How Digital Health should focus on Continuum of Care experience for patients?
Howdy!
Today we are going to talk about patient experience and why digital health strategies should focus on providing a “Continuum of Care” experience to the patients.
Continuum of Care isn’t a new concept but is in existence since long, also known as transitional care and is defined within Wikipedia as,
“Transitional care refers to the coordination and continuity of health care during a movement from one healthcare setting to either another or to home, called care transition, between health care practitioners and settings as their condition and care needs change during the course of a chronic or acute illness.”
Let us review what it means from digital health app standpoint. With implementation of continuum of care strategies digital health apps will enable better health outcomes and overall improvement of care experience both from patient and care givers standpoint. The transition from inpatient to outpatient many a time means the disease is potentially transitioning from acute to chronic, which means more attention is needed to handle chronic conditions.
Focusing on continuum of care experience ensures following –
· Reduced avoidable readmissions to hospitals
· Improved outcomes by ensuring timely care
· Improved patient engagement
· Improved caregiver experience
· Care continuity and Accountability
· Patient medication management and follow ups
· Patient education
· Reduced care givers burnout
· Improved education for care givers as well
So, the digital health applications should be designed to support this transition and provide a continuous experience both to providers and patients.
A typical continuum of care experience in context of transition is elaborated below –
With patients moving through different components of a care journey, the transition from the digital health app perspective is about movement of your digital health apps investment through series of transition to support preventive care, medical incidents, rehabilitation, and maintenance. Most of the EHRs would be seen as a system of record and hence going through this change is an important milestone to support a Continuum of Care experience.
Some of the latest news on Continuum of Care are listed below:
Net Health Acquires Casamba
Acquisition strengthens Net Health's ability to support post-acute care providers and expands its cross-continuum solutions
WellSky® to Acquire CarePort Health from Allscripts® to Enhance Care Coordination Across Acute, Post-Acute Continuum
Indian digital health market is also seeing some of the online health aggregator platforms making a mark to bring the care continuum experience in care delivery.
“Companies like Practo, mFine, DocsApp and AskApollo already enable millions of consumers to consult physicians and specialists in real-time via mobile apps. Portea, CallHealth and Zoctr provide home services. Services like SigTuple, KlinicApp, 5C Network and Qure.ai provide direct-to-consumer laboratory tests. Then there are online medicine-ordering services like 1mg, Netmeds and PharmEasy.”
As published in the article below in “Science The Wire”
Epic and Humana enter 'next phase' of their connectivity collaboration
Nearly two years after announcing a collaboration to enable more data visibility across the care continuum and reduce administrative burden, Epic and Humana say they've "completed the first stage" of their work together and are now eyeing new innovations to streamline prior authorization and claims processing.
Cedar Partners with Hartford HealthCare to Prioritize the Patient Financial Experience
Cedar's patient engagement and payment technology platform will streamline the post-visit billing process across more than 350 locations in Connecticut and Rhode Island
To read more about the stories in digital health app, keep following. If you have some more stories around digital health app or your experience with continuum of care, write to us at healthviva@taliun.com
Adios!
Team HealthViva