Michael Brito posted an important post on Social Business News: Social Business Adoption in the Healthcare Industry. You may recognize the players in this story from this post… Anyway I’m reposting Michael’s here in its entirety because I’d like to hear what you think about this.
If the healthcare industry can adopt social business, anyone one can. Just today, Premier, a hospital-owned alliance with nearly 87,000 member care sites, has partnered with IBM to create the world’s largest healthcare performance improvement network. Using IBM social networking and analytics software, PremierConnect allows for alliance members nationwide to collaborate and share best practices and ideas that can be used to benefit treatment while gleaning vital insight to drive better decision making and reduce healthcare spending.
At the local level, care is connected across all sites (hospitals, physician offices, outpatient clinics), and providers know which patients are driving undesirable outcomes, which physicians have the highest costs or the poorest performance, and why these scenarios are occurring. For patients, this means confidence that their providers understand everything about their care – what drugs they’re taking or allergic to, what procedures they’ve had recently and more. No more unnecessary care that can compromise safety and add to already expensive bills for both consumers and health systems.
Stakeholders across a health system all can benefit from PremierConnect; for example:
- A supply chain executive can make purchasing decisions based on price, quality and safety, supported by thousands of outcomes. They can also interact with peers nationwide to get feedback on products they’re considering for contracts and be alerted when new contracts are launched so they can immediately and easily obtain best pricing.
- A clinical integration executive can segment populations of patients to understand where to focus care management efforts and monitor the effectiveness of medical homes in improving care while reducing costs.
- An infection preventionist can be alerted to possible harm-related events within their system through real-time surveillance. They can also better coordinate care with other departments, such as Pharmacy, to ensure the proper drugs are administered.
- A physician or chief medical officer can monitor clinical performance, understand practice variation, access patient level detail and support government reporting requirements. This information is clearly and simply presented and based on every diagnosis, procedure and patient visit.
- A human resources executive can access staffing plans and industry-best-practices to minimize inefficient processes that take too long or require too many employees to complete, or instances when higher paid employees do work that less expensive or experienced staff could do equally well.
- A Partnership for Patients program director will have access to data collection modules, best practice harm and readmission content, and a community of other healthcare professionals leading their own local programs.
According to a recent IBM CEO Study, 64 percent of healthcare CEOs said they are looking to partner and collaborate with other organizations to help them become more effective and innovative. Over the next five years, collaboration will become even more critical in healthcare. Again, if the healthcare industry can do it, why can’t other industries?
I think this kind of collaborative work is great and is indicative of the way work is changing in the digital/social age. But I’m very curious to hear from you healthcare association folks, specifically. Is this kind of alliance a threat to your organizations? If not, why not? If yes, what are you doing to keep up?
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