What if we can make the health care industry’s decades long promise a reality? After all we’ve learned, especially over the past year and a half, do we have what it takes to reimagine our system? Can we build the system of the future to go beyond simply treating illness, and instead, seek to prevent sickness before it happens?
This promise has been elusive, but today, we’re closer than ever to making it a reality. The idea of proactive health care emerged in the 1980s when HMOs introduced a primary care-centered health care system. It was revived in the 2000s with consumer-driven health plans and their focus on cost and value. And again, in the 2010s, when value-based care moved discussion around health care payment models from quantity to quality. While these failed to fully deliver the promise of a proactive health care system, experts say they were critical building blocks. Yet, by all accounts, today’s system remains largely fragmented, inefficient, expensive, and entirely too reactive.
The U.S. healthcare system is the best in the world at treating sickness, but if we want to truly improve the health of all New Yorkers, we have to focus more broadly on the whole health of people.
Achieving whole-person health requires taking a more holistic view of health and leveraging data that allows us to see and address the most impactful drivers of health. When stakeholders have ready, secure access to both individual consumer information and population-level health data, the health care system will work better for consumers and their care providers by reducing administrative delays, lowering costs, and delivering more actionable insights.
The good news is — we have better tools to do this than ever before.
Empire BlueCross is, today, implementing such a platform for connecting health care. Called Health OS, it’s a comprehensive platform that connects siloed health data and disparate technologies to create actionable insights and reduce costs and complexity. It allows a health care system of many to function as one whole.
Think of your smartphone. The operating system connects individual apps to proactively improve your life in ways we couldn’t imagine just a few years ago: turn on house lights before you get home, notify you a package is on your porch, monitor your blood sugar, or encourage you to get off the couch.
In the same way, Health OS connects health care’s separate components. It then adds artificial intelligence and data-driven insights that, in the hands of health care professionals, enable better decision-making, improved collaboration, and enhanced ability to prevent sickness before it happens.
By integrating into health care providers’ existing workflow, Health OS allows a doctor, for example, to quickly see that her patient recently visited a cardiologist at a different health system, that the patient is COVID-19 vaccinated, and is overdue on a prescription refill. The platform draws insights from data flowing from dozens of consumer touchpoints to hone her ability to detect and act upon her patient’s health risks earlier. Importantly, this information and analysis is presented through the doctor’s existing electronic medical record, making better use of her time, giving her the ability to deliver better care, and helping improve her patient’s whole health and well-being.
For consumers, it helps deliver on the promise of proactive health care by enabling more personalized care, which in turn should reduce frustration. Everything from ensuring prescriptions are refilled on time and filling out fewer forms, to more affordable care and more time with the doctor is enabled by connected, AI-driven health care. And as an added benefit for consumers, they also gain more and easier-to-understand access to information about their own health and how to manage it.
For employers, Health OS offers powerful opportunities to improve and protect the health of their workforce. Population-level data is analyzed, consolidated, and simplified in a fully privacy-protected manner that allows employers to see workforce trends and act on them earlier. It offers insights at the community, industry and national level that can save lives, dollars and even jobs.
Our Health OS platform is the type of update our healthcare system needs to create a new kind of ecosystem – one that is powered in service of all New Yorkers. The actionable insights we can draw from this platform will significantly improve the way we work and bring us closer than ever to delivering on the promise of truly proactive health care.
For more information about how digital innovation and technology can simplify health care, visit ThinkAnthem.com/digital-innovation.
Serving the 11 eastern and southeastern counties of NYS, Empire BlueCross is on a mission to materially and measurably improve the health of New Yorkers. In 2020, Empire BlueCross was named one of Albany Business Review’s Best Places to Work. Additional information about Empire is available at https://www.empireblue.com/employer/ and www.linkedin.com/company/empire-bluecross.