Devoted Health’s Post

It takes courage to be truly patient-centered. Today healthcare is still very much driven by “carrots and sticks”. Change the incentives, and the healthcare system would find a way to optimize for financial results However it’s still very much a slow march from fee-for-service to value-based care. Or more like a slow crawl. So it’s hard to “always do the right thing” for patients because of misaligned financial incentives. Especially when the demand for high quality healthcare outstrips the supply. Yet somehow many of you still find a way to try. Those early mornings or late nights caring for patients. Those extra minutes you spend educating a patient to make sure they understand. The round the clock efforts doing all the behind the scenes operations and administration work that keeps the lights on. And then, on top of that, you somehow make that extra effort to deliver new, innovative models of care that improve patient outcomes - even if it doesn’t come with better reimbursement. Whether that’s implementing a new innovative technology, creating better policy, or re-engineering how you deliver care - when you bring radical change to upend the status quo, you can be sure as heck that courage has a lot to do with it. It’s strange to say that it takes courage to make things better for patients. We got into healthcare to help people after all - so why should it be this hard? Doing the right thing for patients should be a no brainer. It should be expected. And I believe this is what most healthcare providers want to do. But no amount of health policy will ever be enough to incentivize all the possible things we should be doing for our patients. And such policy improvements certainly won’t come fast enough. Rather, a continuous focus on patient-centered care needs to be deeply embedded in an organization’s culture. And when that culture doesn’t exist yet, it takes courage to change it. It can be scary to fight the very economics that underlie your job. It takes courage to make the best choices for your patient, even if your job is on the line. And it takes a whole lot of work to then make the economics work – but the economics do matter, so you can keep delivering care. It takes even more courage to do the right thing as an entire organization. That requires an entire cultural shift. Yet I see that courage all the time. Every provider, hospital and health system we partner with at SeamlessMD has to have courage to upend the status quo.  To evangelize the idea that technology can empower patients to be partners in their own healthcare journeys. Because the easy thing to do would be to continue the status quo and believe it’s not worth the effort to do better. And yet our amazing partners won’t stand for the status quo. Because of your courage to innovate I still believe healthcare will always keep getting better. #digitalhealth #healthcareinnovation

It takes courage to be truly patient-centered. Today healthcare is still very much driven by “carrots and sticks”. Change the incentives, and the healthcare system would find a way to optimize for financial results However it’s still very much a slow march from fee-for-service to value-based care. Or more like a slow crawl. So it’s hard to “always do the right thing” for patients because of misaligned financial incentives. Especially when the demand for high quality healthcare outstrips the supply. Yet somehow many of you still find a way to try. Those early mornings or late nights caring for patients. Those extra minutes you spend educating a patient to make sure they understand. The round the clock efforts doing all the behind the scenes operations and administration work that keeps the lights on. And then, on top of that, you somehow make that extra effort to deliver new, innovative models of care that improve patient outcomes - even if it doesn’t come with better reimbursement. Whether that’s implementing a new innovative technology, creating better policy, or re-engineering how you deliver care - when you bring radical change to upend the status quo, you can be sure as heck that courage has a lot to do with it. It’s strange to say that it takes courage to make things better for patients. We got into healthcare to help people after all - so why should it be this hard? Doing the right thing for patients should be a no brainer. It should be expected. And I believe this is what most healthcare providers want to do. But no amount of health policy will ever be enough to incentivize all the possible things we should be doing for our patients. And such policy improvements certainly won’t come fast enough. Rather, a continuous focus on patient-centered care needs to be deeply embedded in an organization’s culture. And when that culture doesn’t exist yet, it takes courage to change it. It can be scary to fight the very economics that underlie your job. It takes courage to make the best choices for your patient, even if your job is on the line. And it takes a whole lot of work to then make the economics work – but the economics do matter, so you can keep delivering care. It takes even more courage to do the right thing as an entire organization. That requires an entire cultural shift. Yet I see that courage all the time. Every provider, hospital and health system we partner with at SeamlessMD has to have courage to upend the status quo.  To evangelize the idea that technology can empower patients to be partners in their own healthcare journeys. Because the easy thing to do would be to continue the status quo and believe it’s not worth the effort to do better. And yet our amazing partners won’t stand for the status quo. Because of your courage to innovate I still believe healthcare will always keep getting better. #digitalhealth #healthcareinnovation