Building the Future of Healthcare: Insights from the CHIME 2021 Fall Forum
Healthcare’s chief information officers (CIOs) face a wide array of challenges in the current era of care transformation. The CHIME Fall Forum in San Diego brought together technology leaders from across the country to share lessons learned from the past eighteen months of catalyzed innovation.
The fall forum was Current Health’s first event as a CHIME foundation member, and we were delighted to host a focus group on the topic of delivering healthcare at home. These were the top needs CIOs expressed as driving their interest in care at home.
The Top CIO Concerns Driving Interest in Care at Home
It would be difficult to overstate the recent changes we’ve seen in evolving healthcare delivery, shifting patient expectations, and worsening labor shortages. With data and technology both contributing to and helping solve these challenges, CIOs are playing an increasingly critical role in how health systems evolve and address long-term, complex needs.
Meeting consumer demands
While the consumerism trend line is nothing new, we have seen a shift in expectations more rapidly and clearly than before the pandemic. Market disruptions from both technology and retail players continue to emerge, and their presence is making consumers increasingly aware of low-friction options for receiving care.
Digital front doors have already become an imperative for patient acquisition, and growing awareness of at-home care options will drive consumers to seek out providers who offer flexible, patient-centric experiences.
Preserving hospital capacity
The images of patients lining hallways imprinted on every healthcare leader’s memory. But even beyond the pandemic, capacity challenges remain a looming and long-term concern for many health systems. Decentralizing and scaling care outside hospitals is a question for technology, staffing, and operations. CIOs will only become more important as health systems seek to stay ahead of capacity demands.
Moving more care into the home, through models like CMS’s Acute Hospital Care at Home program, allows health systems to extend capacity while controlling costs.
Learn how Baptist Health leveraged our platform to preserve capacity during COVID-19 surges. Get the case study.
Extending staff
The healthcare labor shortage continues to worsen, especially for nurses and home health workers. Many factors are exacerbating recruiting and retention challenges, but CIOs are concerned about extending and protecting staff.
Improving data interoperability as well as removing silos and duplicative administrative tasks all play a key role in reducing the burdens on clinicians. At-home care delivery models may require new staff or reconfigured roles, but these programs are also an opportunity to think creatively about how, when, and where that work gets done.
What is the outlook for remote healthcare delivery?
Get the top trends from 250 healthcare leaders in our white paper.
