The Role of Interoperability In Personalized Care

Personalized care increasingly separates successful digital health companies from their competitors. Broadly speaking, personalized care is an approach towards meeting patient needs in an expansive and friendly way. Organizations of all sizes increasingly promote it as part of their care delivery model.

Personalized care includes lots of data-oriented tasks that tend to make patients happier. It entails active patient engagement, efficient disease management, ongoing care recommendations from a familiar face, and a reliance on data collection beyond the typical doctor-patient relationship. 

In many organizations, the barrier to developing personalized care is that it’s too time intensive; providers would need some sort of automation to keep up! Of course, if you’re looking to work with patient data at scale, Particle Health offers a solution. There’s no better way to integrate personalized care into a provider organization than with a healthcare API.

Particle Health’s platform helps companies achieve personalized care by making it easy to find and work with patient data. That’s as personal as information gets. Providers with a connection to Particle’s API can offer personalized care from the start of a care relationship!

Why Health Tech Companies Want Personalized Care

Personalized care is both desirable and elusive for healthcare startups. Due to their newness and tele-presence, many digital health services start at a disadvantage when attempting to deliver personalized care. Digital health companies can lean on their technological skill by using data to expedite these personalized care relationships. 

Improved Outcomes - A McKinsey report found that personalized care improves outcomes and perceptions of care. Patients that reported a lack of personalized care elements were linked to failed discharge planning, a greater likelihood of inpatient readmissions, a dramatically lower Net Promoter Score for providers, and a 200% increase in insurance plan changes.

Cheerful Consumers - Personalized experiences are the top request for consumers seeking post-COVID healthcare, according to a December 2021 study. Press Ganey found that “consumers increasingly expect a good consumer experience in addition to high-quality care,” and that each year, the trend towards personalized care has increased. Collecting data makes it easier for patients to take ownership of their care.

How Interoperability Accelerates Personalized Care

‍Smooth Onboarding - First impressions set the tone for the entire patient experience. Traditionally, providers have asked patients for their data - but it shatters the illusion of modern healthcare if an onboarding experience defaults to document uploads and fax machines.

Particle’s platform, which offers data in C-CDA or FHIR formats, makes it easy to connect patient data to an intake procedure. It’s imperative for providers to offer an online intake process, so that patients aren’t switching to pen-and-paper intake after starting out with digital scheduling. 44% of patients - likely the same subset of consumers who readily take ownership over their data - prefer digital communication the majority of the time.

A better onboarding process also lets organizations allocate resources correctly by making sure that patients are matched with the right provider from the start. Organizations using a healthcare API demonstrate that no patient’s time is taken for granted.

Informed Check-Ins - With a healthcare API, providers can draw accurate and timely conclusions from historical data to manage care. It’s possible to target patients who are behind on preventive visits, patients with concerning changes to their vital signs, or patients who recently had encounters elsewhere in the healthcare system.   

Simply bringing up past encounters from other providers - whether in-person or over the phone - can make patients feel understood. It saves patients the trouble of explaining their care, and lets providers work from accurate information.

Engaged Care - Getting patient data puts platforms in a position to monitor and coordinate care. Organizations don’t need to charge premium prices to deliver “concierge” care - they just need to be comfortable working with patient data.

Having patient data on hand helps platforms manage handoffs between providers. APIs help the relationship between a patient and provider can transition seamlessly from one clinician to the next, since historical care information is already in the EHR instead of in one provider’s head.

Patients expect that nothing gets by their care team. Particle Health’s platform lets you exceed their lofty expectations.

Personalized care is sometimes called patient-centered care, and you can sum it up like that.  Healthcare organizations use data from Particle’s API to impart a sense of patient ownership of the medical relationship.