Innovating With A Clear Purpose Of Improving Patient Care

Frank Harvey, Chief Executive Officer for Surescripts.

Be careful what you wish for. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Occasionally I think about these outdated sayings. While often cryptic or indirect, they were intended to provide a sort of lesson or cautionary tale. Receiving this unsolicited advice and promptly ignoring it seems to be a universal experience. But many eye-rolls and my own experiences later, it pains me to say that some of the time, there were nuggets of truth that can’t be ignored.

Borrowing from this wisdom, there’s no time like the present to advance technology that solves some of the increasingly complex challenges facing healthcare, clinicians and the patients in their care. But at the risk of being cliche, we should listen to the lessons idioms like these represent and how they might apply to innovation in healthcare—especially when the stakes are so dire.

Well Done Is Better Than Well Said

Artificial intelligence is often described as “disruptive” and “groundbreaking,” but after a year of over-the-top headlines, we’re seeing much more practical and thoughtful uses for this technology in healthcare and across the board.

But instead of making bold claims about the next disruptive or groundbreaking innovation, we ought to ask: How is this innovation going to make healthcare better for patients and care providers? A new idea or technology is great, but does it have a meaningful impact, and does it truly advance healthcare? Or is the scale so small that the effort outsizes the benefit? And, of course, do we know what the potential consequences or risks are that might not be well understood? As they say, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Across the industry, there are many challenges that need solving. Advancing technology and health intelligence sharing are obvious solutions with great potential to support better informed, safer and less costly care. But instead of touting capabilities, we know that the proof really is in the pudding.

For organizations like mine, we’ve been innovating for more than 20 years to help patient information flow securely across healthcare. In 2023 alone, this meant nearly 24 billion exchanges of patient and clinical benefit information that connected 2.14 million healthcare providers and organizations to patient intelligence, according to our National Progress Report.

It’s not about the numbers so much as what it means: Every single transaction represents real people at some point in their care journey. Maybe they are seeing their primary care physician for an annual exam and to check their prescription medications. Or maybe a patient just received a life-altering diagnosis, and the prescriber found a less expensive medication covered by their health plan that will make treatment less stressful.

In any case, technology—and purpose-driven innovations—can have a significant impact on patient care.

The Grass Is Always Greener

As we look to the future of healthcare, it is imperative that innovations aren’t so narrowly focused that we wind up solving one problem while exacerbating another.

For example, in solving the challenge of making patient clinical intelligence accessible to clinicians at the point of care, the reality is that clinicians rarely need decades’ worth of a patient’s clinical history. This so-called “data tsunami” has become a direct source of provider burnout. “[Electronic health records] and other administrative burdens largely contribute to physician burnout and frustration,” according to the American Medical Association.

One study found the average word count in a patient’s health record is more than half (56%) of the length of Hamlet, William Shakespeare’s longest written work. Imagine asking a clinician to read half of Hamlet before every patient they see. They’d likely say it’s impossible and doesn’t always benefit clinical decision-making.

While the industry has made great strides in expanding clinicians’ access to information, as it turns out, more information is not always better. However, I believe we have an opportunity to change how we’re innovating around health intelligence sharing.

One example of innovation that aims to help address the data tsunami can be found in the results of a study on which my company collaborated. We saw promise in leveraging key clinical intelligence to advance electronic prior authorizations for prescription medications, supporting greater workflow efficiency while maintaining essential clinical integrity. The best part was that patients received their treatments sooner. Meaningful innovation can also address challenges like providing health plans with patient intelligence so they can help close gaps in care that have the potential to improve patient outcomes.

The question then becomes: How do we ensure future innovations are truly solving challenges without creating others?

It seems obvious, but an even greater emphasis on cross-industry collaboration is essential. Understanding the unique challenges that each part of healthcare faces and finding holistic solutions that benefit more than one stakeholder, and, ultimately, the patients they serve, can have outsized benefits across the industry.

We also need to remember that the goal of innovation shouldn’t be just to secure the next attention-grabbing headline. We need to focus on what might seem like the “less exciting” challenges that have gone unsolved for far too long. For example, it’s daunting to think of the multiple clinicians and care managers who spend hours, days or longer chasing down clinical information, sending faxes and making calls in support of patient care. And despite agreement among even the most disparate stakeholders that we need to simplify this process, the administrative burdens remain a leading contributor to clinician burnout and delays in patients receiving care.

It might seem that the hype around the healthcare innovation grass is always greener, but I’d argue it’s greener when it’s watered with a clear purpose of systemic innovations focused on patients and those who care for them.

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