Shaping the Future of Care: 2022 Customer Summit Recap
Recently, the Current Health team hosted our first Customer Summit in Boston with an amazing group of care-at-home champions. For two days, clinical and operational leaders from health systems across the country shared challenges, achievements, and lessons learned from their experiences moving care into patients’ homes. Together, we celebrated, dreamed, and planned for the future of care.
Our team is already starting to plan the next event (looking at you, UK!), but before we move on, we wanted to share some of the top takeaways from the inaugural customer summit.
Takeaway 1: We have the best customers.
First things first: our customers are incredible. It was inspiring to see the energy and enthusiasm everyone brought for shaping the future of care and giving patients the best experience possible. To our customers: your tenacity and commitment are making a difference in patients’ lives every day, and the work you’re doing is contributing to a better healthcare system. Thank you. The Current Health team is honored to be supporting your work.
And of course, every person who attended had a whole team of people back at home taking care of patients. We hope even more can join us next year!
Takeaway 2: Care at home is re-energizing clinicians and enabling teams to address SDoH.
We believe that care at home has the ability to transform healthcare experiences for both clinicians and patients. The presentations and stories we heard reinforced this belief.
We kicked off our first day hearing from a panel of clinician executives who serve very different patient populations – ranging from urban Boston to rural Kentucky – but share an unwavering commitment to patient access.
Chemu Langat, COO, Best Buy Health, hosted a panel with: Brett Oliver, MD, CMIO, Baptist Health; Brett Moran, MD, CMIO, Parkland Health; and Rebecca Mishuris, MD, MS, MPH, CMIO, Boston Medical Center Health System.
Addressing access sometimes requires creativity, especially when things like connectivity or technology access are not given. However, all organizations see the importance of connecting to high-risk patients in the home to be able to stay close to them and support their care. Leaders from both Parkland and Boston Medical Center discussed their initiatives to provide holistic support for pregnant patients facing SDoH. All three organizations are engaging in creative community partnerships, such as local designated hot spots or partnering with local libraries to install virtual care kiosks or rent out connectivity hubs.
Candra Szymanski, Interim AVP, Hospital at Home, and Constantinos Michaelidis, MD, Hospital at Home Medical Director, both from UMass Memorial Health shared a number of stories about how connecting with patients in their homes can allow for greater opportunities to connect patients to resources and overall impact their care. This is especially important for the UMass team, who has been able to support broad demographics of patients in their Hospital at Home program, proving that these programs are not just for the well-resourced patient.
Takeaway 3: Integration and support services are critical to make care at home a reality.
Many of our conversations about care at home focus on the question of “How do we ensure excellent experiences for everyone involved?” and the overwhelming themes we keep coming back to are support services and integrations.
The Geek Squad leaders have been working to determine what it looks like to leverage these specialists for patient activation and technology support. Gavin Claycomb, Nurse Informatician Team Lead at Geisinger, shared about how leveraging the Geek Squad for patient activation has helped to expand timely access to care: “By having a reliable mechanism for delivering the necessary devices and technology to patients, we are able to begin monitoring much earlier. From an outcomes perspective, this expedited process comes at a critical juncture in the patient’s continuum of care as they are typically very vulnerable when initially identified for the program, so timing matters.”
Overall, the pilot aims to remove the friction for patients enrolling in a RPM program, knowing that onboarding is a critical step to ensure overall adherence. Gavin Claycomb added, “The human-centered approach enabled by the Geek Squad model supports activation and adherence, improves the patient experience, and reduces provider burden, all leading to better clinical outcomes and cost efficiencies.”
On the integrations front, we shared details about our application’s listing in the Epic App Market and Turbocharger modules that will support faster and easier integration of critical workflows for care-at-home programs. We also debuted some exciting device integrations into our platform, which support a more flexible approach for monitoring patients across diagnoses.
Takeaway 4: Care at home is becoming an integral part of health systems’ strategies.
What we heard across the board reinforced the increasing importance of care-at-home models to the evolution of health systems and healthcare delivery. Brett Oliver, MD, CMIO, Baptist Health, said: “When we look at the limited number of providers we have—and that’s not likely to change anytime soon—we have to get creative about alternative models of care to deliver the services people need.”
Robert Fields, Chief Population Health Officer, Mount Sinai, shared during his keynote: “There is no path to financial sustainability and risk without driving for equitable outcomes. And that’s a good thing that makes it expands the audience of folks that are now looking at equity from a different lens beyond community benefit, beyond mission, which is intensely important, but also into a sustainability strategy for the system we have to do right by those populations that have been disenfranchised by healthcare. And there’s tremendous potential in the digital space to empower that drive toward equity and managing the chronic conditions that disproportionately affect those populations the most.”
Takeaway 5: Quality measurement, reimbursement, payer partnerships are needed.
Collectively, we still have work to do in the direction of standardizing measurement and expanding reimbursement and payer partnerships.
As with most innovation, care at home risks being subject to “death by pilot” without clear and specific understanding about what success looks like and willingness to adapt. “Too many times I’ve seen that people try something new, call it a pilot, and then are scared to abandon it even if it’s not working,” said Gavin Claycomb, Nurse Informatician Team Lead at Geisinger’s Steele Institute for Health Innovation. “Stop what you’re doing and try something different.” For Geisinger pilots around home-based care, this has meant re-evaluating and widening inclusion criteria for patients in order to help reach the necessary volume to effectively evaluate the program. This need to “dream big” was echoed by Emily Wells, CNIO of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who explained the importance of designing her virtual ward program with the end state in mind.
The importance of data was echoed by those on the policy side who cited stories and data as some of the most effective ways to advocate for policy changes on the hill. Our policy experts, Janelle McClure from Best Buy’s Government Affairs team and Jeremiah McCoy from Moving Health Home, share that the most common objections to long-term legislation around care at home often include questions around quality, overutilization, and health disparities.
Dana Gelb Safran, CEO of the National Quality Forum dug into the importance and challenge of measurement, stressing the need to track patient outcomes, including data including PROMs and health equity data, in order to inform care and influence payment reform. “A one size fits all approach to care…is not the opposite of disparity, it’s what causes disparity.” We have to be intentional about how we’re designing and measuring care delivery models.
See you next year!
The work we’re doing is not easy. Moving care into the home comes with complex challenges for workflows, training, and numerous variables in patients’ homes. But we’re honored to be partnering with so many fantastic clinical and operational leaders who are willing to collaborate and build the future of care.
We look forward to seeing even more of you next year!
