The Rise of Virtual Care - Survival of the Digitalist
Consumerism and tech advances gently nudged the mandate on virtual care, but it was always categorized in the 'nice to have' segment. The Covid-19 pandemic has turned the tables making virtual care a 'must-have' in these unprecedented times.
Virtual is the new wave of clinical care, and there are significant benefits of adoption. Darwin may have called it the Survival of the fittest, but in this "New Order" world, it is the Survival of the Digitalist. Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services Administrator Seema Verma stated, "the genie is out of the bottle on this one," referring specifically to telehealth.
Electronic Medical Record (EMR) in the early days were primary & siloed, and there was no platform to maintain them. During those days, best-in-class lab applications, radiology applications, and other high-quality applications were run in silos by clinicians. Over the years, kluge interfaces were built, but rich enterprise applications were favored over the best of the breed.
Despite shortcomings, platforms added far higher overall value. Using a single infrastructure came along with multiple benefits - automatic integration, improved security management, standardized hardware, and need to train only one system. Above all, you reduced the complexity of managing 5-10 disparate applications into one.
Simple and Cost-Effective! Think about the magic of Apple. Frictionless, seamless, and easy.
However, the virtual care sector is severely fragmented today. Most of the hospitals have multiple portals and mobile applications. Legacy telehealth tools are used with separate EHR (Electronic Health Records). The remote patient monitoring segment cannot be considered in its infancy stage, but it is still in the emerging phase. Digital hospitals are still housed in centralized brick & mortar facilities. Digitally enabled clinicians still drive to buildings to use computers.
As the former Chief Information Officer (CIO) of prominent global health systems, I led teams that looked into an enterprise, integrated virtual care platform. Our learning was that the virtual care market is light years behind. To be more precise, it is in the same stage as the early EHR.
The market demands disruption!
The vision continued to resonate, and we kept looking for a tech solution that could disrupt the virtual care segment! The result – HealthNxt®. Let's look into this.
HealthNxt® - World's first enterprise-class virtual care platform
It all started in January 2020 when diverse teams at Tech Mahindra began a close collaboration. Clinicians. Engineers. Designers. Digitalists. We are extremely proud to introduce HealthNxt® - the world's first enterprise-class virtual care platform. HealthNxt® is a single platform that brings amazing features and functions of best-in-class niche virtual care applications into one seamless offering. Best of all, the platform is designed around human-centric design principles.
It is an ambient-voice enabled solution that addresses clinician usability. Simplicity is the key and our application is extremely user-friendly! Hard lessons learned from the EHR journey are helping us in making the practice of medicine more accessible. Patients can also leverage the advantage of this same ambient voice capability to enhance their experience.
HealthNxt® is a technology & peripheral agnostic solution and interoperates with other modern tools that you or your patients might have already deployed. It can be integrated into most EHRs. The results of early deployments are incredibly positive.
Early results of HealthNxt® in physician practices and hospitals demonstrate lower costs, improved revenues, and increased care quality.
HealthNxt® leverages its physical design capabilities to develop products. Combining the beauty of human-centric design & physical design, we are producing our line of elegant, as well as efficient medical peripherals to enhance the experience for all stakeholders (or parties).
While HealthNxt® is device agnostic, patients or providers may desire to have a complete turnkey solution.
Our set of peripherals will enable 80% of care to be completed remotely. These will be known as the Ferrari of Medical Devices.
The platform is devised in a manner that adding new functions & features to the existing product is very simple. The architecture is scalable, and adding more practices & hospitals is not daunting. HealthNxt® is equipped with population health tools, including social determinants of health, to enable your organization to realize its mission and community goals better.
HealthNxt® can be integrated with FirstNet[1], whose mission is to deploy, operate, maintain, and improve the first high-speed, nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety. This reliable, secure, and innovative public safety communications platform will be instrumental in bringing 21st-century tools to public safety agencies, enabling them to gather information swiftly. This will help them in accelerating their decision-making process.
Healthcare's shift from brick & mortar to virtual will only increase its speed and depth.
The future of medicine is upon us, and we have laid the foundation with HealthNxt®. Hospitals will be reserved for the most acutely ill, with only a few remaining urgent care facilities and skilled nursing centers. Hospital structures will be repurposed for community benefits such as shelters, schools, and meeting places.
Healthcare is transforming at a rapid pace and hospitals that are early-adopters to move to virtual care will prosper. It is called the Survival of the Digitalist.
We took a leaf out of Apple and Amazon by learning their usability & simplicity principles. The derived learnings helped us in the development of HealthNxt®, the world's first enterprise-class virtual care platform. The product was handcrafted with a focus on patient and clinician experience. Native intelligence in the solution was used to enable precision medicine.
The future of healthcare delivery is finally here with HealthNxt®
About The Author
Edward Marx is the Chief Digital Officer at HCI
Ed is a Fellow of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He has won numerous awards, including HIMSS/CHIME 2013 CIO of the Year, and has been recognized by both CIO and Computer World as one of the “Top 100 Leaders.” Becker’s named Ed as the 2015 “Top Healthcare IT Executive” and among the 2016 “17 Most Influential People in Healthcare.”
Ed is the author of three books, including the 2019 healthcare bestseller Voices of Innovation. He has a new book on healthcare digital transformation coming out in 2020 and is contracted for a two-book series in 2021.
