Sponsored: Best practices for building a customized care program

With value-based care models taking hold, healthcare organizations are under pressure to deliver the best clinical outcomes. To do so, many are developing customized care programs, designed to provide optimal patient experiences across the continuum from home to clinic to hospital.

During HIMSS16, Justin Barnes, HIT advisor, and Gus Venditto, vice president of content, HIMSS hosted a radio show on the topic of "Customized Care Anywhere – Building a Value Based Enterprise." Ajay Dholakia, senior technical staff member, Lenovo; Craig Klein, director healthcare, Redhat; Andy Heins, senior director information security, LifePoint Health; and John Gresham, vice president, DeviceWorks, discussed what's needed to launch a customized care program; best practices for customized care; and the technology that is likely to come into play as organizations roll these initiatives out.

To build a customized care foundation, organizations should define their goals. "It starts with deciding what are the value outcomes you're trying to achieve. Sometimes we lose sight of that," Gresham said. To get a better handle on defining outcomes, he suggests mapping out a "model experience." From there, organizations can then standardize the processes and applications that will produce the desired outcomes. "Many times, that's not just achieved through technology. It's achieved through process change and other things you need to do for your organization to facilitate the use of that," he said.

Organizational leaders, however, should "separate the provider and patient perspectives," according to Dholakia. For example, the ability to bring various clinicians together via technology to collaborate on patient care is a prime consideration for providers. Patients, on the other hand, need to become comfortable with the various technologies that they might use in a customized care program.

Having a means to access information also is a customized care prerequisite. In fact, information needs to be available at various touchpoints across the continuum. "The patient has a lifecycle . . . of initial diagnosis to providing some onsite care and potentially continuing that when the patient is back in the home environment. So, with the customization of care, [information] has to travel through these domains," Dholakia said.

Superior strategies

In addition to building a foundation, panelists advised healthcare leaders to implement the following best practices:

1. Use data from every corner. "When I think about customized care, I think about breaking down the data silos that exist in the traditional acute and ambulatory environments," Gresham said, pointing to the need to seamlessly access data from fitness trackers, bedside medical devices, electronic medical records, imaging systems and other technologies.
2. Create value for the patient. The tools must be at a place where they can . . . actually give the patient the information that they want to see," Klein said. In addition, the technologies should help patients make care decisions and understand the costs associated with their choices.
3. Get only what's needed. "When you start to hook everything up – whether it's spirometers or heart rate monitors or what you have – you end up with so much data. So you end up either with a complete data storage nightmare or you have to look at it and say, ‘What can I deal with and what do I really have to have to make the correct decisions?'" Klein said.

   Dholakia suggested that organizations develop algorithms that make it possible to define exactly what data is needed to support objectives. "The algorithms that handle the deluge of data that's coming from all these sensors need to be staged in a way" that makes the data meaningful for the purpose that it's being collected, Dholakia said. In essence, organizations need to leverage algorithms that will help them meet defined expectations.

4. Support communication across the care team. Leaders need to think about how they will "facilitate the care team of today and the care team of tomorrow. The care team of tomorrow is going to cross the continuum of care and [you need to know] how are you going to facilitate that from a communication standpoint," Gresham said.
5. Fix processes before implementing technology. "Unless you have your systems and your house in order, applying technology is just masking what the problem is. So you have to make sure that you fix the underlying problem first before you go to technology because if you do it in the wrong order you won't get the right results," Klein said.
6. Keep it simple. "A nurse at New York Presbyterian [told me about] a fantastic best practice. They look at what they've implemented over the year for new processes or workflows and they see what can technologies they can pull off. They look for ways to simplify it," Klein said.

Supporting solutions

In addition to adopting these strategies, healthcare leaders need to consider working with a single source IT partner such as Lenovo Health that can offer the technologies needed to support customized care.

For example, providers should work with a partner that offers a cloud platform that can support the continually changing needs associated with customized care initiatives. Cloud computing is "scalable in architecture so it can scale up and down quickly," Gresham said.

Clinicians and patients also need to leverage mobile solutions. "You want to continue to do what work you're doing as you transition through environments," Dholakia said. "So it could be an office, a clinic, a hospital room, a home, a car. What you want to be able to do is not be interrupted or at least seamlessly be transitioned so that you have better ability to complete the task that you're trying to do."

Perhaps most important, providers should work with a partner that offers security needed to support customized care. "Security is so important these days if you look at where healthcare is going in terms of changing the connectivity that has to happen to be able to support value based care," Klein said. "It's about securing all the different devices to make sure you can do this communication and be able to protect it at the same time."

In fact, the need to exchange information is fueling the corresponding demand for advanced security. "Security is a layered construct. It needs to include the ability for a user or patient or clinician who is providing the care to be able to interact with each other and exchange data. You want to create a secure environment that supports authentication and the exchange of data -- ultimately leading to better care. That, in my mind, would be the ultimate goal for secure healthcare," Heins said.