4 Takeaways from #HLTH2023 on Increasing Access to Care and the Technology to Enable it

Fresh off the stages at #HLTH2023, we saw a lot of discussion around increasing access to care, driving equity in that access, and innovating technology to support those transformations. Importantly, there was a resounding theme of how technology and data don't replace the human element but rather support or enable better experiences and decision-making along the way.

Highmark Taps Spring Health to Expand Access to Behavioral Health Care

Highmark Health and Spring Health announced a collaboration to significantly expand the number of access points to behavioral health care by 40% for Highmark Inc. insurance members, including children and teens.

Anil Singh MD, MPH, MMM, Highmark Health's executive medical director of population and curated health, said that the solution will offer multiple levels of support: digital capabilities for daily wellness, one-on-one care navigation, deeper clinical care through in-person or virtual therapy, medication management, and 24/7 crisis support.

“Expanding access and making it easier for members to engage with a personalized treatment plan helps us intervene earlier, driving a cultural shift in the behavioral health space and cost savings, which Highmark Health reinvests in the consumer experience as part of our #LivingHealth model,” he added.

Read the press release for more details.

Creating Impactful Community-Centered Health Programs

Nebeyou Abebe , senior vice president of social determinants of health at Highmark Health, shared three foundational elements needed to create community health programs that are effective.

First, trust is required to move forward. In many of the most at-risk and marginalized communities, intergenerational experiences of disinvestment, racism, and other forms of systemic disadvantage have left a chasm of trust. Health care is not immune from that trust deficit and must act accordingly.

Second, data is key but can't ignore the lived experience. We can use data to identify and prioritize certain problem sets, but the solutioning phase must marry those data insights with deep human experience from the communities we hope to serve to be effective.  

Third, one size does not fit all. Just because an approach is effective in one community or with a certain member population, does not mean it is scalable across the board, or even to members with the same surface level demographics.

Read his full article here.

Leveraging Data in Your Health Equity Strategy

Onyinye Enyia Daniel, PhD , the vice president of data and analytics strategy at Highmark Health, shared that to address health equity in a meaningful way, we need to bring together payers and partners across academic, community, technology and provider organizations.

When leveraging data and artificial intelligence, organizations must put mechanisms in place to mitigate potential for biases or furthering inequities.

As reported by MedCity News, Dr. Daniel said that, “we need to demand better, more rigorous data collection methods upstream so that algorithms will offer a more complete picture of the population. That way, the data used by digital health algorithms will provide more meaningful insights for underserved populations.”

Dr. Daniel recommended that organizations invest in bold strategies to tackle health equity that may have longer return on investment (within 5-10 years), rather than focusing on immediate results. Get specific with how you’ll measure the outcomes before kicking off an initiative.

Data and Technology are Busy Behind the Scenes

Google Cloud announced new artificial intelligence-powered search capabilities that will help clinicians quickly access information from different data sources. The new features will be offered to health and life sciences organizations through Google’s Vertex AI Search platform.

“This is still very early days, deployed with small teams with lots of support, really thinking about this,” Richard Clarke, chief analytics officer at Highmark Health, told CNBC in an interview. “We haven’t gone big and wide yet, but all early signs say that this is going to be tremendously useful, and frankly, in many cases, transformational for us.”

Clarke told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that Highmark Health plans to deploy the technology across the enterprise. “We really see this as a multi-modality,” he said. “The current focus is really on actual medical documentation,” a physician chore that eats up hours a day and leads to caregiver burnout.