Later this month, my daughter will have her first virtual dentist appointment.
Let it sink in the water.
The days of sitting in an orthodontist’s chair for hours gluing metal braces with cement tooth by tooth are largely over. Instead, it’s an incredibly simple process: Receive Invisalign retainers in the mail, send pictures to the dentist to monitor progress, and ask questions via text every step of the way—all from the comfort of your living room sofa.
While virtual care is changing the way clinicians deliver and patients receive care in ways we’ve never imagined before, it’s unfortunately just another example of digital disruptors innovating without accelerating true industry-wide transformation. example. My daughter’s dental care details – like any patient’s care details – are bound to sit in their current silo; unless the information is manually entered, faxed, or relayed verbally from the patient to the clinician, other clinical providers will Uninformed.
In healthcare, we tend to mistake “virtual” or “innovative” for “transformation,” when in fact, building shiny new digital tools often forces us to de-emphasize the biggest component of enhancing healthcare. Our biggest failure as an industry is to assume that interoperability will inherently make data actionable, enhance collaboration on the ground, and enable new business models to transform the space. The past 10 years of trying and trying to make point solutions and siloed platforms work together has proven this fallacy. In effect, digital health innovators must build — and health organizations must adopt — underlying operating systems that combine new solutions with legacy systems so clinicians don’t have to connect all these dots themselves.
Interoperability often stops in three key areas – but fundamental collaborative innovation from the inside out may open new doors.
1. Legacy workflows lack actionable insights
When it comes to patient data needed to improve the healthcare experience, there is a minimal foundation of interoperability today – fragmented tools lack the basic ability to securely share and structure this data between hospital systems and EHRs to patients , the provider is the same as the payer. Existing data is not readily available or actionable; in fact, despite having one of the fastest growing datasets across industries, 97% of healthcare data Unused.
In a healthcare ecosystem where data sharing has become the bet, the clarity to cut through the noise of data—and what drives our industry forward—is about activating meaningful data through open collaboration. Insights emerging at the moment of care and trend lines woven together over time have the power to enhance the clinician’s experience of care, resulting in greater operational efficiency (delivering the right care at the right time) and financial resilience (closing care throughout the care process) gap in ). For patients, this will create a more tailored and seamless care experience, with personalized and improved outcomes.
2. Clinical systems do not account for broader data input
Discussions around interoperability often start with building data pipelines between different EHRs — and that’s where it often ends. However, clinicians and care providers know firsthand that when patients take the time to be directly involved in their health, in addition to their annual physicals, it often happens in diagnostic labs, insurance systems, or their own Fitbit or Apple Watch. Other places outside the EHR.
When people identify themselves to friends, colleagues, relatives, they rarely say, i am a patient or I am a consumer. More often, they think, I am a parent. I am a partner. I am alone. If health organizations only collect information about patients if they see themselves as patients, medical services and outcomes will always be inherently limited.
Interoperability is not a technical issue; if it were, healthcare would be solved by now. This is ultimately a matter of boundaries, and each entity across the entire care continuum has its own parameters of technical engagement that are only open to a few partner platforms — or not at all. The four walls of the clinic must be broken to provide truly person-centred care. Value-based care, social determinants of health, and other personalized care models and settings will be core components of building a comprehensive whole-person view.
3. Innovation is often technology first, clinicians second
Our industry’s heroic efforts to improve the quality of care and the patient experience through digital innovation have inadvertently created an environment where people serve technology, not the other way around. Clinicians are often placed in positions where they have to compromise the care they provide: invest in clinical techniques or interact with patients; prioritize the quality of results or the number of visits; document in the EHR after hours or focus on work-life balance, otherwise Valuable information may be lost.
Just as health organizations have collectively begun to view patients as consumers of healthcare outcomes, digital health innovators should begin to view clinicians as consumers of healthcare technology.Clinicians know best what they need, and therefore—as American surgeon Vivek Murthy recently highlighted in an article Consultation on healthcare burnout — Healthtech companies must design solutions that meet their needs.
A good starting point is to enable clinicians to use intelligent technologies, such as workflow creation tools, that can be customized to meet individual clinical needs while being standardized enough to meet operational requirements. Additionally, startups and digital innovators should recognize the strong feedback loop that prioritizes clinician leadership and early adopters to ensure the challenges we face in the industry are addressed from the inside out.
Gone are the days of trying a silver bullet solution. Radical collaboration—rather than disruptive innovation—is the key to freeing clinicians from the constraints of technology and enabling them to deliver care without compromise. By uniting responsible innovators and connected technologies in the healthcare ecosystem, I believe our collective healthcare industry can finally achieve true interoperability and begin to advance people-centred healthcare through meaningful transformation.
Photo: Leo Wolfert, Getty Images
