Healthcare providers face challenges balancing compassionate patient care with administrative tasks requiring high-volume critical information processing. As the COVID-19 pandemic puts even more pressure on healthcare providers, robust and adaptable systems are essential to meeting their needs. Xerox is a long-time partner to healthcare customers.
Healthcare is a complex value creation chain, with various activities required to deliver the desired outcome. While traditional cost-reduction strategies are still a priority, providers are finding that new payment models are forcing them to consider new ways to improve their services and retain market share.
Increasing value by improving the efficiency of delivering excellent care can increase a provider's contracting power and help it sustain market share. Health care is one of the most competitive sectors today, and those providers that enhance value will be in the lead in this fiercely competitive industry.
Using networked architecture to align resources, health care professionals, patients, families, and communities can effectively maximize value. It also opens up new avenues for research and development. Two examples show how this proposed architecture might be implemented in real-world systems. This model has implications for system design, technology development, and the roles of all actors in health care systems.
Value creation in health care has faced many barriers, mainly because the fee-for-service system pays clinicians for one element of care. This system was less problematic when clinicians had limited ability to alter the natural history of the disease. Therefore, operating processes were not as crucial as creating value.
Patient-centered care is a critical component of healthcare delivery. It requires a change in how health care is delivered and managed and involves the patient as an active partner in improving care. Unfortunately, this shift often appears to be a barrier to health care reform, as leaders and clinicians often view it as threatening or unnecessary.
The Picker Commonwealth Program for Patient-Centered Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center conducted national surveys to identify patients' values in their care. It also developed an evaluation of patient-centered care and defined the core elements. These components ensure a quality patient experience and improved care coordination.
For healthcare to become more patient-centric, providers must embrace shared purpose, partnership, and distributed powers. By embracing shared purpose, providers can remove silos and improve collaboration and trust. This shift from transactional relationships is necessary to make innovation work for everyone. In addition, the recent pandemic has shown the value of flexibility and hybrid approaches to care delivery.