Consumer-driven healthcare reshapes organizational imperatives
Healthcare providers have reached a critical inflection point. Many providers have gone through several challenging years of organizing their electronic records sys-tems. And during that time, consumer-driven healthcare has gained momentum, leading to heightened competition among providers and intensifying the need to rethink key processes to gain efficiencies and improve services. Leading provid-ers recognize the potential of information technology to increase competitiveness, but at the same time, they struggle with driving new IT efficiencies.
Today, most organizations have numerous stand-alone applications, each of which may contain part of the information a worker or patient needs. Workers are undermined as disjointed searches for information stall their responsiveness and productivity. And patients often find themselves in a frustrating service “limbo,” unable to resolve questions. Portal technology provides healthcare providers with an opportunity to streamline internal administrative and billing processes while giving patients more control over their own care, helping to improve the overall healthcare experience.
This executive brief examines the various solutions that providers often consider when addressing patient-driven business needs. It explains how an IBM WebSphere® Portal software–based solution can provide a flexible and valuable long-term solution compared to other options, with personalized user experiences that help deliver agile, security-rich access to relevant information. This brief introduces the features and capabilities available through WebSphere Portal technology. And to illustrate those capabilities and the success they have helped other companies achieve, it explores several case studies.
Roadblocks ahead: the limitations of popular solutions
As providers look for ways to respond to business challenges related to chang-ing marketplace realities, they typically consider one of the three approaches outlined below. Unfortunately, although each option may provide a reasonable initial solution on some level, none is able to add value over time due to its inflexibility and its inability to help providers respond faster to changing user and business needs.
Implement a Web interface.
- Providers often consider adding a Web interface on top of an existing healthcare information system to provide more users with access to a system’s information and functionality. While the improved access may be initially compelling, interface solutions cannot address larger underlying integration challenges. In other words, you can’t use a Web inter-face to pull together data from different systems, such as scheduling, billing, marketing, document management, health analytics and HR, to create more sophisticated patient- or employee-facing solutions designed to increase satisfaction or productivity.
Build a static online marketing presence.
- While this is a good first step in many cases, patients today are used to using personalized self-service solutions in many other facets of their life. Empowering them to find information and pay bills, self-service solutions can often lead to improved collections and lower call center costs, which can quickly eclipse the value of pure marketing efforts. Attempt to use existing office productivity software.
- Trying to consolidate the broad spectrum of patient data from across enterprise systems into this underpowered solution is not only inefficient, it is also difficult to administer over the long term and limits the types of new solutions organizations can provide to patients and employees over time.
Web portals: single points of access, information and processes
The competitive shifts in the healthcare marketplace necessitate deeper capabili-ties that can help you acquire and retain clients, control costs, increase revenue and respond to changing marketplace conditions. At the same time, you can use these capabilities to empower employees and patients with the information they need, when they need it. For example, if employees are going to work efficiently and accurately, organizations need to eliminate cumbersome processes related to signing on to applications and gathering information from multiple software sources. And patients want to have an experience that’s reminiscent of those they have with other industries such as travel, finance and retail. For example, the abil-ity to schedule appointments, pay bills and access healthcare information online empowers patients to “own” more of their healthcare experience—potentially increasing their satisfaction and loyalty, while helping to reduce operational costs.
