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Leave no patient behind in digital healthcare
Jul 25, 2023
In a health ecosystem that depends on connectivity to enable access, affordability and equitable healthcare, no patient should be left behind. Cloud technologies are helping to pave the way.
PwC’s Cloud Business Survey notes that over 80% of healthcare organizations have adopted cloud in most or all parts of their business. Cloud adoption can set the foundation for a unified data strategy and advanced analytics that can help drive health equity. High quality data can enable a personalized view of each patient, including family history, race and socioeconomic factors, and allows analyzing of gene snippets.
For example, using health equity data, PwC and Microsoft worked with a Fortune 500 health payer to create a health campaign of clear messages through specific channels and messages that target high-risk patients with diabetes, asthma and other chronic illness. The outcomes were lower hospital admissions and readmission cases and the creation of cost saver models for predicting transitions to long-term support services. This approach can potentially lead to millions of dollars in cost reductions per year.
At its core, health equity is about understanding who everyone is as an individual, where their health starting point is and what they need to reach their health potential. This data then can inform equity-based discussions and recommendations, including providing the right care, the right medications, matching patients with appropriate physicians, and encouraging adherence to a healthy lifestyle.
Technology is expected to help activate health equity by 2028
In the next five years, cloud, data and automation can help further remove health equity barriers and help enable better patient and physician experiences in several ways:
- Data gathered from wearable or other in-home devices can help identify and resolve patient issues in real-time. These wearable technologies monitor the patient’s heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and more and can provide vital information in real time to the patient’s care team.
- Collaboration tools can help break down organizational silos. Today, a vulnerable member of the community may receive assistance from various agencies and organizations, but those groups often don’t share information. Collaboration tools enable coordination across organizations for increased benefit to the individual.
- Automation can help clinicians improve internal processes, removing manual, burdensome or inefficient processes, giving providers more time to see patients. This can also improve clinical staff retention.
- Conversational AI services can answer patients’ questions when they call a health plan contact center and remind them to fill a prescription and schedule a mammogram, test or annual checkup. GenAI can help enable more personalized communication campaigns for patients, including translation to native languages. PwC is investing $1B to expand and scale its artificial intelligence offerings and think through all aspects of the transformative impact of AI in healthcare.
To move forward in helping to create a more equitable healthcare system, it’s important to keep sight of the solutions needed to help consumers gain access to broadband and devices. One in five US households is still not connected to the Internet at home, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. As virtual health accelerated during the pandemic, a section of the population couldn't access it. A mix of public and private investment to address the issue remains an important part of making strides in improving equity. One example is the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher program*, which helps refurbishers install software licenses on computers that are then distributed to vulnerable populations across the globe.
To listen to a conversation on health equity and technology, tune into this HLTH podcast with PwC Health Services leader Thom Bales and Microsoft leader Patty Obermaier.
* PCs for People or Digitunity (PCs for People, Digitunity Team Up with Microsoft to Support the Work of Nonprofit Computer Refurbishers – PCs for People)
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