Historical attempts at healthcare interoperability have failed. Calling up a referral partner to discuss how two providers can communicate better with one another is daunting, and then trying to implement changes to make that happen may take months or years. If you’re doing this on your own the process is going to stink.
Collaboration is hard. Collaboration with different providers, health systems and organizations, and payers…woof. Everyone has their own rules, their own most-important-thing, their own standards, their own required fields, and their own vendor or preferred method. Instead of us moving toward connectedness in an incredibly digital age, the healthcare industry continues to struggle with the most basic communication needed to care for patients and manage complex conditions.
Today let’s explore how the “Lone Wolf” mentality is killing progress in healthcare communication, and how some recent efforts might actually result in meaningful change.
Customized Solutions Inhibits Communication
Customization always sounds like a good idea. Get exactly what you want, how you want it, when you want it. But this focus leads to myopic solutions that simply don’t scale. Particularly when it comes to interoperability, this level of focus on point-to-point connections only leave you with one connection, one method of communication. Providers are only left further away from everyone else who needs to help take care of the patient. Data just needs to flow seamlessly to ensure better care and improved outcomes.
Acute approaches to connecting providers for patient data exchange and collaboration have cost a lot of time and money without a ton of benefit to the overall care team. Some have benefited greatly in the short term, but as soon as a patient ventures out of network or falls out of the connected realm, everyone is operating blindly and wondering why all the fuss to still fall short. No wonder providers and executives alike are burned out and jaded!
But there’s another way. And thankfully, it’s a vision beyond this insufferable state of always connecting and never communicating.
Connecting the Building Blocks of Healthcare Communication…Network by Network
Kno2 exists for this purpose and is passionate about making interoperability available to everyone in healthcare, regardless of how deep their pockets. With the Kno2 Communication API, IT vendors can really impact the healthcare experience and the provider landscape to accommodate many workflows, with many tools and entry points, and reduce the requirements to the internet and secure logins. The hoops for providers to jump through are then minimized. It provides an infrastructure providers can capitalize on that enables a path toward exponential access to patient information across national networks that is simple and flexible. And it makes space for post-acute providers and specialists who have notoriously seen very little benefit from subsidized efforts at the hospital level or around regional HIEs.
Providers already have so many things to worry about relative to patient care, staffing, reimbursement, this is one area that providers shouldn’t have to go it alone. Kno2 can
open doors for a communication strategy that brings efficiency and helps drive outcomes and well-being for everyone in healthcare – from patients to administrative staff to payers to physicians – to eliminate isolation.
