Our Thoughts on Innovative Healthcare Investment Strategy
An Untangle Health Thought Leadership Production, Led By Paige Collins
The healthcare ecosystem constantly demands evolution towards faster, higher quality solutions that tech can enable. However, despite a seemingly obvious supply and demand relationship between healthcare and technology, new tech adoption in the healthcare space remains notoriously slow – buyers want to be at the edge of discovery without becoming the test pilot. When lives are on the line, the risks of nominally improved but untested solutions can’t overcome the grip of less efficient, proven-safe products-in-place. That is, with one exception to the rule – Healthcare will invest in tech that aligns with their prospective plans. The true demand, then, and the key for tech success is not for investing in better solutions but vision-enabling solutions.
For Providers, Payers, Life Science companies and patients alike, eyes have been set for years on the holy grail of a true longitudinal patient record where a patient’s entire medical journey can live. Government mandates for digital transformation and increased Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) cloud-adoption has shown progress towards this goal, and yet we are still sitting at the precipice of technology that can turn this vision into a reality. One of the most interesting examples we’ve seen to date is in the category of data accuracy solutions – NextGate, Verato, and IBM, have brought glimmers of the longitudinal record dream to reality by algorithmically consolidating multiple records from a single patient into one through de-duplication and merge functions.
Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) solutions are correlated to data accuracy because duplicate records, by definition, prevent a single-view of all available information. One record may capture an allergy, while the other captures the most recent medication list. If neither record is the singular source of truth and there is some data that is accurate and inaccurate (or outdated) in each, the duplication is worth twice the headache. Third-party solutions, like IBM, NextGate and Verato, offer organizations the unique ability to not only identify duplicates that can delay care, but to also de-duplicate or merge records, whichever is most applicable. These solutions are particularly useful to prevent conflicting data in emergency situations, where duplication and imposter records can graduate from an inconvenience to a hazard.
Healthcare IT currently addresses this hazard widely by streamlining standardized patient registration on the front end and then either stopping at that step or going a modicum further by completing manual record audit and resolution on the back end. That is to say, if a health system is able to get all of their hospitals and centers to use the same electronic health record (EHR), a patient should hypothetically not be able to be added to the system more than once. On the surface, this reasonably solves for duplicates by blocking them from being created in the first place. However, this solution quickly becomes insufficient when data needs to be imported from a different system, patients inconsistently use nicknames, or even undergo something as simple as a name change post-nuptials. Manual resolution at the tail end can’t possibly keep-up, where randomized audits and flags for potential duplicates fail to capture all possible records and even if they could, the cost of man-power required would well surpass the price of more effective solutions. The bottom line is that the current solution is digitally-enabled, not digital-first.
With EMPI, provider empowerment begets patient empowerment. The future of healthcare is rapidly evolving towards the consumer-centric patient experience manifested through a horizontal medical patient journey that mandates clean data. Particularly with a large chunk of health organizations in the midst of their cloud adoption process, the need for simplified and streamlined data-cleaning that results in a single record of truth across disparate systems is palpable. Clean data also sets organizations up for success to explore additional analytic possibilities that we could see extending from insights on an individual basis to a population, expanding the amount of people downstream that this technology stands to help. It can even be combined with other technologies, such as interoperability engines, to create something new so that buyers can expect clean data fast while investors and vendors in the space competitively position themselves as leaders in the space, like we recently saw from Lyniate’s NextGate acquisition.
Nonetheless, EMPI is a crucial tool that HCLS buyers need to build their longitudinal patient record, and the technology is successful because its value is clear in what it accomplishes for its end user. For a provider, EMPI translates to delivering faster care at a higher quality. For a patient, it translates to accessibility of their entire medical journey and a consolidation of records across labs, specialists, etc. For healthcare technology investors, it’s a demonstration of where to play and how to win: Improving the current state is not enough – invest in developing technology that healthcare needs to build their better future.
Learn more about how Untangle Health can improve your healthcare technology GTM and growth strategy or how we can qualify your healthcare investment approach with meaningful insights and market analysis by getting in touch.