The Problem
The Problem, the Challenges and the Opportunity
The Problem
Studies show that collaboration between physical health, behavioral health and social service providers improves outcomes and lowers cost. However, conventional electronic health record and social service systems have disadvantages that make it costly and difficult to create and distribute electronic workflows for patient engagement and care collaboration. For one thing, they are not easily configurable to meet the unique needs of each organization or community. For another, most organizations lack experience in designing, implementing or managing an effective electronic workflow system. Furthermore, previous efforts to address patient engagement and care collaboration, such as patient portals, personal health records, and standalone apps failed to achieve the goal of a truly integrated continuum of care. Accordingly, most organizations choose simply not to adopt technology-enabled workflows for patient engagement and care collaboration.
The Challenges
1) Standards and workflow requirements for physical and behavioral health are not aligned with those for social determinants of health, resulting in a fragmented market with little collaboration and systems that lack interoperability.
2) Evidence-based practice (EBP) and standards, including regulatory and reporting requirements, are constantly changing, requiring continuous monitoring and frequent updates to remain in compliance;
3) Within the set of EBP and standards, providers have broad discretion in how they design and implement their own workflows. That means that one-size-fits-all solutions are not effective nor can they achieve high rates of adoption;
4) As mentioned above, most healthcare and social service organizations lack the expertise to design, construct, deploy and maintain these systems, and are uncomfortable assuming the risk for new technologies and workflows, and;
5) The costs of consultants and programmers to design, configure and update these systems using conventional systems is prohibitive for most organizations.
The Opportunity
Providers need an electronic workflow system that guides user/administrators to easily design, test, evaluate, deploy and manage electronic workflows without the need for costly consulting and programming services. The electronic workflow system also needs to guide users to understand how well their systems conform to evolving evidence-based practice as well as regulatory standards and requirements. While other industries, such as web-page design and surveys, have adopted similar technologies, no one has previously designed or developed solutions for the guided creation for the unique requirements of healthcare and social services for patient engagement and care collaboration. That is the reason we are creating the proVizor patient engagement and care collaboration platform.
