The way we view healthcare today needs to shift. Now is the time to imagine healthcare in our society as a seamless provision of wellness, prevention, treatment and coordinated care services. For years, health and technology experts have researched, debated and piloted various approaches to delivering healthcare by way of generalization, specialization, standardization and economies of scale. We are now at a point, thanks to the advent of scalable information and communication technology (ICT), where we can enable the virtual delivery of healthcare services anywhere, anytime through partnerships with a vast on-demand network of providers.

A Shared Vision
At this moment, health and technology experts with a shared vision have created an integrated system of healthcare delivery to meet patients’ needs no matter where they live – whether in urban, rural or highly remote communities throughout the world.

Years of culling best practices and lessons learned on how programs and services could be enhanced by technology has resulted in new connected community health models with clinically dynamic providers and protocol systems. This has resulted in lower costs and a rise in improved healthcare outcomes. It also creates a seismic opportunity to change how we approach healthcare today.

Focus on the Outcome
While the change might seem to be overwhelming, when thinking of this new way of delivering care, don’t focus only on the technology, but rather the outcome. The true value is providing an ecosystem of high quality delivery and coordination of care in every community in the world.

There is little room left for excuses on why we cannot increase our ability to improve accessibility and quality of services in our healthcare ecosystems, while also extending the reach and increasing efficiency. Technological advances in information and communication have helped alleviate issues in lack of coordination and fragmentation across the care continuum by improving culturally-competent communication, information transfer and collaboration among providers, payers and patients in any setting.

Healthcare teams already are forming in various ways to align with this new paradox in care in order for patients to access extensive, robust and trusted healthcare information. There are provider ecosystem configurations developing with capabilities to implement networks throughout the world instantly with best practice protocols and assistance in economies of scale.

Benefit to Patients and Providers
It is our expectation and belief that the experience and expertise being gained in this critical and evolving field will positively impact patients and providers through the following benefits:

• Greater access to specialists and medical services
• Value-based Purchasing Incentives
• Improve diagnoses and reduction of errors
• Provider efficiency
• Patient engagement
• Scalability and flexibility to adapt to changing service delivery requirements
• Educational opportunities for patients and providers
• Time and travel related cost savings
• Emergency medical services
• Decrease waiting time for medical specialty care
• Decrease costs associated with managing chronic care conditions
• Evidence-based population health integration
• Epidemic and pandemic management systems
• Billing and payment incentive programs and applications
• Global health strategic alignments
• And many more to come…

Stay tuned for subsequent blogs about the specific benefits of ICT on value-based purchasing, reduction of medical errors, patient engagement and much more.