Make America healthy again: Improving primary care tech adoption and real consumer engagement

All attributes of the triple aim of care (cost, experience, and health outcomes) continue to decline. A key opportunity to address is to reverse the decline in the triple aim of care by enhancing the support for primary care, physical therapy and rehab. Yet technology and service penetration across the healthcare provider ecosystem of primary care, acute care, and post-acute care and rehabilitation services has been uneven. There are opportunities to improve the adoption of EHR, RCMs, and other operational technologies that can impact better patient engagement, translating into improved health outcomes.

This roundtable will explore the findings of a recently published HFS study that assessed the opportunities to optimize the potential of US primary care, physical therapy and post-acute care/ rehab. The key breakout room discussion topics for this roundtable are:

• Improving health outcomes by enabling real patient engagement: Over 60% of primary care physicians and rehabilitators prioritize patient health outcomes followed by retention for continuity of care (engagement). Given the episodic nature of healthcare and fee-for-service payment models, the doctor-patient relationships have been diluted negatively impacting engagement. Reversing this trend by leaning into interacting with patients with empathy and digital connectivity will have a material impact on improving health outcomes.
• Optimizing technology adoption: Thanks to Meaningful Use, the electronic health record (EHR) systems adoption is well over 90% for hospitals, but for primary care and rehab that number is just about 50%, and the revenue cycle management (RCM) adoption is even lower. These operational technologies are essential to ensuring clinicians have the best information about their patients to provide effective care while keeping their practices financially viable. Helping improve adoptions will have a direct and positive bearing on patient care and practice financials.
• Embracing the shift in payment models: Unlike acute care settings where nearly all fees are collected through insurance reimbursements, primary care, and rehab have a near equal proportion of their fees through insurance reimbursements and patient out-of-pocket payments. In this context managing patient relationships and driving engagement needs reimagination to drive better outcomes.