Parks Associates spoke with Arta Bakshandeh, Senior Medical Officer at Alignment Healthcare, about emerging trends in digital health markets. Alignment Healthcare is redefining the business of healthcare by shifting the focus from payments to people. They’ve created a new model for health care delivery that cuts costs and improves lives by unraveling the inefficiencies of the current system to drive patients, providers, and payers toward a common goal of wellness.
Dr. Bakshandeh spoke at Parks Associates’ fourth-annual Connected Health Summit: Engaging Consumers, which took place in San Diego August 29-31, 2017. Alongside speakers from CentraCare Health, Libertana, and Orbita Health, Dr. Bakshandeh provided insight on successful strategies for delivering patient care in a value-based payment environment.
What’s new in 2017 that keeps you upbeat/optimistic about the connected health market?
What keeps us optimistic is the state of the healthcare industry and how it’s ripe for growth and change. The need for more value-based care has never been clearer; rapid advances in technology are helping us meet that need. We’re continuing to see more parties leverage the use of data and analytics to better pinpoint patient healthcare trends, which can lead to more personalized care and treatment. Analyzing patient history, age, and even geographic location enables us to connect the dots and understand larger patient trends to define big-picture risks. Ultimately, we’re able to mitigate healthcare risks sooner and more effectively. Most promising, however, is the realization that care does not need to be delivered in a doctor’s office or in person to be effective. In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed paying for new care services delivered virtually, including planning for chronic care management programs and health risk assessments. This keeps us optimistic that the industry is primed for change.
What’s the most effective strategy/approach you have seen that engages consumers for health & wellness behavioral changes?
I think the most effective strategies are those that put the consumer first—providing access to technology that is intuitive and simple to use, for one. By removing barriers such as cost, we are able to fully focus on the changes needed to improve health.
We’ve seen great success in engaging our patients through our remote patient monitoring program. This program provides participants with a tablet and Bluetooth-enabled devices that allow us to track their health journey—after they’ve left the hospital and in between visits—and communicate with them in real time. Filling these gaps helps us to better understand our patients, which, in turn, allows us to have more concrete, personalized conversations with them and advocate for health and wellness behavior changes. A two-way dialogue is always important. Moreover, if a patient is readmitted to the hospital or passes away unexpectedly, we can track the series of health factors that led to this. For example, if we see that heart failure patients continue to have similar complications for up to three to four days after being discharged from the hospital, we can look to the data to analyze what factors might have caused this and how we can avoid this with other patients. Applying these insights is a crucial step to improving healthcare services.
What do you anticipate to happen in 2018 that would have the biggest impact on the connected health market?
At Alignment Healthcare, understanding and applying health trends on the macro scale to individual health treatments is important. We expect to continue to see a focus on personalized, consumer-driven healthcare, powered by insights from data and analytics-powered tools. The push toward true “health” care that is proactivity and compassion will demand more interdisciplinary care from teams that are truly working toward the same goal: happier and healthier patients. The connected health market will have to evolve to support this level of increased collaboration and identify points of efficiency.
For more information on how to get involved in the next Connected Health Summit event, visit www.connectedhealthsummit.com.
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