Prioritizing Digital Health In A Constrained Financial Environment

A turbulent economic environment continues to pose challenges for healthcare organizations, especially hospitals. Operating margins have improved compared to the same time last year but remain negative. Rising labor costs and staffing shortages, slowly recovering patient volumes, inflationary pressures, and the endemic presence of COVID-19 are key contributing factors. On top of this, the competitive landscape keeps tightening, from retailers to innovators, as well as insurers, expanding their reach into care delivery. 

To stay ahead of the competition and maintain your market dominance, prioritizing investment in technology and digital solutions is paramount. However, to sustain this growth, it is also crucial to reassess the value provided by each investment. Hard, but not impossible. At Houston Methodist, for instance, leaders suggest that a robust and thoughtful rollout of technology aimed at building a more sustainable workforce model can lead to at least a 5% cost reduction. At Intermountain Healthcare, a partnership with Omada Health is bringing virtual chronic care to patients, increasing access to critical services. At Providence St. Joseph, a recent partnership with Anthem Blue Cross and Vim has improved provider access to data necessary for delivering value-based care.

As we look across the provider landscape, three strategies have consistently delivered high value for health systems:

1. Rethinking the front door of care. Pursued if a health system is aiming to attract new patients, improve retention, and build convenience

2. Improving health admin operations. Pursued if a health system’s current operations have become unsustainable financially or have handcuffed its ability to aptly respond to market dynamics

3. Optimizing value-based care analytical functions. Pursued if providers are looking for new processes and tools to effectively manage risk

Health systems have adopted a variety of digital plays across each of these strategies to enable their enterprise goals. In the graphic below, we highlight specific actions health systems can take to impact each of the three strategies. Resource constraints will limit how many items a hospital or health system can take on, but each holds a distinct business benefit that allows health systems to better prioritize their investment portfolio.

Keys to success

There are no shortcuts to mapping out a successful digital plan. Regardless of which of the above strategies leaders home in on first, they need to embrace these three overarching principles:

Prioritize digital investments that can have an outsize impact on your enterprise strategy: Delivering differentiated experiences – especially on commodity healthcare services – is paramount. Whether it is a market-leading specialist offering or a primary care network that is consistently accessible, health systems should be focused on how their technology investments bolster their strategies and objectives.

Innovators like Commons Clinic, a specialty provider delivering an end-to-end service for orthopedic conditions, and Heartbeat Health, a virtual-first cardiology provider that’s out to prove telemedicine can work in specialty care, are helping to redefine the patient experience.

Incumbent providers should mirror this way of thinking: design your digital health strategy to the realities of your enterprise and where you want to go in the future.

Prioritize an omnichannel experience and avoid fragmentation-causing solutions: For non-acute care, experience reigns supreme; and for specialized care, patients increasingly expect their data to follow them and the experience to be seamless. Their expectations have been shaped by experiences everywhere else online, whether it’s the ability to transition a Netflix movie from one device to another, the convenience of autofill seamlessly completing address and credit information across multiple online ordering platforms, or the integration of online shopping with curbside pickup.

This is a complex challenge across industries, but the challenge compounds for health systems once you factor in the complexity of healthcare data and the continued lack of interoperability across the sector. To address this, it is core for you to understand how vendors will integrate with your electronic health record and the role that EHR will play in your future technology stack.

The devil is in the details when it comes to enabling interoperability across your EHR – whether it’s ensuring point solutions can be integrated with your verified/unverified patient workflow, ensuring point solutions account for medication history as part of a treatment plan, figuring out the nuance of integrating billing data back into your ledger or being able to receive/send patient data into and out of your health systems, and having it seamlessly transitioned back into a patient’s health record.

Use digital investments to accelerate critical changes in your operating model: Go beyond asking "What technology do I need?" and evaluate "Which operations must we re-evaluate?". You now have the decision space and market conditions to justify critical changes in both your technology and operations.

Reducing consumer friction by simplifying visit form templates and promoting online check-in, opening access through team-based care, and improving messaging platforms via standard guidelines all can have a much bigger impact on consumerism than the shiny toy. That doesn’t mean ignoring technological advances. Rather, providers must look at operations, strategy, and technology as being intertwined. And then evolve operations accordingly as updates and upgrades come online. Consider the experience we all just went through with telehealth. Forward-thinking organizations are not falling back into pre-pandemic patterns; they are banking on hybrid care as the model for the future and marrying technology to operations. For example, companies like Homeward Health are leveraging technology, home visits, and mobile clinics to bring care to patients.

Becoming a market leader

There is strong hope for health systems that are looking to innovate. But they must pursue an enterprise-wide transformation journey, set themselves apart from the competition as a customer-first center for care delivery, and make investments based on increasing access to care across multiple modalities.

Health systems that aptly prioritize the digital plays outlined above, along with maintaining focus on the success factors, and integrating their enhanced digital footprint with their existing in-person operations, can handily distinguish themselves in an increasingly more challenging market.

To learn more contact Matthew Weinstock, Senior Editor, Health and Life Sciences.