Addressing fragmentation, embracing AI, and making data actionable: what we learned at HIMSS21
Both in-person in Las Vegas and virtually, healthcare professionals from all corners of the healthcare industry came together last week at HIMSS21 to discuss the future of healthcare and how digital innovations are leading to reduced costs, improved care access, and ultimately, better health outcomes. Our team headed to the conference to participate in these conversations and learn more about what’s next in digital health. Here’s what we learned:
1. It’s time to address the fragmentation consumers face in healthcare.
There is no longer an industry debate about the challenges consumers face as a result of increased digital fragmentation in healthcare. Consumers face a disjointed experience today, having to navigate a number of different healthcare and service providers on their own. The proliferation of point solutions available today often result in consumers receiving an overload of notifications and reminders from disparate and disconnected vendors and systems. This fragmented journey to address the full spectrum of a consumer’s health causes confusion and friction, and many organizations are looking to a “digital front door” or “no-wrong-door” approach to address these challenges.
We at Pager have long been working to address the complexity of a patient’s healthcare journey. Our platform helps create a connected healthcare experience, so a patient can connect with the clinicians, customer service agents, and care teams they need in one unified experience. By leveraging our proprietary technology and seamlessly integrating other existing point solutions, Pager unifies the member experience to deliver a variety of care and services in one place.
2. Healthcare is embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
Healthcare’s use of AI is rapidly expanding beyond administrative use cases and revenue cycle management, as evidenced by the increased embrace of AI in clinical care. Organizations are not looking to replace clinicians, but rather, to create efficiencies by providing decision, process, and workflow support to free up clinicians from transactional tasks and increase focus on providing personalized care.
Pager’s high-tech, high-touch approach to virtual care helps clinicians and other care providers work more efficiently. Nurses’ clinical decisions can be supported through AI triage bots, and care coordinators and nurses can manage more chat conversations simultaneously by leveraging Pager’s AI functionality, bots, and canned responses. This balance of human and technology allows teams to work more efficiently while delivering high-quality, personalized care and service.
3. Improving access to and the usability of health data is more important than ever.
Data interoperability is poised to drive a wave of change in how data is shared in healthcare, both in terms of continuity of care and personalization of care based on historical records. The ability for data to be de-siloed and brought together across multiple healthcare ecosystem players is core to driving better health outcomes and a more patient-centric experience.
An increasing number of solutions offer access to previously disparate healthcare data such as electronic health record (EHR), pharmacy, health information exchange (HIE), social determinants of health (SDOH), and more. Organizations are also offering increasingly mature data analytics solutions to produce actionable insights through the development of AI/ML models.
At Pager, we’re riding this wave as well. Pager’s integration functionality enables clients to pull the data and tools they need to support patient care into a “single pane of glass” view of relevant information. This drives efficiencies for our clients as agents no longer need to tab between various systems (CRM, EHR, etc.) to pull member information during an encounter. These integrations allow clinicians and other care providers to make more informed and more personalized decisions for their patients, more efficiently.
4. Organizations are shifting their gaze from telemedicine to more comprehensive virtual care.
We all remember the surge of telehealth utilization at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking in the spring and summer of 2020. Since then, however, telehealth utilization has steadily declined until recently reaching a plateau, although overall usage is still meaningfully higher than pre-pandemic levels. One explanation for this decline is the transactional nature of a telemedicine visit, and the acknowledgement that there is a need to provide a more holistic set of virtual services beyond just urgent care. Importantly, while traditional telehealth utilization has decreased in the last year, Pager has seen continued growth in its utilization, pointing to the value of a more holistic approach to virtual care.
As a result, organizations are looking toward more comprehensive virtual care services, such as nurse triage, chronic care management, and behavioral health. One health plan we spoke with mentioned their current challenge to streamline their existing digital assets into a more seamless offering, with a focus on providing more holistic care and patient-centric experience to drive increased utilization.
Pager’s platform offers a variety of virtual care services beyond traditional telehealth, guiding patients through their care journey, from care coordination, to nurse triage, to appointment scheduling, provider visits and Aftercare followup.
5. Organizations are focusing their solutions on value-based care enablement.
It is clearer than ever that digital technology is playing a major role in the shift from fee-for service to value-based care. Whereas previous years saw these changes as talking points, we’re now seeing new entrants tackle this transition with new tools, data, services, and platforms.
Innovations in AI, machine learning (ML), data analytics, and remote patient monitoring (RPM)/wearables are just some examples of how organizations are developing new capabilities to better manage population health and support the industry shift toward value based care delivery.
Pager Navigate, a concierge-style provider search & scheduling solution, provides our partners with assisted provider search and self-service appointment scheduling capabilities that prioritize high-performing and/or strategic providers. By providing a convenient method of appointment scheduling, we find members are more likely to select a preferred provider which benefits both health plans and providers in existing value-based arrangements.
Pager Aftercare provides additional follow-up touchpoints with patients utilizing the Pager platform and is built on the belief that healthcare is not transactional. Follow-up care is provided ~48 hours after each encounter to ensure a patient is able to access their care and/or prescriptions, to answer additional or remaining health questions, and to ensure the patient has what they need to improve their health. The program has resulted in 87% member engagement and provided additional health education for 54% of members – proving Pager’s value in supporting value-based care and preventative holistic care.
Interested in learning more about how Pager is leading the way for virtual care innovation? Contact us at hello@pager.com.
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