The health system is using a federal grant to analyze how a virtual care platform can be used to coordinate care after ICU discharge and reduce negative health outcomes.
Vanderbilt University researchers are using a $3.6 million federal grant to explore how health systems can use virtual care to improve care coordination and management after an ICU discharge.
The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, focuses on post-intensive care syndrome (PICS), which can affect as much as 80% of discharged patients and leads to reduced clinical outcomes, poor quality of life, and rehospitalizations. Researchers led by Leanne Boehm, PhD, RN, ACNS-BC, FCCM, an assistant professor of nursing, will study how hospitals can coordinate care after ICU discharge with primary care physicians to reduce PICS and boost care management.
“Following ICU discharge, patients have problems lasting months to years that often go unaddressed,” Boehm said in a press release. “Primary care providers—and even ICU clinicians taking care of these patients—do not know much about PICS.”
“Only recently have we started to characterize what PICS assessment and management looks like across ICU recovery clinics,” she added. “We’re seeing so much variation in what clinics are doing. This made us wonder which screening intervention elements were the most important in ICU recovery clinics.”
The results of the study could help healthcare organizations develop new strategies for collaborating with PCPs and other resources, including caregivers, to improve the patient’s journey from the hospital to the home or other care site, such as a skilled nursing facility. This includes using virtual care and perhaps remote patient monitoring platforms to track patients more closely and identify and address care gaps before they become serious.
While large health systems often have ICU recovery clinics to help with the transition, smaller and rural health systems often don’t have that resource. The research could not only help ICU recovery centers refine their strategies for connected care, but give those smaller hospitals and networks the guidance they need to improve care and reduce rehospitalizations.
This study follows research recently done by Boehm and others on the value of a telehealth-based multidisciplinary ICU recovery clinic. That research identified the health concerns that accompany an ICU discharge and the value of care coordination and management in reducing negative clinical outcomes.
PICS consists of a variety of physical and mental health problems that remain after critical illness, and affects one-third of patients on ventilators, half of all patients admitted with sepsis, and as many as half of those patients who stay in an ICU for at least a week. One-third to half of those patients develop ICU-acquired dementia, which the NIH now classifies as Alzheimer’s Disease or Related Dementia.
Boehm will be partnering with Carla Sevin, MD, director of Vanderbilt’s ICU Recovery Center and co-chair of the Critical and Acute Illness Recovery Organization’s (CAIRO’s) post-ICU clinic collaborative, and James Jackson, PsyD, director of behavioral health at the ICU Recovery Center, on a telehealth-based model to assess how interdisciplinary teams may be used to transition patients from the hospital and monitor them as they recover from an ICU stay.
“Providers will talk with the patient about their assessment, care plan, what they can expect and the resources to help them in their journey,” Boehm said. The interdisciplinary team, consisting of a physician and/or nurse practitioner, psychologist or psychiatrist, social worker, and pharmacist, “have a multidisciplinary view of ICU-started problems and serve as a bridge in the transition of care from the ICU to their PCP or specialists.”
“Our primary aim is to see if this intervention can improve cognition, mental health, physical function, their social network, and patient activation,” she added.
In a push to improve margins, the utilization of contract labor is declining.
Reducing labor costs is a top concern for CFOs, so pulling back on agency use has been a major theme in 2023, especially since the money CFOs pumped into contract labor during the pandemic is now majorly stressing the bottom line.
As HealthLeaders has been reporting, a new survey is showing there’s a major reduction in contract labor and an increased interest in recruiting and retaining home-grown staff.
According to Kaufman Hall’s 2023 State of Healthcare Performance Improvement report, the utilization of contract labor appears to be majorly declining. Only 4% of organizations are experiencing increased utilization of contract labor, compared to 27% last year, the report says.
In fact, 61% of respondents to this year’s survey say contract labor utilization is decreasing, compared to 44% in last year’s survey.
How are CFOs achieving this?
The ability to reduce reliance on contract labor may be driven in part by the significant percentage of organizations that are using such tactics as internal or enterprise float pools (64%) or a greater number of per diem or pro re nata employees (45%) in lieu of more expensive contract labor.
Organizations are also strengthening their recruitment and retention strategies. Almost all surveyed (98%) are pursuing one or more recruitment and retention strategies, including raising starting salaries or the minimum wage (90%), the report says.
These aspects are exactly what Scott Wester, president and CEO of Memorial Healthcare System, a South Florida-based nonprofit system, prioritized for his organization.
“COVID changed the landscape of how we dealt with the workforce, predominantly the reliance on agency nurse travelers, outside contractors, and not having enough personnel to meet the demand that was out there, mostly on the clinical side,” Wester said.
“We spent almost $280 million a year utilizing outside contract or incentive pay and heavy reliance on nurse travelers. We recognized we needed to get people back to wearing our Memorial badge. Over the course of 12 months, we've dropped about 80% of use of outside contract labor. We're now about a $200 million savings just on that perspective,” Wester said.
So how did Memorial pull it off? The organization did it by bolstering its talent acquisition team, making sure to play more offense than defense, and by reaching out to the work community to try to figure out what was limiting people from joining the organization.
While the reduction in contract labor will help, Kaufman Hall experts expect that it will be a slow climb for hospitals to return to the 3-4% operating margins that help ensure long-term sustainability.
While staffing and capacity challenges have clear implications for revenue, an increased rate of claim denials—reported by 73% of respondents—has had the most significant impact on hospitals’ revenue during the past year, the report says.
Ongoing labor cost management, revenue cycle optimization, and strategic planning will be key for CFOs in 2024.
CFOs will need to continue to focus on labor cost management. The declining utilization of contract labor and the emphasis on recruitment and retention strategies suggest a future trend of hospitals intensifying their efforts to manage labor costs even more so in 2024.
Leaders may explore innovative workforce models, invest in employee development, and collaborate with educational institutions to address contract labor costs and talent gaps.
Revenue cycle optimization will still be the key to financial health in 2024. With increased claim denials having a significant impact on revenue, CFOs will likely continue to heavily invest in technologies and processes to improve revenue cycle management.
Not only will tech investments help revenue cycle performance, but it can play an important part in staff retention strategies as technology can reduce administrative burdens.
CFOs will obviously need to continue to focus on achieving and maintaining long-term financial sustainability as margins are not where we want them. This may involve cost containment, revenue diversification, and strategic financial planning to gradually recover and maintain healthy operating margins into 2024 and beyond.
Health systems are just beginning to develop digital models of everything from organs to people to whole neighborhoods to improve and personalize patient outcomes.
A technology first used by NASA to map out space travel is now giving healthcare providers a better look at how to treat patients.
Digital twin technology creates a digital model of a person, object, system, or process, which can be used to simulate the real thing for testing, monitoring, and other processes. Healthcare has only recently caught on to the potential for digital twins, which can be used to map out complex surgeries, test the efficacy of a treatment, and anticipate the progress (including possible side-effects and setbacks) or a care plan.
“We know the technology is capable of great things,” says Steve Levine, senior director of virtual human modeling for San Diego–based Dassault Systèmes, which drew large crowds with an exhibition at the CES 2023 show in Las Vegas last January. “Many medical centers are only recently becoming digitized, so the adoption curve is going to be long.”
Digital twin technology was first used by the American space program in the 1960s to model spacecraft development and simulate the moon landing. Since then, it has been used to design buildings and other structures such as dams, roadways, theme parks, automobiles, planes, planned communities, and a wide range of manufactured products.
The concept first entered the healthcare lexicon roughly 10 years ago with the launch of the Living Heart Project, a collaboration between Dassault Systèmes and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to gather cardiovascular researchers, medical device developers, cardiologists, educators and others to “develop and validate highly accurate personalized digital human heart models.”
Levine, who founded the project and serves as its chief strategy officer, says the goal is to create a 3D model that replaces animal testing, reduces the cost and complexity of clinical trials, helps guide medical device makers in designing cardiac technology, and can be used to plan out surgeries, treatments, and other procedures.
“Simulations are extremely expensive, limited, and not personal,” Levine says. “This will give us a much better model of the human heart.”
Levine says several organizations are using lessons learned from the Living Heart Project to develop digital twin models for other parts of the body, including the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, and musculoskeletal system. In addition, Boston Children’s Hospital is partnering with Dassault Systèmes on applications of the technology for pediatric care, and Johns Hopkins is exploring the potential for digital twins in remote surgery and treatment.
“Ten years ago, no one had heard of digital twins,” he says. “Now [healthcare organizations] are interested in it and are looking at how they can use it. The pandemic raised a lot of awareness around the need for working virtually, so the focus on this technology has accelerated phenomenally over the past few years.”
Several health systems are testing the technology, including the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, which is using funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a digital twin, or MILBox, of a patient through data gathered from wearables and sensors.
“We want to demonstrate that this kind of individualized data capture can spur a new line of research and personalization in healthcare,” Azizi Seixas, PhD, founding director of the Media and Innovation Lab (TheMIL), and associate director for the Translational Sleep and Circadian Sciences Program at the Miller School of Medicine, said in a press release. “With the capacity to discover everything we can about the individual, we can change the relationship between people and their health.”
“Eventually, such digital twins could comprise sufficient detail about an individual so that a computer could test different treatment or wellness options against that model to predict which are most likely to produce the best outcomes for that person,” school officials said. “Instead of prescribing treatments based on a statistical model of outcomes across a large population, this new approach would provide each patient with a personalized recommendation calculated to produce the best outcome for them.”
This past January, the NIH awarded a $3.14 million grant to the Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth to design entire “digital twin neighborhoods” based on the electronic health record data of 250,000 patients, to analyze how environmental, economic, and social factors create healthcare disparities.
“Where a person lives or works can shape their health outcomes, including life expectancy and risk of developing diseases like cancer or diabetes,” Jarrod Dalton, PhD, director of the Center for Populations Health Research at the Cleveland Clinic, said in a press release. “Americans from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities are more likely to have heart attacks and stroke, and are expected to live 10 fewer years than wealthier Americans. Our goal is to design an approach to help health systems, governments and organizations collaborate and strategize ways to address clear disparities.”
“This project aims to chart a new course for understanding place-based population health strategies and improving health outcomes,” added Adam Perzynski, PhD, of MetroHealth’s Population Health Research Institute (PHRI). “Evaluating technology like digital twins in the research space can make it easier for organizations to take a data-backed approach to public health interventions. Instead of building these models from scratch, other health systems and organizations can adapt the framework for their own needs.”
Levine, who is now working to develop a playbook on digital twin technology in healthcare, says the evolution of digital twin technology will move from designing models to using AI and predictive analytics to map out outcomes, both good and bad.
“We’ll move on from what does it look like to how does it perform to what it can and will do,” he says.
The biggest obstacle at present, he says, is unfamiliarity with the technology, alongside the reluctance among health system decision-makers to invest in something new.
“We need the pioneers to take on the work,” he says. “Once we start getting the qualitative assessments and the data … you’ll see a lot more interest [and engagement]. It’s going to happen.”
Driven at the age of 11 to educate himself on math, science, and computer engineering, he used college textbooks handed down from family members to learn calculus and college-level chemistry. He started his own training in computer engineering while in the 10th grade, learning to run certain software that required adding a different type of processor.
"By then I'd learned enough electrical engineering to make it feasible, and I ran that hybrid system for a couple years," he says. "I've never been happy with what computing has to offer. And so that's why I started designing computers to do things, so we can answer time-sensitive questions today, rather than waiting five or 10 years for the commodity market to give us what we need."
Nicholas Nystrom, chief technology officer of Peptilogics. Photo courtesy Peptilogics.
Nystrom received his PhD in computational chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh. Since then, he has created several innovative platforms, each enabling up to 30,000 users to conduct more than 2,500 projects, particularly in AI for the life sciences.
"I've been doing computational science for my whole career," he says. "I could see the ability of computational science to help us look at things we can't observe experimentally."
After 28 years leading scientific research teams at Pittsburgh Super Computing Center, Nystrom moved clinical-stage biotechnology company Peptilogics. He was excited by the opportunity to speed up lead compounds to patients.
"We're trying to get to those lead compounds as fast as possible," he says. "We are striving to make more of a difference."
He was also a part of the partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), that created the supercomputer Bridges.
"Around 2014, I designed the first computer in the world that brought together high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and big data," he says.
This was at a time when high-performance computing had not yet been used by researchers in other fields, so Bridges was designed to enable these researchers to work easily with supercomputing.
Bridges beat the world’s best human poker players, improved predictions of severe weather to lengthen warning times, and offered gene researchers an easy-to-use tool to assemble the largest DNA and RNA sequences, according to Carnegie Mellon. In 2019, Bridges’ AI capabilities were enhanced with the latest GPU technology, fueling more sophisticated AI work on Bridges. In 2021, an advanced version, Bridges-2, was launched, integrating new technologies for converged, scalable HPC, machine learning, data, and more.
Nystrom was Peptilogics’ fifth employee, joining in 2021 as SVP and head of computation and data, with the goal to scale drug design using generative AI, HPC, and physics-based simulation. He was promoted to chief technology officer one year later.
He had met Peptilogics CEO and founder Jonathan Steckbeck in 2020 and discovered they had the same long-term vision: to use computational science to scale therapeutics design. Steckbeck's vision was to take what he had done through biochemistry and wet lab work to make that scalable through a machine learning approach.
"At Peptilogics, we recognize that AI is transforming the life sciences," Nystrom says. "Where we are focused today is in developing therapeutics. We are focused on being very general, being able to treat arbitrary targets and arbitrary therapeutic areas and that makes it scalable. That means we can go after much more in the long run than we were ever able to do historically. And that's what I was enthused to do."
Nystrom says the biotech is researching very diverse biological targets and diverse diseases that range from membrane proteins down through the target in the cell nucleus.
“We're looking at diseases covering rare disease or genetic disease, cancer and immunology, with others in the pipeline and we are focused on algorithms which led us to the capability to treat general targets and hence general therapeutic areas, rather than having a specific focus on the target class or disease,” he says. “In fact, we could not have done what we did just for one disease because there would not be the data algorithms that can work with finite biological data."
This progressive work environment requires a certain culture of open-minded thinkers, he says. As CTO, Nystrom has built these teams from the ground up.
"The team we have built is focused on people who are very inquisitive, who embrace continuous learning, because this field is moving so fast, and people who really want to make that transformative difference," he says. "It's a very interdisciplinary team.”
“As a leader, I bring a culture of thinking broadly, recognizing people have deep expertise in science and in machine learning, but that everyone is always learning something from others, because there's never anyone who's a master at all, including myself,” he adds. “The biggest challenge in this field is not the implementation, because we know how to do that. It's that continuous learning culture and finding the people that actually have this forward-looking mindset of doing things in a new, better way without saying this is the way I've always done it. And so that's what we hire for, people who embrace that constant curiosity."
This type of culture also requires tackling problems from a "monkey first" mentality, he says, referring to the theory of Astro Teller, the CEO of X, Google's innovation hub, who believes prioritizing the most difficult challenges of a project first is key to success. For example, if your objective is to have a monkey stand on a pedestal and recite Shakespeare, you start by teaching Shakespeare.
"If you build the pedestal first, you will feel like you're making progress because it's easy to build a pedestal," Nystrom says. "But in the end, the really hard thing is teaching a monkey to recite Shakespeare."
At Peptilogics, the principle is to start with the hard thing.
"We bring these different complementary pieces together between understanding science, understanding artificial intelligence, [and] understanding how to compute them, and make them run really well," he says. "And then get to work."
And there is plenty to work on. A 2018 paper, illuminating the druggable genome project, determined only 3% of known targets have been commercially drugged. It identified 62% of targets as having chemical or biological support, many of which Nystrom and his team expect to go after.
Development and application of machine learning architectures and models will create safer, more efficacious medicines and help us to understand key aspects of systems biology that drive disease.
"That's where AI-driven design can potentially make a truly meaningful difference," Nystrom says.
HealthLeaders strategy editor Jay Asser is joined by Gary Stuck, chief medical officer at Advocate Health, to discuss where value-based care is trending. Stuck shares Advocate Health's value-based care initiatives and offers insight on what still needs to be done to have widespread adoption, such as easing data capture barriers.
The HLTH conference reinforced the idea that collaboration may be a key element in the healthcare ecosystem of the future.
Healthcare’s disruptors are finding out that delivering healthcare isn’t as easy as selling retail goods or managing bank accounts or travel plans.
This theme became apartment at the recent HLTH conference in Las Vegas, where disruptors gather and conversations center around redefining healthcare. But amid the hype around AI, the potential of the growing ‘Food as Medicine’ movement, and the U2 show at the Sphere, much of the talk in the Las Vegas Convention Center was on the idea that disruption is not about competition but about collaboration.
A prime example during the event was General Catalyst’s announcement about its Health Assurance Transformation Corporation (HATCo) and to mold a “clicks and mortar” platform. HATCo’s co-leader Marc Harrison said the platform will combine technology with in-person care, mostly through partnerships with other health systems, to improve access and outcomes and reduce costs, especially waste.
The three projects are rooted in value-based care, but critics of the General Catalyst announcement at HLTH were quick to question how that value will be determined.
As the global law firm Sheppard Mullin noted in a recent JD Supra post: “For HATCo and Risant Health, data analytics and value-based care will go hand-in-hand, as their use of data analytics may help health systems unlock major care delivery and patient population insights that drive better care and better outcomes, ultimately lowering total costs of care, which is precisely the goal of value-based care.
“Bottom line: Sophisticated technology, including AI-driven data analytics, combined with deeper collaboration across health systems, may be the new capstone of health system transformation,” the firm wrote.
And while the concept isn't new, the focus on provider partnerships struck a chord with HLTH attendees. The idea that health systems can collaborate to improve care management and coordination takes aim at the long-standing issue of siloed care and competition. It also addresses the idea that companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Walgreens, and Walmart aren’t necessarily competitors in the healthcare space but partners in redefining how care is delivered.
At HLTH, Walgreens announced the launch of a virtual primary care service, with Tracey Brown, the company’s EVP, president of retail and chief customer officer, saying the way forward requires “creating the partnerships that are required, the technology and the data, so that we can create personalized, effective care to improve the overall health and well-being for people in this country.” This came shortly before the company announced plans to slash $1 billion in costs and close 60 VillageMD clinics in the coming year.
To create those partnerships, healthcare executives are seeking expertise they don’t have. For example, HCA Healthcare earlier this year announced an alliance with Google Cloud and Augmedix to develop AI programs. Augmedix, the San Francisco company once known for developing smartglass applications, is now producing digital health tools that use natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLM), and structured data sets to give clinicians on-demand support summarizing conversations and medical notes.
At the Augmedix booth on the HLTH floor, Augmedix CEO Manny Krakaris said the focus is now on finding the right partners to create a comprehensive platform that helps providers save time, reduce workflow stress, and improve clinical outcomes. It’s a lot like putting together a puzzle, with each vendor and each health system holding different pieces.
That’s what health systems are looking for now, and so a lot of the chatter at HLTH was among companies looking to complement other companies, creating platforms that address a number of needs rather than one pain point. A vendor with a unique app might see some initial success, but the company won't survive unless that app can integrate with other solutions across the enterprise.
Healthcare executives are also wary of taking on new projects, primarily because they don’t have the money to spend—but also because solutions to healthcare pain points are found in change management and workflow strategies. New technologies won't necessarily solve problems that are baked into standard operating procedure.
“It's not something you can just throw money at any more,” said Kimberly King Webb, senior vice president and chief human resources officer for CHRISTUS Health, during a session on new ways to address stress and burnout, still one of the biggest issues in healthcare.
This is perhaps HLTH’s biggest takeaway: Health systems can no longer just spend money on new technology to solve the industry’s most pressing problems. True disruption begins with an understanding that change is tough, and change management is vital. Instead of seeing competitors and looking to get ahead of everyone else, healthcare decision-makers should be recognizing opportunities to collaborate and forging partnerships that identify and affect value.
Several large health systems are among more than 100 organizations urging CMS to preserve a Medicare waiver that allows providers to bill Medicare for telehealth delivered from their homes.
A key Medicare waiver that allows healthcare organizations to develop provider-friendly telehealth programs is set to expire at the end of the year, and advocates are lobbying federal officials to make it permanent.
More than 110 organizations, supported by the American Telemedicine Association and including several large health systems, have signed a letter asking the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to extend a pandemic-era waiver that enables providers to bill Medicare for telehealth services delivered from their homes.
The waiver allows health systems to design programs that allow their doctors to work from home, enabling more on-demand and 24/7 coverage and cutting administrative and operational costs associated with an in-house telehealth program that requires staff to be on-site or in operations centers. It also allows health systems to develop work-at-home policies to reduce workplace stress and burnout among staff and attract new physicians.
Prior to the pandemic, CMS wasn’t clear on how a “distant site” was defined for providing telehealth services, only offering that providers should, for the purposes of billing Medicare, list the site where they typically practice healthcare. As a result, many health systems were wary of launching telehealth programs where Medicare reimbursement wasn’t assured, or they created programs where providers had to be located on-site.
“Allowing appropriately licensed and credentialed providers to practice telehealth from their home improves patient access to healthcare services, reduces healthcare costs, while maintaining and meeting patient demand for care,” the letter states. “This was necessary during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and remains just as important today amidst provider workforce shortages and burnout, given that 78 percent of health care practitioners agree that retaining the opinion to provide virtual care from a location convenient to the practitioner would ‘significantly reduce the challenges of stress, burnout, or fatigue’ facing their profession and eight in 10 indicate that this flexibility would make them more likely to continue providing medical care.”
The letter also argues that providers should not have to explicitly state their home address as their practice location, given the heightened animosity toward medical professionals during the pandemic and increasing acts of violence against providers since then.
The letter urges Brooks-LaSure to take two steps:
Permanently continues the waiver that allows provider to bill Medicare for telehealth services delivered from “a location at which the clinician is capable of offering in-person care to patients, even when the practitioner is practicing from a different location such as the home.”
Work with stakeholders to develop an alternative method for determining reimbursable sites for delivering telehealth services that does not require doctors to report their home address. One option could be to allow the reporting of a business address for purposes of enrollment and a zip code or similar geographic indicator for purposes of billing.
“This is an extremely important issue for the healthcare providers in general and the telehealth community in particular,” the letter concludes. “As providers are beginning to update their practice and systems in a post pandemic era, we should arm them with the tools to continue to offer telehealth services as they see clinically appropriate.”
Those signing the letter include Advocate Health, Allina Health, Ascension, Avera Health, Baylor Scott & White Health, Duke Health, Intermountain Health, MaineHealth, the Mayo Clinic, MedStar Health, the Minnesota Hospital Association, Northwell Health, Stanford Health Care, the University of Kansas Health System, UPMC, and the Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Health System.
Who is really in charge of tech in the C-suite? HealthLeaders takes a deep dive into the changing role of leadership and decision-making in the quest for digital transformation.
The integration of technology in healthcare—and its emphasis on forming the health system of the future—is forcing the C-suite to figure out which leaders should own decisions around digital transformation. And that’s not a bad thing.
Some health systems have created new positions to take the pressure off chief information officers, such as chief innovation officer, chief transformation officer, and chief technology officer, to handle tasks from data interoperability to digital health. But no matter what the title is, the person holding that position is becoming more important to hospital operations and management.
HealthLeaders Senior Editor and Associate Content Manager Eric Wicklund explores this shift in his white paper, “Decision-Maker or Chief Extra Officer? Next?” Read how health systems are handling technology management and defining the channels between departments to facilitate collaboration, so that other leaders like the CEO, CNO, CMO, and—especially in this economy—the CFO have insight into the technology process and can play a part in decision-making. With this structure in place, health systems are better equipped to move forward and embrace new ideas and tools.
The topic is crucial to all healthcare organizations. As technology becomes more integral to healthcare delivery, leadership must understand its value and ensure that decisions and strategies are coordinated by the right people. And those roles must be filled by key executives who understand both the technical and the clinical aspects of healthcare.
The health system serving the nation’s active-duty military members and their families has selected Amwell and Leidos to create a ‘Digital First’ platform that emphasizes hybrid care.
Federal officials have selected Amwell and Leidos to create a $180 million hybrid care platform that will replace the Military Health System (MHS)Video Connect program.
The US Defense Health Agency (DHA) selected the two companies to power what it calls a “Digital First” strategy for the nation’s 9.6 million active-duty service members, family members, and retirees. The platform, to be rolled out over the next two years, will include virtual care and digital health tools and integrate with the MHS GENESIS electronic health record platform.
The announcements represent a commitment to hybrid care, particularly telehealth and digital health, in the nation’s largest health system, and the understanding that active-duty military members, veterans, and their families need to have multiple options to access care.
Through the task order, Amwell’s Converge platform, which offers virtual and digital healthcare services, will be offered to military members and their families through the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health, a health information system supported by Leidos, Oracle Cerner, Accenture and Henry Schein One and some 35 smaller organizations.
“Digital First addresses DHA’s goal of better outcomes, new processes, innovation, and increased standardization based on evidence,” Jason McCarthy, senior vice president of military and veterans health solutions for Leidos, said in a press release. “As part of our overall MHS GENESIS effort to enhance patient experience, we, along with Amwell, are looking forward to providing near real-time, self-service support and hybrid care options for our customer and those whom they serve.”
Highmark Health recently announced the integration of behavioral healthcare into its health plan portal. It’s evidence that health systems are taking a close look at what primary care really means.
Healthcare organizations are starting to understand that mental healthcare shouldn’t be treated as a specialty, but as an integral part of primary care.
Pennsylvania-based Highmark Health is making that connection by integrating behavioral healthcare services into its insurance plans through the My Highmark digital health portal. The platform is supported by Spring Health, a New York-based mental healthcare provider serving more than 4,500 employers and health plans.
The collaboration addresses a key pain point in healthcare, and an understanding that many primary care concerns are either linked with behavioral health concerns or can be better treated through a care plan that includes behavioral healthcare. Many primary care providers don’t have the background in behavioral healthcare to treat patients themselves, so access to specialists—especially through a digital health platform—is crucial to improving care management.
“We want healthcare to be personalized,” says Anil Singh, MD, MPH, FCC, senior vice president and executive medical director of population and curated health for Highmark Health, which announced the collaboration at last week’s HLTH conference in Las Vegas. “And we want to be proactive” in addressing health concerns before they become serious.
With a nationwide shortage of psychiatrists and other mental healthcare providers, particularly in rural regions, health systems are looking to digital health partnerships to bolster their platforms and give patients and health plan members access to hospital-approved (and branded) services. Highmark Health, a combination payer-provider, is offering the service, called Highmark’s Mental Well-Being powered by Spring Health, through its health plans.
Singh says the program mirrors a nationwide trend to shift away from episodic care and toward a value-based approach of whole-person care, or what Highmark calls its Living Health strategy. The idea is to bunch together a collection of services aimed at not only addressing immediate concerns, but chronic and preventive care as well.
"Expanding access and making it easier for members to engage with a personalized treatment plan helps us intervene earlier, driving a cultural shift in the behavioral health space and cost savings, which Highmark Health reinvests in the consumer experience as part of our Living Health model," he said in a press release accompanying the HLTH press conference.
The key to the collaboration is that behavioral health becomes a part of the primary care platform, rather than an added service.
“What we don’t want is to have a bunch of apps sitting on a person’s smartphone,” he said.
As more and more health systems look to integrate mental health and primary care, leadership will be taking a hard look at ROI. Singh said Highmark is concerned first and foremost about expanding access to care, with a platform that offers many more access points for members, including children, teens, and those in rural areas. Beyond that, they’ll take a good look at quality and outcomes, ranging from follow-up care to hospitalizations.
“It’s really about moving upstream,” he said, to help improve healthcare before it becomes emergency care.
