The Handbook of Continuing Professional Development for the Health Informatics Professional

JoAnn Klinedinst

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429675911
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud pública, administración y atención

Engaging in ongoing, continuing professional development (CPD) is a strategic imperative for the health informatics professional. In our global economy, healthcare is fast-paced, dynamic, and ever-changing. While this rapid change is both exciting and exhausting, digital health transformation is positively impacting lives, today and every day, in ways not previously imagined. Faced with a COVID-19 pandemic that has forever changed the landscape of health and care delivery, global health and care stakeholders must ensure that our ecosystem continues to rapidly evolve through innovation, government and ministry incentives, and technological advancements to reach citizens everywhere. For these reasons, health informaticists must embrace lifelong learning to ensure they have the professional competencies to advance initiatives that positively impact patient care.

The Handbook of Continuing Professional Development for the Health Informatics Professional, Second Edition has adapted to the evolving needs of health and care professionals everywhere. The Handbook provides the rationale and the resources to do so and serves as a reference to enhance one's career. No other comprehensive resource exists to assist health informaticists in developing and maintaining their professional competencies. Written as a contributed compilation of topics by leading practitioners, the book discusses the most critical competencies needed to ensure understanding of the vast health and care ecosystem while also highlighting industry influences that shape the very evolution of health information and technology.

About HIMSS

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is a global advisor, thought leader, and member association committed to transforming the health ecosystem. As a mission-driven non-profit, HIMSS offers a unique depth and breadth of expertise in health innovation, public policy, workforce development, research, and analytics to advise leaders, stakeholders, and influencers from across the ecosystem on best practices. With a community-centric approach, our innovation engine delivers key insights, education, and engaging events to healthcare providers, payers, governments, startups, life sciences, and other health services organizations, ensuring they have the right information at the point of decision. HIMSS has served the global health community for more than 60 years with focused operations across North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

Section VI Industry Influences Critical to Your Career

28 Driving Digital Health Transformation: Achieving a Person-Enabled Health System

Anne Snowdon

RN, PhD, FAAN

CONTENTS

1. Learning Objectives
2. Introduction
3. Personalization: What Matters to People
4. What is Personalization?
5. Personalization Based on Value
6. Role of Research in a Personalized Healthcare System
7. The Emergence of the Empowered Consumer
8. What Motivates Consumers to Personalize Health and Wellness?
9. Consumer Use of Health Apps to Achieve Personalization
10. Major Categories of Consumer Health Apps
11. The Benefits of Health Apps
12. Why Aren't Health Systems Engaging and Adopting Health Apps?
13. Personalization in Industry: What Can Health Systems Learn?
14. Lesson 1: Use consumer preference to achieve personalization
15. Organization Example: Disney's Personalization of Consumer Experience
16. Organization Example: Amazon Recommendation System
17. Organization Example: Tesco Personalization Based on Culture
18. Lesson 2: Use Segmentation to Achieve a “One Size Fits One” Strategy
19. Industry Example: Insurance Industry Segmentation Using Health Status and Lifestyle
20. Industry Example: Retail Banking Segmentation Based on Risk Taking, Experience, and Expectation
21. Industry Example: Automotive and Retail Segmentation Based on Willingness to Pay
22. Lesson 3: Use Customization as a Strategy for Personalization
23. Industry Example: Mass Customization in the Apparel Industry
24. Industry Example: Mass Customization in the Automotive Industry
25. Ten Steps to Achieve the Personalization of Health Systems
26. Step 1: Reframe the Conversation from “What is the Matter” to “What Matters to You”
27. Step 2: Redefine Success in Terms of Health and Wellness Outcomes that are Valued by a Population
28. Step 3: Put People in Charge—Shift the Decision-Making Process from the “Provider as Expert” to the “Person as Expert”
29. Step 4: Shift Care Processes from “One Size Fits All” to “One Size Fits One”
30. Step 5: Stop Competing and Start Collaborating
31. Step 6: Join the 21st Century, and Get Connected
32. Step 7: Democratize Information to Empower People to Take Charge of Their Health and Wellness
33. Step 8: Learn From Industry and Customize Healthcare to the Needs, Expectations, and Values of the Population
34. Step 9: Put the Population in Charge of Defining Value
35. Step 10: Measure What Matters
36. Conclusion
37. References

DOI: 10.4324/9780429398377-34

Learning Objectives

1. Identify the importance of personalized health care on achieving value and impact as it relates to what matters to people, their quality of life, health and wellness, and the role of the healthcare provider in a digital health ecosystem.
2. Examine the importance of the empowered consumer as a motivating factor in the use of technology and the ways in which health systems and consumers can learn from each other.

Introduction

Health systems have experienced unprecedented change in the last several decades, resulting in new ways for consumers to seek and engage health services and revolutionary technologies that have completely transformed how health challenges are managed. Consumers can connect virtually to global experts to access information about health. Discoveries in genetics are providing a mechanism for consumers to evaluate their risk for disease. Pacemakers and smart devices are able to wirelessly transmit heart rhythms, enabling individuals with cardiac arrhythmia to connect to a cardiologist. Yet, these impressive advances may not have realized their potential in the populations they serve. Why? Health systems around the world are challenged by increasing demands for healthcare services in the face of diminishing economic resources. Every developed country in the world expends substantial economic resources on healthcare which has driven health system priorities to focus on cost containment and sustainability. Yet, as health system costs continue to increase over time, the value health systems are able to achieve for the population they serve remains unclear. Health systems have long been focused on delivering services to treat, manage, or cure disease, illness, or injury; they are not so much “healthcare” systems, but rather, “disease management” systems. Health services focus primarily on assessing and diagnosing patients, prescribing care and treatments based on standardized protocols or best evidence available for a particular disease or condition. Traditionally, health teams have been the key decision makers in most health systems and consumers are the “patient” who is viewed largely as the recipient of care. Although many health systems aspire to deliver “patient-centered care”, health professionals primarily focus on making decisions for, and occasionally, with the patient. In recent decades, the desire to improve the quality of care while reducing health costs has led to a focus on standardizing services to ensure every patient has access to high quality health services. To achieve this, health teams have embraced clinical practice guidelines and evidence-based care planning to direct their day to day practice. Although this has achieved great value for health systems in terms of quality outcomes, the scope of most health systems has remained narrowly focused on the safe and effective management of disease, illness and injury and a top-down style of decision-making whereby health professionals are deemed the experts, and the focus on managing disease has remained virtually unchanged even in light of the new resources available. In addition, there has been little attention placed on whether health systems are delivering value to the populations they are mandated to serve, both in terms of the nature of what they are delivering and also in terms of the fact that people want to be treated as people and not the substrate for diseases. This traditional structure worked very well over the last 50 years for two primary reasons: health providers were the primary (and often sole) source of health information; and, the pace of scientific discovery was steady but not revolutionary. Health provider teams—led by physicians—had more or less exclusive access to all health information, serving as brokers of what information was shared with their patients and when, based on their assessment of what they felt was needed. Exclusive access to, and control of, a patient’s health information gave physicians positions of power over the patients they cared for. However, advancements in communications technologies have shifted this power dynamic. Entire populations are now connected through the World Wide Web, which is accessible through an expanding set of technologies including mobile phones, computers, tablets, and wearables.

These two drivers of change, unprecedented access to health information and revolutionary medical discoveries, are working together to generate demand for personalized healthcare. However, given the very dominant focus of most every health system on standardized pathways for disease management, most health systems are not designed to respond to consumer demand for personalization. Health systems are under substantial pressure to deliver value to the populations they serve within limited fiscal resources, while at the same time, the role of the consumer is evolving as they begin taking steps to engage and manage their health and wellness in a manner that is personalized to meet their unique needs and life circumstances. What is critically important about the rapid evolution of information technologies is that they enable the engagement of entire populations of consumers, who now use online tools to access the health information needed to manage their health and wellness, and connect to health system experts, clinicians, and services globally. Essentially, the boom of information and communication technologies is a major influence in driving the emerging personalization of healthcare globally.

To more fully examine the growing consumer demands on health systems, we consider the following key questions:

• What matters to individuals in regard to personalization of health care?
• What are the emerging trends in technology and consumer behavior that are contributing to and influencing the personalization of health systems?
• What are the key personalization strategies that have been successfully used by industries and organizations outside of healthcare?
• What could a personalized health system look like?
• What are the necessary steps health systems must undertake to achieve personalization?

Personalization: What Matters to People

Personalization in healthcare is not a new concept. Over 2000 years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates emphasized the importance of individualizing medical care proclaiming, “it is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has”.¹ Personalization in this traditional sense means that individuals are able to seek healthcare services and treatment tailored to meet the unique challenges of a particular disease or condition they are experiencing. Advances in both “omics” sciences and information and communication technologies, offer health systems a new way forward to “personalize”, by engaging these technologies to focus on achieving value in terms of what matters to people—quality of life and wellness. As a result, a very new perspective on personalization is now emerging which is very distinct from Hippocrates’ vision. Health systems have the opportunity to leverage these emerging trends, to achieve sustainable personalized health systems that deliver value to the populations they serve.

What is Personalization?

The concept of salutogenesis² provides a strong theoretical basis for defining personalization. Salutogenesis, first described by Antonovsky in the 1980s,³ defines health relative to what matters to people, where the ultimate goal of healthcare is to enable or facilitate health, which is viewed as a key determinant of quality of life. Lindstrom and Eriksson ⁴ use the analogy of the “river of life” as a potential vision for personalized health systems. Downstream, healthcare systems offer disease management, which can be likened to trying to save people from drowning in the river. Upstream, healthcare is more closely aligned with people’s values of health and wellness to achieve quality of life, and is designed to prevent or mitigate risk of disease which compromises health and wellness. In this vision, healthcare systems offer a balanced portfolio of services to populations, both supporting people so that they can experience a good life where they are well and healthy, and providing supports when disease or illness occurs so that individuals can be rehabilitated and returned, where possible, to good health.

In this chapter, personalization is considered through a population-based lens, where health systems strive to achieve value in terms of health, wellness, and quality of life—factors that vary across population health sub-groups. Before personalization can be contemplated, it is important to first understand the key philosophical dimensions of healthcare that matter to people and therefore reflect value.

Personalization Based on Value

If health systems are to deliver value to the populations they serve, it would require that value be defined in terms of quality of life, health, and wellness, as an alternative to a narrower focus of value relative to disease and illness. Value-based outcomes, beyond those that are purely economic in their construction, are not currently defined or measured by health systems. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges health systems face is delivering value to the populations they serve in a way that is meaningful to health consumers, and sustainable from a cost persp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Accelerate: A Digital Ecosystem Designed for Health IT Professionals
• Reflections on My Career
• My Career Journey
• Editor
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Advocating for Change: Become Involved
• Section I: Positioning The Health IT Professional For Lifelong CPD
• Section II: Establishing and Nurturing Your Career
• Section III: Learning From Others
• Section IV: The Aspiring Leader
• Section V: The Importance of Lifelong Learning
• Section VI: Industry Influences Critical to Your Career
• Appendix: Prioritize Your Career Development Plan
• Index