Imagine, you are preparing for an upcoming dream vacation to the Bahamas that you have been planning for the past couple of months with your friends. You are to leave in a couple of days. And you get the feeling that you are gradually coming down with a cold & cough. You know that it is the seasonal flu that would take you offline for a few days. But you can’t afford to miss this once in a lifetime – vacation.
You pick up a phone, and make an appointment with your doctor in minutes. An hour later, you are at the doctor’s office. The doctor greets you with your first name. Enquires about your kid’s school & how the last vacation was when you had gone to France a couple of months back. You chat around all the personal encounters the past 2 months, having a few laughs along the way. Finally, he inspects on that flu/cold, prescribes you medicine (the doctor already knows you are allergic to potassium – hence he gives a prescription med that doesn’t contain potassium) & gives you the confidence that you will be just fine by tomorrow morning, to get ready for the trip to the Bahamas.
As you step out of the office, reminiscing about the conversations, you are already starting to feel better. Access & experience stands out in this encounter.
These are the kind of memories you have if you are born during the 70’s or 80’s. Compare this experience to any of your recent doctor visits. The first available appointment you get with your doctor was a month away. On the day of the appointment, even though you came in 15 minutes ahead, you wait up for another hour before anyone sees you. Once the nurse practitioner has taken the vitals, you get to meet the doctor 2 hours past the appointment time. After that wait, the encounter with the doctor is completely rushed, not anywhere close to personal, leaving a sour memory. The difference is Day & Night. So the experience of visiting your doctor has changed significantly, over the decades. Some of the problems that got us here are the dwindling number of physicians per 1000 people, a system that rewards quantity as opposed to quality, and lack of computing infrastructure, to name a few.
How about the cost? Over the past 3 decades, healthcare spending has been on a rise, around the globe. In the US, healthcare spending has risen from single digits to ~20% of GDP. China’s spending has been on a gradual rise over the past few years. The same applies to other developed countries.
In summary, over the past 3 decades, the cost of healthcare has been on the rise. On the other hand, access to healthcare & the overall experience has been on the decline.
Industry leaders & governments have always regarded this as a serious problem & have been constantly on the lookout for newer ways to resolve this. For example, below are the takeaways from the recent HIMSS 2022.
- Hospital At Home remains a key component to explore
- Healthcare Interoperability is the new promising area of investment
- Deep Learning continues to be regarded as the final missing piece of the puzzle
SpringML’s take
The Industry has been trying to come at this Healthcare problem from many different angles
- Reducing cost through efficiency, better processes & automation
- Increasing quality with better predictive models, better alarming systems/processes
- Better experience using the latest digital technologies
These are certainly the critical factors to solve this puzzle. Barring one nuance, which we feel will propel us towards solving this ever unsolvable problem.
Personalization
We strongly believe that adding the personalization factor to the already existing solutions will get us to the dreamland – where Healthcare is accessible, at a reasonable cost, great quality & with an overall exceptional experience.
Where CX stands for Customer Experience. C for Cost. Q for Quality & P for Personalization. If we tailor our approach to each individual customer’s healthcare needs, we can increase the quality of care and reduce the cost of the episodes while giving an overall exceptional customer experience.
Each of us is unique. In many ways, actually. We have all taken very different routes in our lives to get here. The lifestyle we have lived, the eating habits, the physical activities, the allergies we have had, the specific chemicals each of us are repellent to, etc.
Rather than trying to generalize a group of people & trying to arrive at the tools/process from a Population Health Management aspect, we strongly believe we should look at Individual health management. So step aside Population management, and give way to the new PHM – Personal Health Management.
We couldn’t have imagined doing individual health management up until now. We are at a point in time where we could leverage the potential of cloud, edge computing & ML algorithms – to identify each individual’s life/health pattern & devise a customized Health plan/roadmap accordingly.
With the recent acceptance of cloud platforms in the Healthcare spectrum, application of ML/AI technologies in multiple areas etc. – the time is ripe for us to finally solve this problem. With Cloud computing, we can control cost, pay for what you need, stay up-to-date, use multiple best tools & access from anywhere.
Summary
Over the decades, we tried refining our approach to solve the healthcare problem. We had our share of obstacles that were shifting our focus from Individual to a Population-based. But with the latest developments & acceptance of Cloud computing & leveraging machine learning, we can reverse the trend & get the industry to care for everyone’s health – giving the best CX for each individual. This will translate to increased customer retention from a stakeholder aspect & a healthier population from a state aspect.
At SpringML, we have been helping our clients across industries, leverage Google Cloud Platform & the power of Machine learning to solve some of the most pressing problems. We aim to do the same with Healthcare, as well.
Let’s Get Personal!
