Moving away from analogue health in a digital world

Advancements in healthcare have been fundamental in changing the world as we know it. People are living longer and achieving more in their lifetime. Nations are ageing and their healthcare costs are spiralling upwards. Everywhere we look today, problems arise from the need to provide the best possible patient care at the most affordable price. Supply-driven care is out; value-based care is in.

If we take it as a given that resources are finite and the demands on our healthcare systems are only likely to increase under the status quo, then the key to providing a sensible framework for the provision of healthcare lies in one that provides efficiencies across the stakeholder spectrum.

Such a framework – which the Open Group Healthcare Forum is developing – must show how stakeholders are related to each other, to the patient, and to the big picture in healthcare. This is a universal truth, not limited to any particular geography.

Unfortunately, we still live in a world where many patients’ experiences with their healthcare system is bogged down by information travelling via paper transfer, snail mail and fax. It is inefficient, disjointed and increases the time, effort, and cost spent on receiving and delivering healthcare. When patient information is not connected and is not available to key actors involved in the provision of healthcare, the result is disjointed, incomplete patient records.

This, in turn, can lead to misdiagnosis, medical errors, waste, poor-quality care and, increasingly, insurance providers that deny payment for care that cannot be justified.

We are seeing the increasing deployment of electronic health records (EHR) at great expense across the western world, but there is insufficient training in how best to utilise them for better patient care at lower cost. Health information is still siloed and is not easily accessible by different healthcare providers, nor by patients themselves.

So, imagine a world in which a patient’s health information is available to all stakeholders, when and where they need it. In this world, a patient can share personally collected information – blood pressure, glucose levels, weight, medication tolerance, and so on – that is received and understood by all key players in real time.