Getting to Connected Health Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Consumers may demand connected experiences in daily living, but there have been many barriers to health care industry stakeholders delivering on that expectation: among them, privacy and security concerns, and provider resistance. This demand-and-supply chasm is noted in Deloitte’s Center for Health Solutions’ latest look into the healthcare landscape, Accelerating the adoption of connected health.

The objectives of connected health, or cHealth, are:

To improve digital connectivity among consumers, providers, health plans and life sciences companies
To facilitate self-managed care in a secure environment that protects privacy
To deliver care outside of traditional institutional settings
To enable chronic care management and improve population health outcomes.

Deloitte’s Center sees cHealth as an underpinning to value-based care, with payment models growing for shared-savings, bundles, shared-risk, and global capitation. Mining, analyzing, and developing useful and personalized insights and communications back to patient-consumers from data generated by mobile health tools and platforms, sensors, and electronic health records will be the basis for getting value out of connected health.

Health Populi’s Hot Points: Connected health can also enhance the patient experience. This is certainly the expectation of homo informaticus, of whom I frequently write and speak as the new species of health care consumer: the person who consumes information (health and other sorts) via multiple channels and platforms, from phones and tablets to smart TVs and laptops. Health is everywhere, and so must health-messaging and support be, from prevention through to high-risk care management.

What’s necessary to bring this vision forward is collaboration across different health ecosystem partners — plans, providers, pharma and life science companies, physicians and at the center, patients. These many “P’s” as partners must recognize that patient trust is a pre-cursor to health engagement; not all of the players are trusted among consumers to help manage health. Identifying and using the levers of trust equity, on top of building well-designed programs for cHealth, will be one important secret in this sauce to be successful.