As mobile technology becomes more sophisticated, hospitals, payers, pharma and accountable care organizations are being given the opportunity to design, customize and even private-label their own care coordination platforms.
This week we look at two BYO care coordination solutions: HealthyCircles, acquired in 2013 by Qualcomm to broaden the reach of its Qualcomm Life 2net platform, and Healarium, founded by a management team that includes entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals and software developers.
Product capabilities
HealthyCircles, a cloud-based solution, can be used out-of-the-box for exception-based care coordination and management. As a hosted solution it provides traditional care management that includes intensive 30-day monitoring of patients post-discharge and a longitudinal care management component for managing across multiple sites and providers, particularly in the case of patients who require complex care.
But what is really unique about HealthyCircles is its Care Solutions Authoring Tool (CSAT),which provides a web-based application for an enterprise to author its own unique sets of custom care solutions. These might include interactive forms for data collection, registration and patient satisfaction surveys. Caregivers have the ability to tailor health coaching regimens and disease management programs which might include customized risk scores that in turn trigger alerts.
The HealthyCircles care management dashboard also allows a care team to adjust the care management dashboard that displays biometric, vital and symptomatic data. The rules-based filter manages by exception in order to control limited resources and adapt care interventions.
All forms are customizable - including questionnaires to patients or caregivers to obtain a patient's latest health information and those sent to professionals to allow them to manage a patient’s care and at-risk patient populations. What’s more, customized content allows a care team to send educational materials to the patient to improve outcomes, while “landing pages” enable access to key links such as messaging to health professionals and calendar functions.
HealthyCircles and Healarium both address the need to enable health service providers to cost-effectively and efficiently specialize their digital health programs for the specific needs of their organization and its consumers, while at the same time ensuring that all the devices and components in play integrate with each other.
Back in the bad old days such system integration for large enterprises often became a multi-year, multi-million dollar project. By leveraging their PaaS (Platform as a Service) roots, HealthyCircles and Healarium offer similar customization services at a far lower cost.
Healarium offers health providers, ACOs, health plans, even solution integrators and telecom providers a customizable front-end, with the real magic happening on the back-end. Although some of that technology is proprietary, PaaS solutions in general can offer customers a plethora of choices that are unique from the user perspective but are actually all part of the engine hidden under the hood and invisible to the user.
The rules-based platform can be configured for multiple healthcare solutions ranging from chronic conditions to wellness programs to discharge services. Healarium includes configurations for interventions and integration into the healthcare ecosystem, as well as messaging and alerts. The BYO configuration components include intervention modeling, process modeling and message and notification modeling.
Customization-by-configuration
Real-world examples of customizing by configuration include converting medical guidelines into structured, actionable care plans that can be adjusted as protocols or government regulations and standards change; branding the platform’s look and feel with corporate logos, colors, styles and preferred terminology; creating a fully branded mobile app and publishing it in app stores under one's own brand; creating flexible roles and permissions as well as patient registration processes and methods, within the platform; and configuring and delivering branded messages and notifications via multiple channels using the message engine.
Both platforms give an organization the ability to brand and market solutions at a competitive cost by accelerating development time and responding quickly to changes in technology, the healthcare business model and care protocols.
More importantly, both platforms help to reduce readmissions and unnecessary hospitalizations by mobilizing care and reaching people where they live, work and play. The only thing that can do that is mobile technology.
Ephraim Schwartz is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vt. Schwartz is a recognized mobile expert and columnist, having spent 15 years as Editor-at-Large for InfoWorld, half of them covering the mobile space. Prior to that he was Editor-in-Chief of Laptop Magazine.
