What OSF HealthCare considers when making digital health tech decisions

“Healthcare is really hard. It's harder than people think it's going to be,” said OSF HealthCare’s Brandi Clark at the American Telemedicine Association’s (ATA) annual Nexus conference earlier this month.

With these words, Clark, vice president of digital care for OSF OnCall Digital Health, neatly summed up the core reality for those navigating the increasingly complex healthcare landscape. Even retail and technology mammoths are not immune to the unique challenges of the healthcare industry, with Walmart shutting down its health center and virtual care operations and Amazon pivoting to an aggregator role within the telehealth arena.

“[Healthcare is] expensive, it's costly, it's time-consuming, it requires a lot of resources,” Clark said in an interview with mHealthIntelligence at the conference. “The regulatory and payer environment in our country creates a whole other layer of complexity that makes it hard for a for-profit company like Walmart to make sense of the economics of it, and it's not their core business.”

For health systems like OSF HealthCare — whose core business it is — surviving and thriving amid the fast-paced evolution of healthcare requires continually re-evaluating and reconfiguring strategy, particularly digital health strategy.

A keen focus on technology integration is at the heart of this strategy at the Illinois-based health system.

“That's why we talk about that sort of end-to-end journey and the way we are trying to think about weaving the technology and the digital solutions into workflows and into models of care all across the continuum,” Clark said.

This integration must enable an efficient workflow and mitigate roadblocks for both caregivers and patients, she added. Thus, selecting the right technology and vendor is critical.

When evaluating digital health technology, Clark emphasized the importance of selecting a solution that, first and foremost, improves patient and clinician experience.

“We're always trying to thread that needle of finding those solutions that are going to benefit both,” she said. “And that's hard because some companies come very clearly from a patient perspective and are focused on the patient side of it, and then you lose something maybe on the other side of the workflow, and then others are the opposite, right?”

One way to ensure that the solution will benefit all stakeholders is to go back to the crux of the problem that needs to be solved. According to Clark, OSF leaders begin conversations around technology selection and integration with the question: What's my goal? What am I trying to achieve?

Once the problem has been identified, health system leaders conduct an analysis to determine whether to build the solution in-house, buy it, or partner with a vendor.

“It's not always the same answer at the end of the day, depending on the solution that we're trying to create,” Clark said. “And it may not always be the same answer in the long run.”

For instance, the health system decided to use a particular platform for one of its remote patient monitoring programs, but a few years later, a new solution emerged that was better suited to the program’s needs.

“It's always that balance of we're not chasing the next shiny ball, but we're also not so firmly embedded in the way we've always done it that we're not always evaluating if there's a need to pivot to something that will benefit us, our organization, our patients more,” Clark said.

OSF’s digital health efforts also include collaborations with virtual care solution developers, particularly early-stage companies. The health system works closely with numerous early-stage companies to build their product.

“They may have, kind of, the seed and the start of something that could be great, but without the insights and the data from the health system to help them continue to build and develop that product, they're unlikely probably to achieve the optimal value,” Clark noted.

She added that the health system focuses on finding partners willing to spend the time, energy, and resources to create mutually beneficial digital tools.

This echoes what market analysts recently told mHealthIntelligence. Well-resourced healthcare provider organizations increasingly have to play a role in digital health technology development, partnering with companies to combine the former’s data and clinical expertise with the latter’s technical knowledge and agility.

Another reason collaboration between healthcare providers and digital health companies is critical is the growing emphasis on clinical quality and efficacy in the digital health arena. A Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) report released in March that shook the digital health arena showed that several prominent digital tools addressing type 2 diabetes resulted in minimal and short-term improvements in glycemic control.

Clinical quality must be front and center as health systems work with digital health companies to develop and test new tools, Clark said. Healthcare stakeholders must also understand that digital tools are not meant to replace the human touch in healthcare.

“And at the end of the day…you can't replace the clinician,” she said. “Digital tools and solutions can help the clinician to be more efficient and to make better and more informed decisions. But I don't think we can lose sight of the importance of the clinician in the whole equation.”

This underscores the importance of integrating digital tools to ease burdensome workflows rather than implementing the latest tools and creating workflows to accommodate them. Achieving this requires an open dialogue between digital health partners.

Clark believes that the most fruitful digital health collaborations are those in which technology developers are eager to truly understand the problems facing healthcare providers and their patient populations.

“And we've seen great and not so great in that space, but the good ones are listening and then tailoring their solutions to those needs,” Clark said.