Many technology enthusiasts have grown frustrated with the health care industry's slow adoption of new technology. Why has the health care sector not embraced many of the new tools made available by the modern era?
There are several expert commentaries that point out to these 2 points:
- There are many new technologies that might actually lower costs. That sounds great, except that doctors and hospitals are paid based on the fee-for-service model, meaning that technologies that reduce the number of patient visits actually cost them money.
- Technology is simply creating more administrative burdens on the medical organizations. For e.g. it takes the typical doctor much longer to enter patient data into an Electronic Health Record (EHR) than to write it on paper. It is called Technology Productivity Paradox.
I want to stress on the second point here because I do belong to the health care technology sector.
If technology is not making anything cheaper or better, the adoption will be a problem. And technology companies have to take the blame for it.
Why in the world I would use something that is just going to increase my workload?
One of the things that I feel health care technology companies have to do is - provide more transparency in terms of their own data. Meaning, they should provide data on what is happening with their existing user base. What are the trends they are seeing? For e.g. what EMR features are making it so time consuming? And work backwards to fix these issues.
Data is gold, but transparency is key.
At Klara, one of our focuses is to utilize the power of data in debunking inefficiencies and bringing transparency to organizations in terms of, especially, how Klara is adding value to them.
One step that we took recently is to share more insights with our product users. We shipped a new addition to our product family called Insights. Kudos to our product team - yay! Insights give medical organizations the ability to gain more knowledge about how their team uses Klara and the opportunity to identify possible bottlenecks.
In the first version of Insights, we are showcasing following organizational stats:
- Active Vs closed patient conversations (encounters)
- Estimated time saving for the organizations
- Team response time to patient communication
- Patient adoption rate of Klara for the organization
- Team workload in terms of patient conversations
We’re not perfect, but we are trying our best to stick with our mission.
Nevertheless, there is not doubt that we challenge ourselves in the way what value we provide to medical organizations. This is at our core, and this is how we are making healthcare communication better. And data is more important than ever before.
