How evidence, engagement and experience unlock the promise of connected healthcare

A connected healthcare system—a seamless, patient-centric ecosystem—remains rich, but the fragmented nature of the healthcare system makes it a bit difficult. To create a well-connected healthcare ecosystem, organizations must focus on three keys—evidence, engagement, and experiences. By using predictive data, real-world insights, and digital health innovation, organizations can bridge the gaps in healthcare and improve health outcomes through connected healthcare solutions.

Evidence in real patient journeys

Patients often experience gaps in care due to incomplete medical histories, disjointed data systems, and lack of real-time insights. By analyzing real patient experiences, organizations can find gaps in care, understand health challenges and create better treatment plans.

Patient health data

Patient health data helps to see the full medical journey of an individual. It can help identify where a gap in healthcare exists, what causes it, and whether it stems from issues within our control. By combining different data sources, such as claims data, population health data, lab and genetic data and behavioral and patient-reported insights, organizations can gain a clearer picture of a patient’s healthcare experience. From these sources, healthcare providers can identify critical healthcare challenges, such as health equity barriers, disease burdens, comorbidities, and disease progression.

Predictive data

Predictive data goes beyond understanding past patient experiences as it helps anticipate future health outcomes. It can help the organizations predict future events, which can help in managing the disease progression, identifying the patients not receiving appropriate treatment and making the healthcare process smoother. By using real-world insights, plan treatments and interventions based on actual risks, truly improving health outcomes. For patients, this means fewer obstacles, better medical care, and control over their health information—finally putting the patient at the center of care.

Redesigning for engagement

Around the globe, patients face significant obstacles in accessing quality care due to various friction and inconvenience. Issues like transportation barriers, affordability and limited access to specialists can impact health outcomes. While healthcare organizations invest in programs addressing these issues, their success has been limited. An effective patient support program should be sustainable, accessible, affordable, and equitable. Moreover, they need to be significantly effective in improving health outcomes and managing risk, justifying their investment and having a lasting impact on patients’ health.

We can achieve this by adopting a holistic approach that gives individuals more control, choices, and the right tools to stay involved in their healthcare journey. This can potentially transform outcomes for prevalent conditions. Organizations can create sustainable patient engagement programs that help patients at every stage of their healthcare journey—noticing the first symptoms, getting diagnosed, starting treatment, and ongoing care. Programs that connect directly with patients can support them throughout their health journey in long-term health conditions like diabetes, kidney disease, or obesity. Through these programs, patients are involved in managing their health.

Bridging clinical care with real-world experience

To improve patient care, the healthcare system must find better ways to connect with patients, doctors and researchers at every stage, starting from prevention and follow-up care. One way is to make the clinical trials easier and more inclusive for people to join. However, this is not enough, we also need to gather real-world data when patients start their treatment and continue supporting them outside the setting of hospitals.

Clinical evidence

Digital platforms can help researchers make clinical trials smoother by making the process of joining the study easier for patients. It can remove barriers for underserved communities and reduce challenges in both hospitals and home settings. With better clinical evidence, companies can generate real-world data, which brings life-changing treatments and healthtech solutions to people more quickly. However, true innovation must extend beyond the clinical setting to the patient’s everyday life.

Real-world evidence

To effectively support patients, healthcare companies need to create connected solutions that make each interaction meaningful. Many digital health devices collect a large amount of data, which does not give a clear picture of patients’ health to doctors. This can be achieved by connecting data from monitoring devices that patients use in clinical trials throughout their treatment journey. Making clinical trials easier and therapy and prevention more effective can boost their success. With the power of digital health, innovation trials can be optimized, and clinical care can be delivered effectively to underserved people.

Building a healthcare ecosystem which is connected, equal and human-centric will require rigor and a focused approach. By strategically focusing on evidence, engagement and experiences, healthcare players can deliver the care people want, need and deserve.