The product team at Force Therapeutics recently attended DOCSF 2021: Digital Technologies in Healthcare. There were three key challenges that emerged as surgeons look to transform the future of patient care with robotics, data analytics, and digital care.
Effectively Managing Data Collection
The mega-trend and future in healthcare is data and how to synthesize massive data collections in a way that is actionable for clinicians; digital tools that provide digestible data are key. There are so many data points around patient-reported outcomes (PROs) that can overwhelm many health systems that are not yet able to collect massive amounts of data. The challenge is deciding what information is most important to collect and having a tool that can sort through and deliver that data. Data managing systems like Force Therapeutics are growing in importance for this reason.
Actioning on Data Collected
Dashboards help deliver important patient data to clinicians, admins, and quality teams in a comprehensible and useful manner. This will help “clean up” patient data and improves how information is incorporated into EMRs. While EMRs offer a much larger, macro version of patient information, digital technology entwines this information with smaller more specific data, which provides a vivid depiction of a patient’s condition. For this reason, it’s important to use digital tools that can work across patient, clinician, and administrative workflows to give care teams one tool of interoperability.
With Force, hospitals are able to digitally collect, monitor, and benchmark patient-reported outcomes and numerous discrete data points. Not only are patients completing forms within their episode-of-care, but they’re also automatically prompted to fill out longitudinal outcomes at the 1-year mark and beyond, offering valuable newfound insights into long-term outcomes. All data – from average PROs scores to actual engagement with the platform – can then be viewed and analyzed in real-time via Force’s Executive Dashboards.
Integrating Patient Data & EMRs
The integration of PROs and quality patient data in EMRs allows for strong evidence-based data collection that aids in both the episode of care and future research. Digital health technologies, like Force Therapeutics, provide seamless collections of this crucial patient data which can be uploaded to registries like AAOS and offer evidence-based data which can be utilized by a larger network of hospitals.
With this technology, quality of care can be improved by predicting the risk of complication or readmission, monitoring patients through care episodes, and recommending actions/interventions based on patient status.