Digital technology has forever changed how consumers plan travel, manage money, reserve tables at restaurants, and plan cooking our meals at home. Today, digital technology is on the cusp of profoundly changing how we utilize health care services and "make" health for ourselves and our loved ones.
By digitally tweaking in-person health care visits to primary care providers (PCPs) -- internists, general and family practitioners, and pediatricians -- we can meet the challenge of the primary care shortage, engage and activate people more in their health, and improve health care outcomes. Accenture looked into "Virtual Health: The Untapped Opportunity to Get Most out of Healthcare," and explored three scenarios that combine in-person and digital health visits that together can conserve billions of dollars' worth of primary care resources -- equivalent to extending care beyond the expected PCP shortage.
This isn't about simply doing every primary care visit virtually -- like Skyping with your doctor every time you want a consult. Instead, the patient visit is constructed as a mix of in-person and virtual, not "or." In one case, a patient pre-completes digital forms with medical history, uploads a phone camera shot of a skin rash, or shares blood sugar measurements over time collected by a digital glucometer used by a person with Type 2 diabetes. In another situation, a doctor receives a report based on predictive analytics which a Big Data engine, such as Watson, would provide the clinician ahead of the patient visit. There is a growing roster of these digital health tools and apps, numbering in the thousands in databases collected by industry analysts and financial services firms, and it's growing every year. Investment in digital health totaled $4.3 billion in 2014, according to Rock Health's 2015 mid-year review.
What's unique about the health care scenarios in Accenture's study, compared with other industry verticals, is that consumers are patients, too. So a patient must turn, sooner or later, to a doctor, nurse, diabetes educator, pharmacist, or other expert counsel IRL -- in real life. For health care, the art and science of virtual visits mix both the digital and the analog worlds to get health care to the right person in the right place at the right time.
How to get that mix just right? By knowing a lot about the person-patient from the start: our medical histories, our interactions with the health care system, and our observations of daily living. That's a lot of data, and it resides in a lot of places. Our medical history can be found, increasingly, in our physicians' electronic health records systems which extend patient portals to us as partners in shared health decision making. Interactions with the health care system reside in health insurance and pharmacy benefit management claims systems, which have long known more about "us" in the health care system than we have been able to track ourselves. At least as important as those institutionally-centered databases are our observations of daily living, which is where health is mostly created: at home, at work, at the gym, at prayer, at school... in other words, where we live, work, play, pray and learn. This is information on our mood, what we're eating, our activity (e.g., steps, swims, runs), our gut health... the data that describes the way we're living every day.
A group of early adopters of wearable technologies, activity trackers and clinical home-testing devices first spawned the Quantified Self movement, now reaching into the mass middle market of people shopping for devices at ever-growing retail aisles of activity trackers found in Best Buy, Target and Walmart. A recent trip to Target blew even my mind -- as I've been tracking myself and this market segment for the better part of a decade. I found in the midst of the electronics department an entire long stretch of devices from over a dozen brand names, including a large kiosk of Fitbit-branded products and a "Which Fitbit is Right for You?" interactive kiosk to help the shopper curate the best choice for their level of activity, fitness, and budget.
The self-care aspect of virtual care is an important linchpin for the realization of the virtual health care vision. Without patients -- people, consumers, caregivers all -- taking on some responsibility and action on behalf of our own health, we won't be able to close the loop on virtual care. Self-care is an integral part of the process.
We digitally-DIY travel planning, household financial management, and nabbing a reservation at that popular neighborhood restaurant for a special occasion. For our health, if we take on that measure of self-care, we can all help move the needle on primary care and improve our own health, the health of our communities, and the health of our health care system.