Despite channeling billions of dollars into adopting digital health technology, healthcare has "fundamentally failed" to innovate, claims a viewpoint in The New England Journal of Medicine.
EHRs were widely embraced as key to reform. Yet when this technology is held up against the quadruple aim, it hasn't meaningfully improved the patient experience, the health of patient populations, the cost of providing care or the lives of healthcare providers, the authors write.
The authors suggest one of the main reasons digital health technology has failed to make a mark on healthcare is because the industry takes a resource-based, rather than service-based, approach to innovation. A services approach focuses on identifying the needs of the consumer and working backward from there. For example, when policymakers look at lack of accessibility to primary care, they implement policy to increase the pipeline of primary care physicians. This is slow and expensive, the authors write. A services approach to primary care accessibility for lawmakers could be removing the barriers to providing telemedicine or expanding the scope of practice for other providers, the authors write.
The same issue applies to EHRs. Providers are grappling to make the system fit the EHR, rather than the needs of the consumer. A more service-oriented healthcare system might include digital tools to help patients positively change their health behaviors, tools to help remotely monitor chronic disease, resources to answer patient health questions and more ways to access acute care.
"[W]e suggest that a true innovation agenda in healthcare requires a focus on services (such as primary care) rather than resources (such as primary care physicians) in designing high-value care and high-quality patient experiences," the authors wrote.
Read the full opinion here.
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