“Public and private healthcare providers of the most agile and visionary economies are progressing with technological initiatives to proactively implement solutions that help to reduce the impacts of demographic change and the transition through epidemiological stages.”

An efficient healthcare system - public or private -, offering adequate access to healthcare services is deemed one of the most relevant factors as to how citizens perceive quality of life. Therefore, it is considered a key element of federal public policy and the foundation of the social security system. Due to global epidemics as well as the ongoing expansion of chronic diseases, the public and private healthcare systems are put to the test on a daily basis, creating a new demand for collaboration as well as innovative solutions to provide improved healthcare services to patients at lower costs.

Public and private healthcare providers of the most agile and visionary economies are progressing with technological initiatives that help reduce the impact of demographic change and the transition through epidemiological stages. Both are frequently observed as accompanying elements of the modernization process from developing to developed nation status.

Healthcare Effectiveness Technological Stepping Stones to Confront Healthcare ChallengesRobert Schotte

Commercial Director

Practical InSights

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The development of a modern healthcare system and the access to medication dramati cally reduces infant mortality rates, propels life expectancy and shifts the paradigm from infectious towards chronic and degenerative diseases. This transition and the opportunity to choose between different attention schemes (private or public healthcare providers) natu-rally results in new challenges for the industry, including patients and insurance companies, as they have to overcome the overall increased healthcare spending.

Given the demographic phenomenon of our time and the associated increase of common chronic illnesses, the focus is to optimize healthcare in every stage:

Prevention in order to contain the development of chronic and acute disease

Treatment that use collaborative networks to distribute the risk of the cost associated with medical interventions evenly between healthcare payers and providers

Surveillance of patients with modern care models that utilize alternative formats such as telemedicine.

A sustainable healthcare strategy starts with a widespread primary care network that includes routine check-ups and preventive care to treat-ments of common chronic illnesses, such as diabetes or hypertension. Continuity in primary care and the use of technology, such as in-tegrated EMR platforms, provide the required information to analyze patterns of symptoms in order to trigger preventive measures, thus reducing the probabilities of future chronic or acute diseases.

Clinical interventions remain the expensive part of the equation, but the objective is to reach commercial models between public and private healthcare payers as well as providers that help to share risk utilizing DRG (Diagnose related Groups) based models.

Not only can DRG-based models help an organization understand its clinical effec-tiveness, but they can also allow healthcare providers create clinical packages for stan-dard interventions at fixed prices. This allows healthcare payers to reasonably predict financial results based on historical claim ratios for their portfolio and utilize the results for reasonable future policy adjustments.

This new context gives room to explore the potential as to how technology can help to understand, manage and influence the dynamics of the healthcare environment shifting from isolated healthcare services to integrated healthcare solutions. Some ex-amples for this paradigm shift and the use of technology in modern healthcare practices are:

eHealth: Driving the utilization of telemedicine applications to remotely administrate curative as well as preventive care processes in order to bring down cost per unit, while extending geographic span and access to specialized physicians.

Integrated EMR: Connecting clinical DRG coded and patient billing information throughout healthcare networks, thus pro-viding real-time information and statistics. In addition the usage of integration standards (HL7/DICOM) facilitates a seamless informa-tion exchange connecting departmental sys-tems with the EMR as proposed through the EMR Adoption Model™ by HIMSS Analytics.

Capitation: Implementation of integrated technological platforms to support healthcare payment models that allow patient access to specific healthcare services at guaranteed costs.

By collaborating towards an efficient healthcare system, technology facilitates the access to healthcare services and thus, tremendously enhances the individual and the collective perception of an improved quality of life.

This new context gives room to explore the potential as to how the use of technology can help to understand, manage and influence the dynamics of the healthcare environment shifting from isolated healthcare services to integrated healthcare solutions.

“Continuity in primary care and the use of technology, such as integrated EMR plat-forms, provide the required information to analyze patterns of symptoms in order to trigger preventive measures, thus reducing the probabilities of future chronic or acute diseases.”