Patient Self-Management

June 8, 2013

Healthcare reimbursement are moving towards episode of care-based bundling, shared savings incentives and capitation to achieve improved outcomes, lower costs and greater patient and provider satisfaction. This is creating incentives for healthcare providers to work as part of a care team and to more actively engage patients in their daily self-management. This new model requires providers and patients to change current behaviors around providing and receiving medical care. As a result, technologies and applications that impact organizations, care providers and patient behaviors and experiences are gaining prominence.

What applications and technologies are needed? Here is my list:

• Solutions that promote wellness, chronic disease management and care management

• Decision support systems that offer best practices and provide predictability in the decision making process throughout the continuum of care.

• Solutions to generate and communicate health information and analytics to uncover opportunities to impact care, such as daily automatic calls reminding a patient to take their medication or to provide a status of their health condition.

• Collaboration tools that span multi-channel capabilities such as phone, email, text messaging, video conferencing and portals that empower provider-provider and provider-patient communication.

• Remote patient monitoring and telemedicine solutions to monitor and care for patients regardless of patient or provider location.

• High-quality, easy-to-understand education provided on demand and wherever the patient may be.

• Systems that monitor medical costs and utilization across the continuum of care and manage risk more effectively.

The introduction of these technologies and applications presents the need for comprehensive policy and resilient infrastructure to support their usage.

#costefficiency #returns