Connected Healthcare Will Drive Global Change in 2013

Driven by new technology, patient-centered connected healthcare will help people worldwide receive better and more cost-efficient treatment and care, said one of Accenture’s top healthcare consultants.

Rick Ratliff, Accenture’s senior executive of health and public service, speaking at the recent Healthcare IT Summit, disclosed the results of a massive global study on connected healthcare that delved into such global trends as the aging population, a decrease in fitness, and increased incidence of chronic and lifestyle disease.

“At the end of the day, it’s important that the technology supports access to the information at every phase of patient care, and that there is an ability for a single view of patient information to provide all those who are involved in the care with a common view of the patient’s information for fully expedited and coordinated care,” said Ratliff.

He disclosed the findings of Accenture’s study of 3,700 physicians and 160 healthcare experts worldwide that examined connected health, healthcare IT adoption, health information exchanges and insight-driven healthcare.

“We need to digitize healthcare with electronic medical records, and we need to make sure that it’s digitized in a certain way that will allow us to use that information to manage workflow to improve overall healthcare,” said Ratliff. “We, then, need to exchange that data among hospitals, physicians, payer organizations and patients, and use analytics to assess the care, find the gaps and change the behavior of the healthcare system.”

Right now, primary care organizations in Spain and England are leading in the areas of healthcare IT adoption and health information exchange, followed by the U.S. Secondary, or specialist, care organizations in Spain and the U.S. are leading in those areas, with Singapore following very close behind, according to Accenture’s research.

“Here in the U.S., the HITECH Act is driving significant adoption of electronic medical records and we are starting to see slow growth in health information exchange, but there is still a long way to go,” said Ratliff.

The main reason why many countries are falling behind with technology-driven connected healthcare is because of cost. “In addition to cost, there is concern about privacy and lack of interoperability standards, and there is a lack of incentives to drive adoption and utilization of electronic medical records. These issues are seen consistently across the world,” said Ratliff.

According to the survey, only one in five physicians receive incentives for managing patients with chronic conditions while less than 20 percent have incentives for achieving quality measures and only 10 percent have motivation for coordinating care with other organizations.

In the U.S. today, approximately two-thirds of physicians have an electronic medical record system in place, and the U.S. is doing well in using EMRs to capture information during exams, however, there is not as much uptake on the exchange of information. Only about 16 percent of primary care physicians who responded to the survey are doing some level of communication, and about 24 percent of secondary care physicians are communicating via HIEs.

“We are still seeing a lot more progress in the U.S. than we are seeing in some other countries around the world regarding HIE and the use of electronic medical records for connected healthcare, and I am confident that progress will only grow over the next few years,” said Ratliff.

The 4 Pillars Of Technical Innovation In Healthcare

Four major technology trends, which are becoming more intertwined every day, will dominate the healthcare IT landscape in 2013, according to IDC Health Insight’s top researcher, Scott Lundstrom.

These trends—social media, cloud, big data and analytics, and mobility—already are having a big impact on many healthcare provider and payer organizations, but CIOs will be faced with managing and deploying many of these technologies as their use becomes pervasive during the coming year. Lundstrom calls these tech trends the “four pillars” of healthcare IT and recently presented them during a keynote presentation at UBM Technology’s Healthcare IT Summit.

“By using technology we can go out and make a difference in the quality and cost of care,” Lundstrom told the CIOs gathered at the conference. “The answer to doing more with less in healthcare is getting closer to the patient with cloud, analytics, mobile, and social/unified communications.”

Cloud

When it comes to cloud computing, private cloud is emerging as the platform of choice to transform healthcare IT departments and make technology more efficient and accessible. New business requirements are demanding new architectures, and cloud platforms are a priority for payer and provider CIOs.

Healthcare IT executives are using the cloud in many different ways and for varying reasons, but according to IDC Health Insights’ research, both payer and provider healthcare organizations stated that data backup and archiving is the No.1 storage solution in the cloud, with server capacity on demand  a close second.

Security issues, however, may be holding back broader deployment—at least in the short term. Security and availability concerns were stated as the biggest impediments to deploying cloud storage solutions by 22 percent of the payers and by 40 percent of providers surveyed by IDC. “Most breaches are not the result of an inept third party; they are from a laptop left in the car or a USB left on the desk by employees,” said Lundstrom.

Also, healthcare organizations must adhere to HIPAA security safeguards such as security management processes, workstation and device security and access control for proper implementation, which pose further challenges.

With all of the advantages of cloud storage, payer and provider IT executives are slowly looking beyond its challenges and beginning to implement cloud strategies for 2013. According to IDC Health Insights, nearly one-third of both payer and provider organizations are currently researching and evaluating the purchase of cloud technology.  Meanwhile, 31 percent of payer organizations said they are currently deploying cloud technologies while only 16.5 percent of provider organizations said they were using the cloud.

“At the end of the day, the cloud is just another place to put things,” said Lundstrom.

Big Data And Analytics

The explosion of data is creating challenges in healthcare around the volume, variety, velocity and value of information associated with it.

HIEs are certainly a focus area for big data and analytics in 2013 because of the vast amounts of data involved with the sharing process. “We’ve done a great job of getting analytics and research, but we’ve done a really bad job of getting it in the hands of the physicians,” Lundstrom said. The safe exchange of patients’ information will continue to get a lot of payer and provider IT executive attention in the coming months.

At the same time, IT executives’ focus regarding big data and analytics will slightly shift to include care management, population health, care team collaboration, transitions in management, analytics and business intelligence. This move in the focus of data aggregation to big data and analytics is the future of healthcare IT.

Mobile

Mobility’s pervasiveness is creating new demands on healthcare data centers—given the need for instant connectivity, streaming video and the transfer and sharing of large medical images.

Doctors want to the ability to take a CAT scan image from the hospital’s system to their iPad or iPhone simply and seamlessly so that they can travel throughout the hospital with the image. Doctors, nurses and other health payer and provider employees are demanding mobile applications and access to the network, and CIOs must have the back end ready to host such devices.

However, accessing patient data on mobile devices is still a challenge because of security issues and the cost of supporting such devices. “It always seems to be the discussion of the gadget. The gadget is not where the money or difficulty is—supporting the device is also easy from a technical standpoint. The real issue is the money that’s in the back end [network, storage, data centers, virtualization],” said Lundstrom. “We have to grow our mobile platforms to satisfy the gadget demands of the users, and we have to secure information. “

Social Media And Unified Communications

Every customer or patient has a voice, and healthcare payer and provider organizations can use social media to hear those voices and use them to bring tremendous value to patient care. The next generation of consumer engagement will leverage consumers’ social profiles, according to IDC Health Insights, as should be tapped into as a resource to effect positive health behaviors.

IDC Health Insights asked payer and provider IT executives about their top challenges in using or deploying social media tools and found that executive support, justifying expenses of social software, maintaining and keeping track of all the posted content and getting customers to participate were cited most often.

Forty-two percent of payers and 24 percent of providers said their top challenge is getting executive support—the fact that these numbers are slightly low compared to the other challenges proves that healthcare organizations understand the need for social media and technology method innovation.

However, regardless of the challenges, social media is a technology that will thrive in the healthcare industry in 2013, according to IDC Health Insights. “Facebook is an 800-million- user social media application platform, and consumer engagement solutions in healthcare will be increasingly mobile and connected to social networking sites like Facebook in the coming year,” said Lundstrom.

The TriZetto Group Plays The Role Of ‘Global Solution Partner’

As the health-care industry continues to change and evolve, IT vendors are realizing that they must step up to help payers and providers seamlessly transform their organizations from a technology standpoint. Emil Peters, vice president of Hospital and Health System Markets at The TriZetto Group, shares his message with health-care CIOs, The TriZetto Group’s new solutions and improvements to its flagship offering, how it’s innovating and what he is hearing from its customers and partners.

HCITS: The TriZetto Group is attending the Healthcare IT Summit, which attracts CIOs of health-care payer and provider organizations. What is your message to them?

Peters: I think I would say, ‘Welcome to the most interesting time in the most important industry in the world that impacts every member of every society.' We bring comprehensive experience and decades of knowledge from supporting risk-bearing entities to both payers and providers. As we enter new and innovative models that seek to solve the global health-care affordability crisis that we collectively share, we think our solutions will help new stakeholders play a pivotal role. We look to support and contribute to this new world not just by being an IT vendor, but also by being a global solution partner that supports its clients as they transform themselves.

HCITS: What new deployment methodologies and architectures is your flagship solution providing today?

Peters: With the payers’ drive to become more efficient, and the providers’ goal to enter new models without breaking their already broken piggy banks, we see an opportunity to be relevant and supportive in both spaces. TriZetto has not only made investments in functional capabilities to deepen our ability to support a variety of customers, but we have made some key acquisitions that extend our capabilities to address what these new payer/providers clients will ultimately look like.

Our GatewayEDI acquisition, last year, has given us tremendous insight and capability into physician revenue cycle management (RCM) and real-time payment capabilities. Recently we bolstered that investment in provider infrastructure by bringing NHXS on board to help group practices obtain accurate claim payments and recover underpayments. Continuing this expansion, we've just announced the acquisition of ClaimLogic, a medical claims and payment processing company that has serves hospitals and large medical practices. By combining all these capabilities, TriZetto is building an integrated, real-time payer-provider technology platform that helps health plans and physicians achieve efficiency and effective care.

HCITS: How are you innovating and driving innovation from a technology standpoint?

Peters: Having just spent a few days with our TriZetto technology team, I can't be more positive about our technical innovation trajectory. We continue to evolve our solutions to meet the ever changing demands of both our payer and provider clients. Being able to provide flexibility with a focus on TCO is important and the ability to scale is something that we think is going to be vital for payers and providers moving forward. When you think of information as the new currency for global population health management, the ability to flex with our customers is paramount. We're truly excited to be in position to lead with our clients, but it also brings a tremendous amount of responsibility that we are ready for.

HCITS: What are you hearing from your IT executive partners and customers?

Peters: There is a sense of tremendous opportunity, while at the same time there is a lot of risk. Providers, specifically, are catching their breath from the first wave of Meaningful Use and are getting ready to run and jump into stage two. Payers are looking to drive administrative efficiency, increase automation and improve the cost and quality of care. It's no surprise that everyone is a bit weary of all these new models that will require heavy doses of information to succeed. That's why we think we can play an impartial and transparent role in helping them mitigate risks and maximize opportunities. There is a lot of opportunity as I mentioned earlier, but it's below the surface and going to require some excavation to get there. If you're going to excavate, you're going to need the right tools and capabilities and our clients are coming to us asking for answers.

HCITS: What is your biggest piece of advice, from a vendor perspective, to our Healthcare CIO audience?

Peters: I think it would be to specialize and know your end destination. Know your place in the market and what your value proposition is. There will be a lot of iteration in order to get to that final destination and undoubtedly it will be an arduous journey, but if you know the end point and the way points to get there, the organizational risk can be manageable. To reuse my boat analogy, you need to plan for the whole journey and not just the rapids or the calm waters. Your equipment needs to serve you in the way you need to be served at the time you need it. Planning with that end in mind will help you get the right balance of people, process and technology. It sounds elementary, but it's really important.