By Ashu Ravichander, Product Manager, Integrations, Medfusion
Twitter: @medfusion
The underlying theme at this year’s GE Centricity LIVE was the move towards value based care and its impact on software. Practices and technology partners gathered at GE’s largest user group conference to share tips and thought leadership for improving care. While progress still needs to be made to align payer plans and federal incentive programs to compensate for the value provided, we’re heading in the right direction. To drive change, health groups are learning to treat patients as consumers and offer multiple options for their healthcare needs. Putting patients at the center and ensuring their satisfaction is a key paradigm change towards value based care.
So how can technology help with engaging patients?
Centricity LIVE Focus – Unifying the Patient Experience to Retain Patients
Health care systems are realizing every interaction with patients impacts their overall experience. Practices are moving away from one-off solutions to offer a comprehensive experience platform designed to delight patients at every touch point. Centricity LIVE highlighted that your technology platform is the primary representation of providers and staff to the patient population. This means unifying the patient experience to make interactions easy across the board, which increases patient retention and loyalty.
Mobile Patient Solutions Are No Longer Optional
A recurring sentiment through every session at Centricity LIVE was “Can my patients access this on a Mobile device?”. As health IT vendors introduce more features for patients online, it’s critical for the experience needs to translate to mobile devices. Consumers are increasingly using their phone to conduct tasks on-the-go and that includes managing their healthcare.a result all software needs to be mobile-friendly so patients can easily use features like text messaging and push notifications. Ensuring your solutions are mobile-friendly will result in higher utilization with your technology.
Telehealth Extends Patient Access to the Practice
Telemedicine is another obvious tool to expand a patient’s access to the practice. The ease of scheduling combined with the time and cost savings benefit both the provider and the patient. Regulations and incentive programs are slowly but surely changing to allow and reward users for embracing this technology. With a multitude of vendors offering these services it will only be a short while before having a telehealth service becomes the norm.
GE Implementing FHIR APIs
As part of the ONC 2015 EHR Certification criterion, all EHRs are now required to expose their data through APIs. GE is adhering to this using FHIR standards which will let vendors use REST based APIs for data access. This will allow patients to access their medical record in the application of their choice without restrictions.
In conclusion, it was great to see industry leaders unite in their approach to consumer healthcare at Centricity LIVE. Offering convenient technology solutions to patients and providing easier access to their health data puts the patients in control. This will drive higher utilization and loyalty for health systems while providing a better overall patient experience. It took awhile, but it seems like healthcare is finally catching up to other industries that put the consumer first.
This article was originally published on Medfusion and is republished here with permission.