own health.

Daron Domino, Vice President, Messagepoint

It’s a familiar, tiring drill every year for those who work for Medicare Advantage Organizations (MAOs). There is a frantic rush from the time your organization makes its bid submission on the first Monday in June through the middle of August when plan materials need to go to print. Material preparation teams are tasked with preparing benefit materials such as the Annual Notice of Change, Evidence of Coverage, and Summary of Benefit that are compliant with CMS marketing guidelines, ensuring that all regulatory language, benefits and operational information is 100 percent accurate. Sitting between Product and Compliance, material preparation teams are challenged during the annual enrollment period (AEP) preparation as they process a sea of ad-hoc change requests.

Because of CMS timelines and the Sept. 30 in-home date, the annual update process typically starts ahead of benefits and plan approval being complete. So, there is risk of doing work to prepare materials for a plan, or plans, that may not receive CMS approval.

For most MAOs, the annual materials preparation process has been largely manual, resulting in increased efforts and risk of error. Many have attempted to automate the process only to find significant lead-times, costs, complexity, and ultimately a different set of challenges.

With a traditional document automation approach, data and rules drive the process. Those taking this approach spend most of their time managing a long list of business rules. One company we interviewed ended up with thousands of rules to drive benefits and content across their Individual market and Group plans. Automation was intended to simplify the annual process, reduce time and effort, and ultimately eliminate human error. Their attempt resulted in a process that requires an IT skill-set to set up and manage complex rules and a complex QA process to assess the impact of rule changes across plans, both of which have effectively eliminated any cost benefit. As a result, the team supporting materials preparation continues to work endless hours each summer.