Unravel the social factors: Person-centered health

Healthcare stakeholders understand well that throwing dollars at skyrocketing healthcare costs is the fiscal equivalent of continually mopping the floor rather than turning off the faucet. We must continue to radically rethink how we can enable more people to achieve better health.

Today there is an opportunity to upend traditional approaches—putting individuals at the center and using data, analytics and service design to create the “Amazon experience” that will deliver what is truly needed in the moments that matter.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the urgency of understanding and addressing social determinants of health—with the people most vulnerable to the infection more likely to feel negative economic impacts, as well.

Putting people at the center

Service design provides a way to help dive deep into who people are and the complex circumstances that affect their lives and their health. Designing with humans at the center makes it possible to infuse cultural competence into solutions. Resulting supports might include deploying Spanish-speaking workers to certain service centers and offering communications channels and vehicles based on individuals’ preferences (for example, smartphone videos for some consumers and hard-copy letters for others).

Human-centered design also provides a framework for creating end-to-end experiences that help support people as they move through their daily lives. Imagine a mobile app that sends alerts when a person is shopping at the grocery store, offers healthy recipes based on specific health conditions and serves up referrals to providers who are located near a person’s home. Or imagine a maternal health program that helps to provide telehealth options for early appointments, enabling expectant moms who need to conserve their time and money to appear in person for more critical appointments closer to their due date.

To complement service design, healthcare stakeholders also need access to a broad array of data and advanced analytics capabilities. Health plans and Medicaid agencies may be accustomed to studying claims data, while hospitals and other providers may focus on electronic medical record data. The key is to bring that information together along with additional third-party data to surface important insights related to social risk factors.

These insights will help in understanding individuals and crafting personalized engagement and supports to meet them where they are—and, ultimately, enable better outcomes.

Person-centered health: Bold vision, better outcomes

Economic stability. Education. Neighborhood and home environment. Social and community context. While there’s no “prescription” for addressing these social factors, they have a vast impact on every individual’s health and wellness.

Unraveling and addressing these factors starts with a bold vision for combining new insights, technologies and partnerships to address the needs of individuals—whether patients, members, health or social care providers, or citizens.

Person-centered health weaves together comprehensive, effective interventions that help address social risk factors and improve health outcomes. To advance toward person-centered health, payers, providers and public sector health entities need proven ways to:

Let’s change how we engage with people

By moving upstream to understand root causes of chronic disease, we can begin to change how we engage with people, creating personalized, culturally competent experiences to build trust and bring them the help they need at the moments that matter.

Everything it takes to do that—including human-centered design techniques, advanced data analytics, digital technologies and ecosystem management approaches—is ready.

Stakeholders no longer face a choice between better outcomes or spending smarter. Through person-centered health, it’s possible to achieve both.