This article explores the crucial importance of Population Health Management (PHM) and innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and telemedicine in shaping the future of healthcare.
Together with Andrea Buccoliero, Vision & Innovation Manager of Gpi’s Research and Development Department, we examine how these elements are driving the sector towards a more efficient, sustainable, and patient-centered future.
Q: In a period characterized by acceleration and increased focus on the healthcare system, how can Population Health Management and innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and telemedicine help address emerging challenges?
AB: The healthcare system is a complex one, involving a delicate balance between various factors influencing both the demand and supply of healthcare. On one side, several elements are driving up the demand for care and assistance, including the aging population and the rising incidence of chronic diseases. On the other side, the supply of healthcare services is under significant pressure due to increasingly scarce resources. This tension between demand and supply can lead to imbalances in the healthcare system.
The Impact of Population Health Management in the Digital Age
In this context, the adoption of Population Health Management emerges as a potentially effective solution. According to a 2016 Gartner report, the PHM approach can help improve health, reduce costs, and enhance the patient experience while promoting universal, high-quality healthcare.
Challenges and Solutions for an Evolving Healthcare System
However, there are significant challenges to be addressed to make this vision a reality. Some of these challenges include the need to reduce waiting times for medical care and ensure easier access to healthcare services. Additionally, it is important to invest in advanced healthcare technologies, such as artificial intelligence and telemedicine, to improve the efficiency and quality of territorial medical care.
Virtual Care: A Holistic Approach to Patient Care
Managing population health in relation to the territory it inhabits is therefore of great strategic importance. Promoting the adoption of Virtual Care tools, electronic patient records, remote monitoring systems, and other healthcare technologies is key to improving health management and fostering more effective communication between healthcare professionals, patients, and their families.
Q: A complex ecosystem revolves around healthcare. How can digital technologies facilitate relationships among all stakeholders: patients, doctors, facilities, and organizations?
AB: Digital technologies play a fundamental role in the healthcare sector, revolutionizing communication and collaboration between patients, doctors, healthcare facilities, and regulatory bodies. These technologies offer innovative tools and solutions that help improve the quality of medical care and make the healthcare system more efficient and patient-centered.
The 7 Principles of Clinical Collaboration for Patient-Centered Healthcare
The paradigm of Clinical Collaboration aims to establish a holistic, patient-centered approach based on multidisciplinary teams. Its principles are seven:
- Improving Quality of Life;
- Reducing complications and unnecessary hospitalizations through early management of medical conditions;
- Patient-Centered Care, considering physical, psychological, social, and emotional aspects;
- Prevention as an integral part of the care approach;
- Improvement of Mobility, including rehabilitation programs and therapies to enhance mobility and autonomy;
- Family Involvement;
- Monitoring, Follow-up, and regular updates of care plans according to patients’ needs.
Technology as a Catalyst for Change in Healthcare
It is therefore essential to provide effective and flexible cross-collaboration tools that not only facilitate various forms of communication and coordination among the professionals involved but also enable the configuration of care pathways to foster patient engagement and deliver services aimed at empowerment.
Q: What are GPI’s strategies in this complex scenario of transformation?
AB: Our experience and vision in such a complex context as healthcare have long guided us toward developing solutions that support a paradigm shift towards proactive, personalized, and initiative-driven medicine. In this regard, the design and development of our offerings are based on several important pillars.
Towards Proactive Medicine: The Pillars of Digital Healthcare Transformation
- Beyond Technology: Virtual Care certainly offers significant opportunities in care processes, but technology must go beyond mere functional features to encourage widespread adoption. We must also work on automation, simplification, and engagement processes, while always keeping the User Experience in mind.
- Configurability: No software product in healthcare can fully capture the complexity of organizations, and this is even more true in the realm of Virtual Care, a topic that has been discussed for a long time but has never had systemic characteristics. For these reasons, we envision solutions with strong flexibility: interpreting the organization, not imposing rigid functional schemes.
- Rapid Development and Maintainability: Beyond current trends, a monolithic system loses out compared to a microservices-based one, especially in its ability to evolve quickly and ensure long-term maintenance, protecting investments and requiring fewer and fewer efforts and costs. The adoption of low and no-code development techniques (especially for the front end) creates a virtuous, positive-sum mechanism that benefits the producer, the customer, and the users.
- Knowledge Domains: If we are managing a patient with heart failure, it is essential to share a language that represents the specific application domain, the relevant care plan, and a series of sequenced and conditional follow-up steps. It is necessary to summarize pharmacological or rehabilitative therapies, behavioral patterns, monitoring devices, and review and decision triggers. A patient with rheumatoid arthritis, on the other hand, will have different needs. For these reasons, it is important to adopt a Terminology Server based on ontological domains capable of effectively responding to specificity needs while maintaining a shared semantic foundation.
Starting from these pillars, we strengthen our offering to continue being a reliable partner in the journey towards sustainable healthcare system transformation.
