The COVID-19 pandemic forced a new level of safety in care delivery. Almost overnight, telehealth and virtual care cemented their place in healthcare as clinicians sought innovative ways to remotely engage with patients and mitigate the spread of the virus. This experience significantly accelerated the pace of digital health adoption.

Digital health is now well on its way to reaching ubiquity. As healthcare organizations consider the path forward, many are reevaluating the effectiveness of point systems implemented as stopgaps during the initial COVID-19 response. Lack of scalability and integration into care models are common challenges that limit the usefulness of stand-alone solutions in a long-term digital health strategy.

In the digital-first ecosystem that’s taking root in healthcare, fully integrated platforms are the future. As providers evolve beyond telehealth to a broader virtual engagement strategy, integrated, end-to-end virtual care platforms will support a variety of goals, such as:

1. Contactless engagement

As we saw early on in the pandemic, waiting rooms are a place of vulnerability. We must manage patients more innovatively to save lives. The evolution of virtual care to broader online workflows such as patient self-scheduling, digital-check-in, health questionnaires, and remote patient monitoring maintains important touchpoints without the need for physical interaction.

2. Patient self-service

Digital engagement tools offer patients the convenience they have come to expect. They also empower patients to play a more active role in their care journey. Digital solutions reduce care team workloads by outsourcing common tasks that patients can field from home. This is particularly valuable as the healthcare industry grapples with staff shortages and burnout.

3. Enhanced clinical insight

Digital engagement has already begun to amplify the type and frequency of patient interaction, generating more patient data than ever before. This lays the groundwork to deploy CRM-like strategies in healthcare. Care teams will know when and how frequently patients are engaged with and can use broader patient insight to deliver a more curated care experience. This excitedly brings to reality a care strategy that many of us have been forecasting for several years.

Preparing for the Patient Data Surge

Accelerated access to and exchange of patient data will be paramount to enabling care interventions that improve patient outcomes. Integrated platforms that fuse in-person and digital workflows and insights will be vital. To deliver personalized care, providers will need centralized access to key patient data within their native EHR work environment.

To support this goal, Qure4u recently partnered with JASE Health, a leading technology and professional services provider of end-to-end integration solutions with major EHRs, to accelerate virtual care integration and interoperability with Cerner and other EHR leaders. The partnership integrates digital health engagement into the established EHR workflows of health systems and provider groups to create a unified environment to support a hybrid care delivery. The collaboration marries Qure4u’s end-to-end virtual care and digital engagement platform with JASE Health’s demonstrated expertise in bi-directional data integration and embedded end-user workflows in EHR systems.

The partnership’s current focus seeks to seamlessly integrate virtual care into Cerner user workflows via one comprehensive platform. Providers can use Qure4u tools that are directly embedded within Cerner to support transition of care and remote patient monitoring with device integration that allows providers to share care plans and receive real-time diagnostic data and alerts to monitor patients’ health from anywhere. Integration support from JASE Health unifies these unique capabilities, which have traditionally been siloed directly into Cerner Millennium workflows. JASE enables reading and writing from the EHR, providing batch or near real-time data to downstream systems.

The pandemic hastened adoption of digital health and there is no going back. To compete, providers must implement strategies to engage patients in convenient, meaningful ways similar to what consumers experience in other industries. Virtual care enablement improves patient experience and engagement throughout the care journey and allows providers to reallocate staff to higher priority tasks. Perhaps most importantly, the integration of insight gleaned from routine virtual engagement drives quicker intervention and personalized care. Qure4u and JASE Health are on a mission to help providers realize this goal, one integration at a time.

Authors: Justin Barnes, Director, Qure4u and John Orosco, President & CEO, JASE Health