The march toward value-based care has prompted a seemingly endless number of vendors to claim they have the ‘secret sauce’ that will help health systems and vendor partners succeed in an ever-evolving market.
With so many options, decision-makers must separate false promises from real opportunities and identify the companies that will have staying power. Taking a thoughtful and strategic approach to analyzing options will help identify beneficial long-term partners. Continue reading
Driving toward value-based care first requires a healthy understanding of the environment in which we are operating. Though regularly criticized, the U.S. healthcare system is actually strong: we have some of the world’s best hospitals and doctors. Individual service lines can provide attentive and effective care, whether it is cardiology, endocrinology or oncology.
However, we are falling short by failing to pull these service lines together. That is where the challenge lies. By focusing on wellness, we have the capability to deliver collaborative care and truly transformative outcomes.
The healthcare IT industry enters 2018 with a lot of potential, along with the need to overcome structures that have historically stunted progress. What is on our health IT wish list? AirStrip is feeling optimistic about the industry’s direction in terms of broader collaboration for building up truly interoperable systems to improve patient care, and overall health system stability.
2017 was a roller-coaster ride for healthcare, marked by exciting innovation, damaging cyberattacks, periods of lulls and disruptive change. As we enter a new year, it is important to celebrate the industry’s successes in 2017, and reflect on the ways these changes, incidents, and regulations both pushed health IT forward and established a foundation for 2018. From the consumerization of healthcare, to the implications of a changing reimbursement structure, to increases in health IT M&A, here is what three AirStrip executives and consultants identified as the most impactful change in health IT last year:
Most physicians have long enjoyed the benefits of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies. As health systems focused on ensuring doctors had access to state-of-the-art health IT to monitor their patients when they couldn’t be at the bedside, the quality of tools and pace of adoption for nursing solutions did not keep up. In some situations, nurses received bulky phones that could only be used within the walls of the hospital, while physicians needed to download specific apps on their own devices to receive calls from the nurses’ devices. Technical difficulties were frequent. In other situations, health systems tried rolling out solutions to nurses that had been used successfully by physicians. Unfortunately, those solutions were not always conducive to nurses’ workflow.
As we celebrate National Health IT Week, it is incredible to realize how health technology tools are transforming every facet of patient care. From telehealth, to 3D printers to artificial intelligence, the explosion of personalized health devices redefines the dynamics of patient treatment and interactions.
However, we still fall short in comparison to other industries, particularly in terms of consistent patient information access, and the lack of incentive for industry collaboration to achieve smooth, interoperable data transfers. This week, we strike a balance between applauding our progress, yet refusing to rest on our laurels.
Software as a medical device (SaMD) is defined by the International Medical Device Regulators Forum as “software intended to be used for one or more medical purposes that perform these purposes without being part of a hardware medical device.” SaMD is developed at a much faster pace than traditional medical devices, and may require frequent updates, as opposed to hardware devices that typically are updated every few years. While SaMD and medical devices are clearly different and evolve at completely different paces, the same regulatory approval process currently applies to both types of technology. Using the same process for both is akin to forcing a square peg into a round hole – it is not going to work because one size does not fit all, especially in healthcare.
Over the past couple of years, there have been around 200 merger and acquisition (M&A) deals in the healthcare IT space, driven by high enterprise value and the sheer size of the industry. 49 deals came together in the first quarter of this year alone. These numbers make health IT the highest performing industry in terms of M&A activity in the consumer and retail space, and the second highest in the infrastructure/industrial space.
Between 2018 and 2019, we will see an insatiable need for increased health IT interoperability, with providers putting increased pressure on health IT vendors to deliver. This pressure – combined with the shift brought on by new regulations like MACRA around performance, measurement and outcomes – will drive one of the biggest M&A pushes we’ve seen in the health IT industry.
This is a watershed moment in healthcare. New technologies are constantly in development to help treat and prevent previously incurable conditions, and improve current processes. From leadless pacemakers to mobile applications that advance telehealth access, digital innovation is at an all-time high. The problem is that our current speed of regulatory approval for these innovations simply cannot keep up.
While many groundbreaking technologies are being created, their full promise is not being realized because they are not being approved quickly enough to be implemented and adopted by health systems. The FDA regulatory process has long been a matter of contention. However, now that the rate of innovation is increasing, things need to change accordingly. By working together to streamline this regulatory process, technology will arrive to the market faster and propel the healthcare industry forward.
We are currently experiencing the biggest transformation in healthcare ever. Technology plays a significant role as an enabler of this transformation, but will not drive it alone. Improving patient care and driving toward patient engagement are crucial goals in this next phase of the healthcare industry. To make adoption ubiquitous and implementation effective, there are several things we should focus on as we dive into 2015:
Mobile Health Matters 