The Digital Disruption

The Digital Disruption

Medicine is destined to be the most regulated industry in the world. The current culture of healthcare in America challenges traditional business models on everything from cost to implementation to how we gather feedback about the patient experience. This paramount shift in the way we evaluate our physicians and choose our health plans further supports the need for continual innovation. In this new generation of due diligence, the entire healthcare community has become accountable not only in the state and federal courts but in the court of public opinion as well. This new arena demands strong fiscal oversight, tangible transparency and outcomes that are determined by the level of patient engagement. The old boardrooms dialogue, centered around the acquisition and internal uses of big data, have given way to new questions. Senior executives and are now asking, “How do we get our members excited about using all of this data?”

The fact that this question is now being asked by the most influential decision makers in healthcare signals the beginning of a new kind of disruption, a digital disruption.

This digital disruption will be pioneered by leaders using technology to create innovative platforms to engage patients and change behavior. The champions of the future will be determined by the individual capacity of a corporation to modify and adapt. Inventions will no longer depend on handcrafted products but instead be shaped from ideas, concepts and processes presented across multiple platforms that can be accessed from anywhere any time any place.

The health plan of the future will engage patients through digital apps that can monitor compliance, Create custom QR Codes for HEDIS Measures to allow for real time tracking, all while assessing member satisfaction with the plan, pharmacy benefits and primary care providers.

In fact, the tools themselves will have nothing to do with the digital disruption, it will be the meaningful ways in which we use these tools to meet the needs of patients. Success or failure will be contingent not on what you create but what you do with it next.

The cost of healthcare is unsustainable. First premiums were raised to try and get consumer involvement. That was followed by employing variable cost shares and quality incentives. None of which have influenced behaviors. Perhaps because all of those affect us indirectly.

Innovative platforms such as Mobile Apps and Telemedicine have been able to reach their audience in the most intimate of places. 

How are you engaging your patients? Are you prepared for the digital disruption?

Kameron Gifford, CPC

ERM Consulting Inc

www.ermconsultinginc.com