The pandemic has forever changed health care and will continue to have an impact on all of us for years to come. During CommonWell TV 2021, many of our members had a chance to share how they view the changes for Health IT—both the good and the bad. See some of the highlights and watch all CommonWell TV videos here.
All of a sudden, digital emergency care planning and digital advance care planning has taken on a whole new sense of urgency, and the ability to create these types of documents digitally and to be able to share them across all points of care seamlessly and securely has really become critical to the provision of high value, high quality care.
As unfortunate as it is that we’ve had to go through this pandemic, it really forced the industry, providers, payers, technology stakeholders to reimagine the workflow for care for patients. This year has forced us to think about how we empower not just providers and hospitals to take care of patients, but how patients can be empowered with tools to help manage their care.
In terms of permanent trends, I think that we’re going to see tremendous stickiness for patient facing, patient engagement, patient journey—type tools. We stayed home—we ordered from Amazon, we ordered groceries from Shipt or another application and we got to track all of that in real time. I think that is going to further empower the rise of the patient as a consumer. They’re going to begin to expect the same experience in their health journey, and the health journey of their loved ones.
The pandemic highlighted the increased need to manage fragmented data elements truly on the national scale, as opposed to within the confines of the single health care organization. The pandemic further highlighted we need all three modalities to track and contain future pandemic spread—push, pull and notifications of the data.
The pandemic virtualized our care experience. There were incredibly moving stories about hospitals implementing COVID shutdown protocols, turning people away who needed care for other vital problems. As a result, I think people took a very hard look at what the infrastructure is and what it should be and that has made digital health not a nice to have but a pressing need.