Imagine being able to click your fingers and answer many of the challenges facing health systems today. If we could reduce ED admissions by increasing accessibility, it would decrease health worker stress, and we would ultimately have healthier and happier communities.

Whilst clicking our fingers isn’t the answer, perhaps an overhaul in the way we approach providing healthcare coupled with innovative technology that unlocks preventative, proactive and predictive people-centred healthcare is.

What’s missing from population health?

When it comes to successfully delivering healthcare, information is everything. Providing the right information easily accessible to clinicians, can lead to smarter and more accurate decisions at the point of care. It means bringing all the critical information together, analyse it, and predict care needs– using data science. 

Whilst the strategy of leveraging data more efficiently, and shifting care from hospitals into the community is not a new one, there is still a very important element missing: the population.

Setting a global benchmark for person-led care

Is the health system working for people? Are people confident they can find the information they need when they need it, and are they provided with the right reasons? If you think about your own personal situation and ask yourself that question, the answer is probably no.

The consumer experience in healthcare is notoriously poor. People who wish to access their information and share it with others frequently find that their access is fragmented and incomplete and, often, Google searches of test results or recent diagnoses do not provide reliable information.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of patient engagement tools, with a big shift in how consumers want to access and interact with their health system based on the way they interact with other digital services, such as online banking. Healthcare now needs to respond and make the most of this.

A truly personalised healthcare experience

In applying what has been learned from integrating information, making it more accessible to clinicians so they are well informed when treating patients, and then applying this logic to individuals by unifying all their health interactions and data into a single user-friendly hub, we enable truly customised healthcare for individuals.

This can be achieved by introducing a healthcare navigation tool such as a digital front door. A population health solution that spans a wide variety of functions and is best regarded as a strategic platform that wraps around all consumer-facing initiatives. By bringing new and existing patient engagement technologies together, a digital front door provides people with access to all the tools needed to manage their own, as well as their dependents’ health and wellbeing.

Providing people with self-care tools accessible from a single user-friendly hub will help to simplify the challenge of navigating disjointed, complex health systems. Add to this the power of machine learning and analytics so that clinicians can intervene at the right time, and you will have a population empowered to play an active role in their healthcare from an earlier point in the health journey. Ultimately this will help keep people healthier, happier and ensure hospital care is reserved for those who need it most.

How Orion Health can help

Population health for Orion Health isn’t about seeing people as statistics. Real population health needs a health navigation tool, a health data platform, and the power to predict care needs through data science. Only Orion Health has the capability to do all three.

Orion Health is committed to continuous innovation to cement its position at the forefront of advanced population health and precision medicine, and to redefine the future of healthcare delivery.

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