Virtual healthcare can improve provider efficiency
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“We keep coming across two value propositions: improved self care and just-in-time care,” said Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare in Boston. “We as a society can work ourselves out of this by giving patients more responsibility and tools to take care of themselves.”
Providers can use modern technologies to reduce burdens on themselves by shifting some responsibility to patients. When Center for Connected Health patients at risk for readmission are discharged from a hospitalization, they may be given a scale and a blood pressure. They are expected to take and report their own readings, eliminating the need for a physical visit to a physician’s office.
Just-in-time care refers to tools like patient dashboards and social media, which can allow providers to identify who is in need of care immediately. By eliminating the need for visits to physical spaces among patients who don’t require immediate care, providers would be allowed more time to identify patients requiring just-in-time care.
The Center for Connected Health has had success testing new healthcare delivery methods. The center’s chronic heart failure patients are 50 percent less likely to be rehospitalized the other Partners’ patients, 60 percent of patients have reduced their blood pressure and they have decreased A1c levels by an average of 1.5. Despite the success, Kvedar pointed out that the Center For Connected Health provides just a small portion of the care delivered by Partners HealthCare.
Healthcare needs to be more like online retail, which shifted much of its operations to the virtual space in the early 2000s, according to Paul Griffiths, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based MedTouch. A physical space is more expensive to operate. “The internet, from a retail standpoint, allowed you to buy things while cutting out the middleman,” he said. “If you think about Amazon, they changed shopping carts forever.” Griffiths pointed to the fact that about 80 percent of internet users use the web to shop and to find health information to justify his argument.
Despite the potential benefits and a growing sense of urgency surrounding the need for healthcare to change, the industry has been slow to move its operations to virtual spaces.
“You don’t always have to visit your doctor to get healthcare,” Kvedar said. “Why is it that that’s so hard to do?”