Rochester Business Journal - March 5, 2021
We all know about the incredibly swift uptick and uptake last year of digital health, driven by necessity during the COVID pandemic shutdown. The health care sector, not known for rapid pivots or streamlined service, dove into adoption and effectively delivered, patients embraced virtual care, and investment in digital health soared.
Venture funding for digital health surged to $14.1 billion in 2020, a 72% increase over the next highest year (2018), reported Rock Health. Total corporate funding, including venture capital, debt, and public market financing, reached $21.6 billion last year, up 103% from $10.6 billion in 2019, according to Mercom Capital Group.
Virtual health utilization decreased in 2020 when in-person care became an option again but, clearly, investors are banking on considerable growth in digital health as providers integrate virtual care with care delivered by patients’ traditional, trusted caregivers. At the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held virtually in January, experts in health tech predicted the digital health boom will continue post-COVID and could accelerate further.
Will Health Care Finally Enter the Modern Digital Era?
If this is the tipping point for digital health, then perhaps the health care system will finally catch up to every other industry and enter the modern world. Why so far behind? Health care has been digitally handicapped by several factors.
Until the COVID public health emergency (PHE), Medicare did not cover telehealth services except in rural areas with many limitations. Private insurers, as is typical, followed Medicare’s lead. No coverage means no payment for telehealth and inability to incur costs of providing the service.
Second, hospitals and health systems have had to focus all health information technology (HIT) effort and resources on adopting and maintaining excessively expensive, notoriously cumbersome, and poorly performing electronic health records (EHRs).
A 2009 law that was supposed to result in an electronic ecosystem of easily shared health information instead created a “sprawling, disconnected patchwork” of thousands of EHRs that are not interoperable and that have “handcuffed health providers to technology they mostly can’t stand” while enriching and empowering the $13 billion-a-year EHR industry. Those are the findings of Fortune magazine after extensive study of the matter with Kaiser Family Foundation. Research also shows that EHR vexation is a major contributor to physician burnout.
Scarred by this experience, hospitals, health systems and providers have low HIT expectations, insisting on only rudimentary deliverables in the digital space: integration with current systems (frequently requiring costly patches), compatibility with existing workflows (even if the EHR itself drives sub-optimal workflows), least friction for beleaguered physicians, and compliance, privacy, and security. Maxed out by EHR frustration, most health systems and physicians have had little patience or bandwidth to explore digital innovations. Nor do providers have the capital to invest in unproven digital products or lure the best technologist.
We are fortunate in the greater Rochester area to have health systems that, despite HIT challenges, remain undaunted and have become leaders in digital health innovation, providing virtual care solutions to their patients and our communities. But the health care system as a whole lags woefully.
Pandemic the Change Agent
COVID prompted the government to remove persistent barriers to the health system’s IT transformation and provided reimbursement for telehealth. Recognizing how well telehealth is working during the PHE and how popular it is, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in January made permanent several Medicare changes for telehealth and expanded access to other digital modalities including remote patient monitoring (RPM). CMS also started a Medicare inpatient hospital-at-home program.
Congressional action is required to more fully liberate digital health from restriction and encourage payment, but this has been a swift and significant shift that clears the way for consistent government reimbursement and private payers likely will follow Medicare’s lead.
Recognizing that the tipping point may have finally arrived, everyone and their wallets are jumping into the digital health pool. The world’s largest companies, brilliant technologists and ingenious startups all seek solutions beyond what has been imagined thus far to truly revolutionize how care is delivered, advance medicine, reduce costs, and address the health system’s long-standing, most-frustrating problems. Hundreds of companies offer thousands of solutions, some original, many similar but with “distinctive” features making them “superior”, in a wild west of digital health.
Finding Your Way in Health Care’s Digital Frontier
It is exciting and chaotic.
As with past tectonic shifts in other markets from Amazon to Zillow, disruption to the legacy industry is monumental and only the strong survive. In health care, we need to be cautious with hospitals, health systems and other providers that emerge from the pandemic in a weakened financial state. They must continue to battle COVID and their legacy challenges including insurer denials, government underfunding and regulatory burdens, while providing quality care and serving their communities.
Pandion Optimization Alliance has partnered with hospitals and health systems for 70 years providing group purchasing and business solutions to help them achieve that mission. There is no clear path to the digital health future right now and high potential for charlatan vendors and unproductive detours. It is our job to lead our customers during these tumultuous times and in this emerging macrocosm by sorting through the turmoil to find, vet and deliver the best products and services to them and to leverage aggregate buying power to ensure best contracts.
The key is finding solutions that truly alleviate pain points and advance health care.
For example, Pandion has partnered with Suki, an artificial intelligence app enabling physicians to use their mobile phone to dictate patient records, information and medications in real time. Suki helps physicians manage increased workload while alleviating frustration with EHRs and data entry. During a patient encounter, they speak normally and the app captures orders and medical notes, entering it all automatically into the EHR with no additional work required by the physician or staff, thus saving precious time.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, investors stressed that the future focus in telehealth is beyond virtual visits and incident-based care to integrating RPM and digital therapeutics into a more comprehensive understanding of the patient’s ongoing health to manage chronic disease and facilitate wellness and prevention.
Pandion partner HealthSnap does that and raises the bar when compared with other RPM products “on the shelf.” By using device-agnostic apps and navigators, HealthSnap maximizes patient engagement and compliance, empowering patients to better manage chronic illness and achieve their full potential for health. HealthSnap’s Lifestyle Data Analytics Platform extracts and analyses meaningful data to equip clinicians with timely information to effectively guide care management and treatment. And when care is needed, HealthSnap provides comprehensive virtual care seamlessly integrated into provider clinical workflows.
Beyond patient-facing applications, digital tools help providers address long-standing dissonance in health care’s byzantine universe to improve patient experience and increase efficiency. Examples of Pandion solutions in this area include: TogetherMD, which eases physician coding burdens while ensuring accurate coding to maximize revenue. Radiology patient-engagement platform, Within Health, tracks patient visits and prompts recommended screenings to promote early detection while facilitating communication with patients and physicians about test results and follow-up.
In the coming weeks, Pandion will announce a new initiative that will fill a critical and as-yet unmet need in digital health for our customers and all players in the digital space. More on that in a future column.
Pandion’s digital health strategy is important, and the activity is exhilarating. We never lose focus on our core mission, working as an equity partner of Premier, Inc. to make sure our members have the supplies they need at the lowest cost during this pandemic and beyond. At the same time, we will lead our customers to truly valuable solutions so they can seize the power and possibility of digital health.
###