When I wrote about megatrends last year, the predictions were, naturally, forward-looking. Telehealth, for example, was important because of increased healthcare consumerism and the convergence of technologies to make its use quick and easy for payers, providers and patients.
Now when I look at telehealth as one of several 2021 megatrends, it’s tinged by the coronavirus pandemic. Rather than telehealth being a nice-to-have in 2020 with adoption over time, the service has become a necessity needed in real-time caused by the pandemic’s social distancing mandate and the highly communicable nature of the virus.
Each 2021 megatrend has the pandemic front and center. The pandemic exposed many issues facing the healthcare industry. Challenges and problems that weren’t a surprise, but simply rose to the top astonishingly quickly as the healthcare industry responded to the pandemic. The pandemic is and will continue to propel many analytics challenges and needs throughout healthcare.
Coronavirus sets the stage
Now that we’ve established the pandemic as the dominant megatrend across healthcare businesses worldwide, we’re going to take a deeper look at the pandemic’s impact on the industry: payers and providers, members and patients.
As COVID-19 rapidly descended, many different types of organizations changed to partial or fully remote workforce operations and took necessary measures to preserve the safety and health of employees. After securing operations, organizations quickly started to understand how they could help clients navigate the pandemic.
Much of the work in healthcare IT (HIT) was shaped by COVID-19. We wanted to help payers and providers understand the impact of the pandemic on business, financial and clinical outcomes to help healthcare remain viable for the many people working for the organizations or receiving care.
The following are 2021’s healthcare megatrends.
Telehealth goes mainstream as the new normal
The first major pandemic-propelled trend that everyone is talking about is increased telehealth usage. Many of us, my family included, began seeing our doctors online for the first time because of the pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported a staggering change for Medicare and Medicaid populations. Telehealth use was 0.1% of overall health services in January 2020, but by April it had increased to 45.9% of utilization. (Telehealth use by Medicare and Medicaid patients later decreased to 20%.)
Meanwhile, Definitive Healthcare reported in June 2020 that 33 percent of inpatient hospitals offered telehealth in 2019. By June 2020 that was up to 75%; another staggering increase. We see telehealth here to stay after COVID-19 is controlled. Utilization likely will come down from current pandemic levels, but industry analysts almost universally predict telehealth adoption will remain high as mainstream patients adopt and become comfortable with the technology. (Last year, an increase in the use of telehealth was one of our megatrends, though for different reasons.)
By Ashley Joseph, senior director of client services, Infusion at LeanTaaS.
Ashley Joseph
Each new year brings about the opportunity to reflect, learn and welcome positive change in our personal lives. This ideology is also embraced by the healthcare industry, as we’re constantly looking to improve workflows and incorporate new technology to boost patient care and operational efficiency.
To say the healthcare industry has learned a lot from 2020 would be a drastic understatement. As we enter 2021, we have an opportunity to make improvements to the vulnerabilities exposed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Infusion centers (and their patients) were forced to get creative “on the fly” in 2020. With the new year officially here, we expect to see more change and creativity from infusion centers around the country, in response to yet more new challenges.
Infusion centers may expand their scope
In the past, infusion centers have had occasional times when a chair or two was used for non-oncology treatments. Now, we’re seeing these various treatments pop up in centers more frequently, especially some COVID-19 treatments like monoclonal antibody infusions used to treat coronavirus patients. This not only increases the scarcity of chair resources, but also creates issues around trying to treat COVID-19 patients in the same vicinity as severely immunocompromised patients.
Process bottlenecks may come from new sources
Infusion chairs have traditionally been the limiting factor in how many patients can be treated per day. Today, though, nursing shortages are just as likely to be the limiting asset. These shortages are caused by unexpected, COVID-induced early retirements, quarantines required due to COVID-19 exposure, and the fact that infusion nurses are highly skilled – and thus among those who can easily provide support in inpatient units when those units experience sudden or unexpected nursing shortages.
Some centers have been forced to create/section off infusion areas for cancer patients who have also tested positive for COVID-19. Every time that the overall pool of available infusion chairs needs to be segmented such that any patient can’t go into any chair, efficiency in the center overall will decline.
The challenges and tragedies of the past year are well-known, but amidst the hardships of 2020 some hopeful signals have emerged in healthcare. Patients and the people and systems who care for them have been forced to do things differently this year, and many of these experiments will be with us to stay. These are some trends that will strengthen and take shape in 2021.
#1 Stakeholders embrace asynchronous
Payors, providers and other industry stakeholders who may have been reluctant to engage with async models in the past have been won over in 2020. The pandemic accelerated the understanding that async can safely and efficiently care for patients at scale. Providers who waded into async out of necessity during Covid have found that it allows for less rushed, more direct communication with patients that in many cases results in better care, while increasing provider flexibility and quality of life. Payors are realizing telehealth offers smart savings compared to legacy systems. State laws are coming along too — in May Maryland changed legislation allowing for asynchronous telemedicine to be accepted, and we expect more states to modernize in this way.
#2 Decrease of PCP as gatekeeper
Today’s young adults were already less likely than those of previous generations to have a primary care provider, and this trend will grow as PCPs close practices and people grow accustomed to a la carte care. Circumstances of 2020 have led people to get care formerly channeled through a primary provider directly, in a diverse array of settings. Covid swabs at drive-through clinics, flu shots at supermarket pharmacies, and prescription medications through telehealth, combined with increased utilization of home monitoring devices and wearables, have transformed patients (for better or worse) into their own care coordinators.
For years, health IT stakeholders and industry associations have stressed the importance of high-quality patient matching and data standardization in achieving the goals of the Triple Aim. While efforts for a national strategy have stalled, in part because of the government’s ban on universal identifiers, endeavors to improve patient identification at scale are mounting.
Last November, Senator Maggie Hassan petitioned the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to develop policies for standardized address data given the importance of accurate patient demographics in this ongoing pandemic.
Since then, action has been forthcoming, not only by the ONC but also by the federal government and other private sector organizations who have come together to address the clear need for a unified standard around patient address data. In December, ONC announced their intention to develop a unified specification for a critical component in patient matching—address data.
This new initiative, known as Project US@, will formally launch later this month and help health officials and experts establish consistency around formatting patient addresses. Here are three things you should know about Project US@:
Medical debt is one of the many painful and confusing problems of the modern U.S. healthcare system. While care solutions develop and improve, costs only seem to go up along with the confusion faced by many patients. But can new preventative health technologies offer a reprieve from these high costs and corresponding debt?
As millions of Americans struggle with bills, especially in the wake of the pandemic, technology is here to help. Remote healthcare and cloud data innovations are creating a variety of solutions from the safety of home — even the U.S medical debt crisis.
The Unfortunate Reality of Medical Debt
Before the pandemic even struck, 137 million Americans were struggling with medical debt. Individuals and families alike find it all but impossible to meet their financial obligations to the healthcare industry and the result is negative for both patients and providers. With nearly half the total U.S. population facing medical payment difficulties, the question must be asked how we got here and what we can do about it.
Group Psychology is an area of mental health specialties that prepares group leaders to identify and capitalize on developmental and healing possibilities embedded in individual group members’ interpersonal functioning to benefit a group.
In such settings, the emphasis is on group dynamics and the role of individuals and leaders in a group, and how they treat and address individual members.
Group-based psychology is suitable for children and adults, various conditions and concerns, and numerous and diverse settings.
Problems Addressed
Group psychology helps addresses problems, issues, or concerns within several settings addressed by the group, including emotional and mental disorders, behavioral problems and concerns, interpersonal relating and communications difficulties, life transitions, support and development of coping and managing skills development for conditions, and trauma, crisis, and even stress.
Assessment
The assessment process includes individual assessment and group assessment. According to the American Psychological Association, individual assessment emphasizes assessing the individual’s appropriateness for the particular group, “such as level of interpersonal skills and the capacity to engage in group process, and psychological assessment of issues, motivation, diagnoses and similar issues related to successful outcomes.”
Group assessment includes evaluating factors for those in the group, including climate, cohesion, dynamics, and how people in the potential group relate.
Intervention
The intervention promotes positive changes for emotional, cognitive, relational, and physical well-being using evidence-based strategies. Integration of theories, such as interpersonal, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and commitment therapy (ACT), is applied to conditions, issues, and concerns.
Consultation
Consultation includes specialists in group psychology providing consultation with other health professionals, medical hospitals, military, and veteran’s facilities, schools, business, sports and athletic professionals, rehabilitation facilities, and religious and churches.
You did your best to stay healthy and safe yet somehow, COVID-19 managed to find you.
Fortunately, after feeling the full effects of the virus for well over a week and finishing up your quarantine time, you now feel much better. You are ready to get back to work, school, working out and/or running errands, yet you are not really sure how to go about doing those things.
To help you in your quest to get back to life post-COVID-19, consider the following tips.
Slowly Get Back Into Exercising
As Houston Methodist notes, many people who have had the coronavirus deal with lingering fatigue long after they are over the fever, cough and body aches. If you were used to working out five days a week for 60 minutes at a time, you may be discouraged when you feel winded after going out for a 10-minute walk. Be patient during this time and understand that the fatigue, while annoying, is quite normal.
Give yourself a pep talk after that short walk and remind yourself that your body just went through a pretty rough time, and that while you’ll be back at it full force before you know it, it will take a while to get there. Do shorter workouts until you feel your strength returning and then gradually increase the time as your body allows.
Assistive technologies are tools and devices that support the needs of people with disabilities. These technologies aim to improve the lives of more than 100 million people who experience significant disabilities. Sadly, the World Health Organization points out that only 5% to 15% of people with disabilities have access to assistive technologies.
It’s for this reason that both the tech and healthcare should work together in terms of improving mobility and essential everyday functions. For now, there are already a number of new assistive technologies that are making people’s lives easier, from upright walkers to power wheelchairs. Check out some of them in the list below:
Smart homes
For people who suffer from conditions that limit their mobility, smart homes are becoming sought after in greater numbers. As virtual assistant technology becomes even more sophisticated year by year, home automation will surely provide high levels of comfort, ease, and security. Using voice commands, you could activate security systems, schedule meetings, search online, and even cook meals. Although such capabilities have not come full circle yet, the increasing drive to wire homes to the Internet of Things (IoT) holds much promise for the future.
Group Psychology is an area of mental health specialties that prepares group leaders to identify and capitalize on developmental and healing possibilities embedded in individual group members’ interpersonal functioning to benefit a group.
