This is the second in a series of blog posts recapping HIMSS’19; you can read all our coverage here.  

My primary purpose at HIMSS’19 was gathering information and ideas for our upcoming report on the front door to care. This report will take a close look at the evolving ways patients first enter the healthcare system. Whether from retail health, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, or remote care apps, HIMSS was full of changing ideas and approaches. The conference had a utilitarian focus, looking less at generic or abstract buzzwords to get people excited, and more at what can be done right now to engage providers, payers, and ultimately patients.

My biggest takeaways:

Telehealth, Remote Monitoring, and Virtual Care can significantly erode established HCO business models, or complement them.

Health systems have invested a lot into controlling referrals and leakage. While the PCP remains the central organizing hub of most healthcare, the growth of retail and remote health could lessen the PCP’s centrality in traditional referrals networks.

Unlike the Teladoc model, which employs contracted providers to provide a turnkey outsourced telehealth service, newer entrants offer operational platforms and back-end systems so HCOs can staff and run their own telehealth programs. This allows them to retain control of the patient experience. It’s an easier model for an HCO to understand and use, but whether they adopt such solutions before their competition is an open question.

Behavioral health might finally get its due through Virtual Care apps.

Between shrinking reimbursements and scarce providers, behavioral and mental health care have been the first service line on the chopping block for a while now. PCPs have become the go-to provider for too many behavioral health needs, occupying increasing amounts of time and stretching their expertise thin.

Several of the telehealth and remote health platforms I saw last week had behavioral health components. There were a few well-executed apps dedicated to mental health and wellness, mainly with a CBT/DBT focus and some with solid clinical results. Helping PCPs manage this care and mitigating the effects of comorbidities on patients is an important part of addressing PCP workload and job satisfaction, as well as patient engagement. These virtual care offerings can help struggling PCPs get their patients the help they need, while still working within tight budgetary and scheduling restrictions.

Telehealth, Remote Monitoring, and Virtual Care can significantly erode established HCO business models, or complement them. The question is whether health care systems will recognize that in time.

Performance improvement services are becoming a core component of analytics products

With my background in healthcare performance analysis and improvement, I wanted to see how analytics is evolving to become more effective and efficient.

The future of analytics platforms looks less like pre-built dashboards or reports and a lot more like what Visiquate offers. Its embedded employees work directly with customer end-users to execute Agile-inspired improvement sprints supported by their analytics and reporting. Vendors are coming to grips with the challenge of operationalizing analytics for value and performance improvement. The value proposition behind both improved reporting software and process improvement is pretty well understood. Figuring out how to fit it all into an annual budget in an era of shrinking margins is the real hard part here.

Leveraging data to produce specific, actionable recommendations remains a challenge.

A fascinating conversation about AI at the Geneia booth on Tuesday afternoon summed up the current state of AI and machine learning in the clinical world. While access to existing and new kinds of data is increasing and the ability to integrate it is getting more sophisticated, AI and ML still aren’t the clinical tools many expected them to be. Only imaging, an area where the datasets are complete and the challenges are well understood, has really begun to heavily leverage AI/ML. Everywhere else, the barriers to gathering appropriate context and rendering predictive clinical recommendations have yet to be overcome.

Coaching Technology

While the landmark health reform laws enacted in 2009 (HITECH Act) and 2010 (Affordable Care Act, or ACA) have begun transforming certain aspects of the US healthcare system, they have not had a meaningful impact on behavioral and mental health care delivery. Patients in need of these services already face an uphill battle in terms of social stigma and making a decision to seek out care, yet our system compounds such challenges through poor benefit design, uneven IT adoption, and lack of care coordination. An emerging fleet of technology solutions focused on behavioral health care has the potential to improve care, though they are not without their own set of challenges.

> Providers lack adequate incentives to adopt patient-facing digital mental health care tools. This is due both to omission of non-psychiatric mental health specialists in the Meaningful Use program as well as the slow adoption of value-based contracts.
> Vendors of new technology have not placed a premium on making their platforms interoperable with legacy software. New startups have focused most of their efforts on developing self-contained tools geared towards the employer market rather than emphasizing document exchange, shared care plans, or tools for the population health manager to manage mental health needs.
> Given the fragmented nature of the delivery system for mental health care, the market for mental health care IT is quite immature. While there are ample opportunities for one-off improvements (primary care, substance abuse facilities, Veterans Affairs, higher education, employee programs, etc) – only those health systems who can underwrite their own reforms will be the ones taking action.

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Earlier this year Chilmark Research launched its latest service, the Chilmark Advisory Service (CAS). One of the benefits of CAS is that subscribers receive a continuous feed of our research, from major annual reports such as the recently released 2012 HIE Market Report, to Quarterly Reports (e.g., mHealth Adoption for Patient Engagement) and exclusive to subscribers, the Monthly Update. Of course, subscribers also get unfettered access to our analysts to answer any specific questions they may have.

For the merry month of May, the Monthly Report touched upon four topics that are abstracted below:

Social Games for Wellbeing, Courtesy of Your Health Insurer
Much of this story was pulled from the forthcoming report that Cora is authoring that takes a close look at how payers are adopting consumer technologies (social media, gamification, mobile apps, etc.) to more effectively engage their members in healthy behaviors. This story looked at the current initiatives of Aetna, Blue Cross of California, Cigna, and Humana, each of which is taking a slightly different approach to more actively engage their members.

When Behavioral Health Goes Mainstream Will Technology be Ready?
This year, five states received grants of $600K each to explore how they would integrate behavioral health data into their statewide HIEs.  Analyst Naveen interviewed several stakeholders about how they would actually address the technology and policy hurdles to incorporate such data into an HIE. One of his findings, which he details in this story, is that current technology offerings from HIE vendors are ill-prepared to address this growing need to fold in behavioral health data into the HIE. Secondly, there remain significant policy issues that need to be addressed as behavioral health data is some of the most sensitive and protected health data.

Filling Gaps Separating Behavioral Health from the Healthcare Continuum
We had another story on the relative state of technology adoption within the behavioral health community. Our interviews with several stakeholders uncovered a market that is even further behind (at least 10-15 years) the rest of the medical community in IT adoption and use. As public health officials, healthcare organizations and others come to the realization that a significant proportion of chronic disease patients have a co-morbidity with a behavioral health issue, they are also coming to the realization that more effective care coordination must also occur with behavioral health specialists. John (the younger) takes a close look at what may develop in this market to fill the current gap.

Feds Look to Tighten Privacy & Security of HIEs
This last story took provided subscribers an assessment of the current Request for Information (RFI) for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN). The RFI was released on May 10, 2012 and is the an attempt by the U.S. government to establish a clear set of governance rules for the sharing and use of patient data within an HIE, and of course more broadly across the U.S., via the NwHIN. While the objectives are noble and to some extent needed, our assessment is that in several areas the RFI goes too far and will significantly hinder HIE innovation, deployment and adoption.

If you wish to learn more about CAS, please head on over to the Research Services page and towards the bottom there is a slide deck that provides a prospectus on CAS. If that piques your interest, drop us a line and we’ll be more than happy to answer any further questions you may have regarding the service.