Over the past three months, Silver Fern has been honored to join other industry thought leaders in examining how digital healthcare can be used in the prevention and management of chronic disease and to further advance value-based care initiatives.
In addition, we’ve had the opportunity to share our own experiences with the application of our Silver Fern digital tools in clinical settings. It’s been a very exciting quarter and one that provides insight into the ongoing evolution of healthcare both here and abroad. We share some of the highlights with you below.
Value-based care
Today, chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and coronary artery disease – conditions that are mostly preventable, reversible, or can be delayed by many years – constitute a substantial portion of healthcare spending in the U.S. This fact makes prevention and successful management of chronic disease pivotal factors in the journey to value-based care and bending the cost curve.
In October, Garry Welch, Ph.D., Co-Founder, and Chief Scientific Officer, Silver Fern joined John Rodis, M.D., William Bestermann, Jr, M.D., and Kenny Cole, M.D., MHCDS for a panel discussion, The Role of the Primary Care Provider in Disease Prevention and Management in a Value-Based World, hosted by the Moving to Value Alliance (MTVA). The MTVA, a multi-stakeholder grassroots community, is focused on supporting a value-based healthcare ecosystem and empowering self-insured employers who face high, escalating employee health costs in advocating for a greater focus in healthcare on prevention and early treatment of chronic conditions. These chronic conditions are very costly to bottom-line-focused employers yet are largely preventable.
Dr. Welch, a former primary investigator at Harvard Medical School and research professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, offered insight on the use of Silver Fern digital healthcare assessments to uncover the key drivers to patient success – self-management behavior and psychosocial barriers.
For the more than 130 million people in the U.S. who suffer from preventable, lifestyle-related, chronic conditions, unlocking those self-management behaviors and psychosocial barriers are critical to whole-person care and good outcomes. The traditional biomedically-focused clinical model doesn’t fully provide for the identification and measurement of patient behaviors and psychosocial barriers and so often falls short of providing the highest level of care.
Silver Fern’s digital products provide clinicians with access to this unique, untapped, patient information. Through clinically-validated diagnostic modules, clinicians can unlock the root causes of patient challenges, illuminate barriers to success, identify individual treatment preferences and goals, and provide individualized patient solutions.
By focusing on patient engagement and the behavior and psychosocial drivers of good health, Silver Fern products prevent or reduce chronic disease complications, comorbidity, and healthcare utilization over the life of the patient, thereby improving outcomes and reducing the total cost of care.
This combination of determining challenges through bite-size patient assessments, together with keeping care teams at the center of care and promoting highly personalized interactions that result in education and sustained engagement is an optimal way to get to true whole-person care and drive improved patient health outcomes.
The Use of Digital Healthcare Tools to Improve Care
For optimal success, chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, require patients to be effective, long-term self-managers and clinicians to provide personalized and consistent support over time.
However, clinicians struggle engaging patients between regular, face-to-face visits and often lack staffing for effective patient outreach. Studies estimate that between 20–45% of patients living with type 2 diabetes are emotionally overwhelmed by their condition and at risk of disengaging from treatment plans or even becoming depressed1.
Digital health tools meet patients where they are and provide an alternative opportunity for providers to connect with their patients.
In November, The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) Lifestyle Medicine Conference kicked off in Orlando. The ACLM provides education and certification for the clinical and worksite practice of lifestyle medicine as the foundation of a sustainable healthcare system. This year, Silver Fern’s commercial implementation pilot was selected as a featured poster presentation at the annual conference.
The poster, Behavior and Psychosocial Data Collection Using Digital Outreach, provides insight into the commercial utilization of digital health assessments to measure diabetes emotional distress, meal planning self-management barriers, patient engagement, and patient re-engagement.
The pilot included 62 high-risk participants with type 2 diabetes enrolled in a complex home care program and showed that low-cost digital health outreach strategies can be utilized to collect vital patient self-management information without increasing the administrative burden for busy clinical teams.
In fact, 64% of participants in the pilot who were previously disengaged from their treatment plan were re-engaged after completing the health assessment, thereby improving patient care and increasing satisfaction for both healthcare staff and patients.
This pilot provides the groundwork for well-designed clinical interventions that will help advance the utilization of digital health in the treatment of chronic conditions. Digital health and outreach to patients via text messaging have the potential to greatly improve patient access to care between clinic visits, improve clinical effectiveness, and help augment the shortage of clinicians and burden on healthcare providers and clinical teams.
Global Perspective on the Value of Digital Healthcare
To wrap up the year, in December, Silver Fern travels across the globe to present at the Digital Health Week New Zealand conference in Rotorua.
Organized by Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ), Digital Health Week is the country’s largest digital health event with more than 1,100 delegates coming from around the world to present on healthcare’s most pressing issues.
Dr. Welch was among the industry experts selected to be a delegate. He presented on the importance of leveraging digital health to help augment clinicians to improve care plans and personalize treatment for patients with long-term conditions. A variety of clinical scenarios were highlighted in his talk on the value of Silver Fern’s digital toolset, including population health promotion for Medicare Advantage patients, home health, and health plan care management support for high-risk employees with chronic conditions.
Dr. Welch’s own research has shown that empowering clinicians to identify and properly assess patient behaviors and psychosocial barriers can have a positive impact on the patient’s health outcomes. There is an opportunity to expand the utilization of digital tools to better measure and understand patient behavior and barriers. Digital tools, such as Silver Fern’s clinical research-based solution, can be implemented within the traditional healthcare structure to provide added value for patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems.
Silver Fern tools offer multi-channel technology to efficiently capture patient barriers and preferences (brief assessments collected in person at home or clinic, by phone, or asynchronously by text or email to phone) and deliver this data securely into clinical care teams and workflows. The assessments provide suggested, actionable care paths for flagged issues and real-time population insights.
Now, more than ever, it’s important that we leverage new, evidence-based digital strategies that can help reduce the burden on clinical teams and systematically improve patient care for chronic conditions, that in turn leads to healthier families and communities.
If you’d like to learn more about Silver Fern, click here to check out our product demos.
- Young-Hyman, D. et al. Psychosocial Care for People with Diabetes: A Position Statement of the American Diabetes Association. Diabetes Care;39(12):2126-214