The following us a guest article by David Thawley, CEO at HST Pathways.
Reducing disparities in care is complex issue, yet a critical one that all players in the healthcare industry should be focused on by leveraging their own unique strategies. Making progress on this challenge will require a multi-pronged approach that includes reducing barriers to access, getting costs under control, improving communication, increasing diversity amongst healthcare providers, and more.
While identification of disparities in care has historically been challenging, due to the disconnect in patient details and data across the continuum of care, without consistent and representative views of patents, it’s difficult to objectively identify disparities.
Technology absolutely plays a role in all of this, as it has huge potential to increase access, improve outcomes and reduce costs across the board. Telehealth, as a form of health technology, gained a lot of attention during the COVID pandemic, and although some elements are being rolled back it is still likely to play a much larger role moving forward than it did pre-pandemic. And although there was no sudden dramatic increase like we saw with telehealth, there has still been a steady drumbeat over the years of increased adoption of electronic health records (EHRs). And widespread use of EHRs should not be under-estimated as one of the necessary components of improving clinical outcomes for disadvantaged patient populations. EHRs open up many possibilities for better utilization of healthcare trend information, improving care team communication, and leveraging patient data to address the disparity of care issue.
According to Healthy People 2020, health disparity is “a particular type of health difference that is closely linked with social, economic, and/or environmental disadvantage. Health disparities adversely affect groups of people who have systematically experienced greater obstacles to health based on their racial or ethnic group; religion; socioeconomic status; gender; age; mental health; cognitive, sensory, or physical disability; sexual orientation or gender identity; geographic location; or other characteristics historically linked to discrimination or exclusion.” Common examples of disparities in health include mortality, life expectancy, burden of disease, mental health, uninsured/underinsured, and lack of access to care.
While many factors must be considered in developing a comprehensive approach to reducing and eliminating disparities in care, the use of effective technology and the use of patient data should be a key strategy for providers, suppliers, and facilities.
Effective use of EHRs and data sharing reduces the likelihood of missing or inaccurate patient information – resulting in real world impacts on the disparity of care and enhanced patient outcomes. Efficient use of health IT also provides:
- The ability to proactively identify and track unrecognized, undiagnosed, and untreated conditions – having this patient data stored can reveal patterns that will improve care and may trigger treatment earlier when it is most effective.
- Enhanced use of technology can help identify the need for intervention, strengthening the ability of healthcare providers to understand where and how to launch intervention strategies for improving health and lifestyle behaviors.
- Greater connectedness, interoperability, and information sharing throughout the ecosystem of healthcare providers and facilities is enabled through tools such as EHRs – which is not only beneficial for individual patients, but also improves efficiencies for health management of the population at large.
Implementation of EHRs continues to increase, with office-based physician adoption of EHRs more than doubling from 42 percent to 86 percent since 2008.
With the right interoperability of systems, and leveraging modern big data/analytics platforms to regressively understand correlating factors between patient baseline, treatments, and outcomes, we have the ability to not only identify disparities in care, but we can also increasingly improve patient outcomes across all patient and physician populations
We all have a part to play in minimizing health disparities. Our healthcare ecosystem must independently and collectively seek and embrace IT solutions to help address this critical issue and improve healthcare equity for all.
David Thawley is Chief Executive Officer of HST Pathways, the leader in cloud-based software for ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs).
