As I’ve been thinking more about the future of healthcare IT, I wrote that I think the next major healthcare IT product could be a Care Management System. Maybe it will go by a different name, but the functionality that’s described by a care management system is already going into place. Regulations are headed that direction and every organization will need to have a care management system.
At the core of a care management system will be functionality that engages the patient. I use that term in the broadest sense possible and not the fully corrupted meaningful use version of patient engagement. I’m talking about truly engaging the patient in their care in a bi-directional way that includes communication, support, education, social influence, and more.
As I consider the broad possibilities around patient engagement, there are hundreds of companies (possibly thousands) working in this space. Some are working with diabetic patients while others are focused on cardiac issues. Others are using text messages while some startups are leveraging full smart phone applications. A few tie in with the EHR vendors and many don’t. A hospital system is going to need a patient engagement solution that cuts across all of these slices.
With that in mind, it begs the question, “Are we going to implement and manage a cobbled together “best of breed” solution for patient engagement?”
If EHR history tells us anything, most hospitals will adopt some point patient engagement solutions and then over time they’ll realize that the best of breed approach to patient engagement has gotten unwieldy and they’ll start looking for an all in one patient engagement solution. In some ways, this has to be the path forward. There’s no all in one patient engagement solution today. So, hospital systems have to choose to either sit on the sideline and wait for the all in one system to arrive (like many did with EHR software) or they have to go best of breed to start while the all in one patient engagement solutions come together.
I’m not sure this path is such a bad thing. It’s good for a health system to understand patient engagement in a smaller way before expanding across the entire system. We’re starting to see more of this happen in hospitals. However, be sure to keep your eye on the long game being one unified patient engagement system.
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