Vision for a Connected Health Future

What is connected health and what does it mean for the future of healthcare? This article challenges health professionals to envision a connected health future with an advanced standard of care where patients come first. This connected health environment is a much-needed answer to today’s disconnected healthcare ecosystem. It recenters today’s fragmented system around the patient and can deliver significant value across the healthcare community. Getting there means following a three-phase journey focused on revolutionizing care coordination powered by the electronic flow of information across the continuum of care. The ultimate outcome? Better healthcare cost, quality and access for everyone.

Made up of many individuals and organizations, today’s healthcare ecosystem is more disconnected than ever. Patient data is scattered in siloed systems, which impedes the information exchange essential to getting a patient’s full health picture. In essence, the healthcare system has become estranged from patients. Care has turned inward, centered on a broken and increasingly cumbersome system, rather than on the patients themselves.

Healing the disconnections between patients and the system—and among all members of the healthcare community—is fundamental to improving healthcare worldwide.

Meeting this goal will mean more than introducing a digital infrastructure. A “build it and they will come” approach simply does not go far enough. Healthcare transformation demands an evolution in true care coordination powered by the electronic flow of health information across the continuum of care. While connected health starts with a digital infrastructure, it’s ultimately more about what happens next. Connected health demands looking beyond the infrastructure as an end in itself and seeing it as a means to deliver never-before-seen healthcare value.

Connected health can recenter the system around the patient. It has the potential to deliver an estimated $250 billion in annual value.

The journey to connected health benefits involves three phases.

1. Health IT adoption. The first phase is planning and building a digital foundation for patient data with decentralized approaches to data collection through electronic medical records and patient health records.
   
   
2. Health information exchange. By enabling data capture, organizations can then move to powering data liquidity, promoting health information exchange with strong governance.
   
   
3. Value Extraction. With a data foundation and secure exchange in place, insights can drive advanced analytics improving decision making and clinical quality.