How medtech can better integrate their digital solutions with healthcare workflows

The healthcare industry is transitioning to value-based care models. That’s why the medical device industry's ability to continue the development of life-changing innovations will rely on demonstrating how new technology fits under the new value-based paradigm.

The key to sustaining future growth is going beyond the traditional uses for medical devices and adding capabilities to harness data, predict consumers’ needs, improve care workflows, and seamlessly operate with other enterprise and non-enterprise data sources. COVID-19 has accelerated the need for organizations to adopt and add digital capabilities in how they function. As digital technologies’ value to healthcare is expected to continue to rise (see linked image and report from McKinsey), medtech organizations can’t afford to fall behind competitors when it comes to providing healthcare integrated digital solutions.

A medtech organization with a technology roadmap that isn’t focused on patient-centered care is most certainly writing its own sunsetting story. Therefore, leading medtech players should focus on building digital solutions that can integrate better into care settings and generate contextualized insights about device use and clinical value. Specifically, digital solutions at the intersection of medtech and care delivery can help:

• Integrate insights from medical device data with patients’ longitudinal health records
• Improve workflows related to use of med device products for patients, and inform workflows for providers, and care teams with insights from these products
• Generate evidence of clinical outcomes achieved by the use of med devices

In today’s increasingly digital healthcare landscape, medtech companies must account for the dynamic and connected ecosystems and be a trusted partner to health systems. Patient-centricity, demonstrated value, data handling, interoperability, and security are all critical to medtech companies’ successes.

When evaluating opportunities to digitize, a few key factors need to be considered, including the risks of delaying digitization, development costs, infrastructure requirements, organizational agility, and more. The main question: “How can medtech companies reduce costs and risk while increasing their innovative edge?”

Meet the Innovaccer Health Cloud

The Innovaccer Health Cloud natively integrates with health system digital data sources—including claims, EHRs, labs, pharmacies, and more—to capture the true value of the connected medical devices. It also provides:

• More than 80 EHR integrations and 300 connectors for data standardization
• Healthcare expertise through our significant footprint inmore than 55 healthcare organizations
• Ready-to-deploy apps for engaging with providers, care teams, and patients
• A resilient platform and open architecture that meets current data ecosystem’s needs and helps prepare you for future changes to regulations and data standards changes; compatible with existing infrastructure, apps, and data sources

A deeper look at the Innovaccer Health Cloud for medtech organizations

With that background, let’s go back to our main question. Imagine a solution where a medtech organization deploys a companion SaaS platform that can ingest medical devices' data and, through collaborations with health systems, integrate critical insights from these devices with other information systems that hold patient data and reside within the health systems (such as EHR, claims, labs, medication, etc.). As a result, providers and care teams can access a complete view of patients at different stages of their care journey (before, during, and after operation/treatment). This not only enables care teams and clinicians to act on workflow integrated insights from devices, but also enhances the value of the medical device itself—a win-win for everyone, most importantly for patients.

The Innovaccer Health Cloud does all that and more. Through our proprietary Data Activation Platform (DAP) and a suite of white-labeled downstream applications, medtech companies can:

• Enable health systems improve patient care by digitally connecting medical devices directly to patients, providers, and care managers
• Generate analytics for hospitals to measure patient outcomes and improve operational gaps related with device use
• Create unified patient records by ingesting and integrating disparate health data from a patient, including insights from digital devices

Improve patient care

Disparate patient data means providers or care managers may be delivering care with incomplete information, and in most cases the device information is only available through an external application not integrated with their workflow. While EHRs can hold this information, there are a large number of different EHRs makes, models and customizations that a device manufacturer would need to integrate with in order to get insights from their devices in front of clinicians .

The superior capabilities of The Innovaccer Health Cloud that help healthcare providers improve patient care are important to mention:

• A patient-facing mobile application, which is a one-stop solution for most patient needs. It allows users to conveniently book in-person and virtual appointments with doctors, attend video consultations, receive digital prescriptions, send and receive direct messages with care managers, report care outcomes (directly or through connected wearables), and set up medication alerts to improve adherence.
• A provider-facing desktop application that pops out of the EHR window to simplify a provider's workflow and provides contextualized longitudinal 360-degree view of a patient's health, including diagnosis, medication, lab reports, procedures, active care protocols, SDoH risks, and more. The application also enables providers to make referral requests and connect with care managers and patients via direct message.
• A care manager-facing application that helps manage tasks like assigning protocols, scheduling appointments, creating care strategies, and more. Through this application, care managers can also access a 360-degree view of patients.

Thus, working with Innovaccer Health Cloud, it is possible for medtech companies to have a mechanism of collaborating with healthcare providers in order to integrate med device insights into the provider workflows.

Generate analytics for hospitals

It’s estimated that the U.S. healthcare industry wastes $1 trillion annually. To reduce that number, hospitals need to take advantage of clinical and operational data through analytics. Medtech organizations should develop solutions with this in mind—and the Innovaccer Health Cloud can help build such solutions in collaboration with hospital administrations.

In turn, hospital administrators are responsible for making key decisions and operational improvements to improve patient outcomes. These decisions should be data-driven and need all the relevant patient data to be easily translated into actionable insights. Innovaccer’s Data Analytics and Visualization solution is a versatile tool, already in use across many of our health systems today helping hospital administrators make data-driven decisions.

Create unified patient records

Innovaccer Data Activation Platform (DAP) is the engine under the hood that can add incredible power and contextualize insights on top of device-generated data by integrating it with a unified patient record. According to CBInsights, there are more than 8,000 digital health startups today, each adding to the growing amount of healthcare data—current estimates say that 2,314 exabytes are produced each year. All that data isn’t manageable if it’s stored in information silos. Instead imagine a situation where all patient data is integrated into a patients’ health record, then intelligence is used to generate meaningful insights right when the patient or clinician needs it. That’s what Innovaccer’s DAP does. It includes:

• Innovaccer DAP, which is a proprietary data ingestion platform that simplifies the process of data integration through its templatized repository of data sources; a library of parsers and connectors; and robust semantic normalization, data quality management, and longitudinal linking capabilities.
• Function-as-a-service (FaaS) UI that rapidly conducts scalable calculations, transforms data, and powers analytics and dashboards.
• An embedded developer platform that will allow medtech companies to build custom applications on Innovaccer’s DAP or make UI enhancements to our existing applications.

Building for the future starts today

To add to the already large volume of data available in healthcare, you now have access to medtech data; we’re quickly moving toward a healthcare singularity, where all data speaks to each other with the patient right at the center. And it ultimately speaks to the person accessing it. That’s why generating unified patient records is key to building solutions to solve today’s challenges and prepare for future ones.

Ongoing investments in technology are essential to healthcare organizations’ successes. But when it comes to building future-ready solutions, it’s important to focus on choosing the right tools and technology partners. Medtech organizations will be at the center of the revolution for healthcare and must build for the future, starting today. The Innovaccer Health Cloud is well-positioned to help develop solutions that improve care delivery while being prepared to meet changing industry demands.