George W. Bush, in his State of the Union speech in 2004, stated, "By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve care." As a result, healthcare technology investment in the 2000s focused on the digitization of the medical record and its associated processes. President Obama solidified this mandate with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) requiring the electronic medical record to take effect by 2014.
From Bed Management to Discharge Planning this period ushered in substantial investments in data collection and data digitization technologies. These investments are depicted on the left side of the infographic below. Costs, however, were not reduced.
In the subsequent decade (the 2010s), to reduce costs, Healthcare systems attempted to capitalize on the mountains of electronic data contained within the EMR and bet on big-data analytics, interoperability, data warehouses and the like. More recently, we see an invasion of machine learning and AI technologies. These investments are depicted on the right side of the infographic. Costs, however, are not diminishing. Provider fatigue is growing, and capacity is still at a premium.
It is estimated that healthcare "wastes" $1T per year in administrative, and operational inefficiencies and from losses due to provide fatigue and burnout.
The primary reason for this intractability is that implementations of the EMR - and its companion applications such as RIS, LIS - codified the siloed workflows at their pre-EMR state. Except for nominal gains in billing and charge capture, this codification accelerated care-provider fatigue and constrained capacity. Few if any savings were encountered.
The Workflow-Outcomes Solution
Edgility knows the solution to waste, inefficiency, and fatigue lies in the workflow ‘gap’. We advocate a focus on the Outcome, where transactional, real-time data is processed and analyzed to create Situational Awareness. Situational awareness is used to orchestrate workflows and outcomes, agnostics of the foundational technologies (EMRs, ERPs).
Workflow analysis and Situational Awareness leads to enterprise-intelligence that then facilitates removing low-value work from high-value assets. It reduces the administrative burdens and releases (under)utilized capacity. Moreover, Edgility makes this possible within an enterprise's existing investment.
Edgility understands this gap and associated complexity. We see the opportunity in this complexity for innovation and value realization.