The New Normal, Part 4: What we Need Most: Anchoring Communities in Concert with Standardized Symptom Capture
Part 4 in our five week blog series: The New Normal: Covid-19’s Impact on Population Health Information Technology. What we know to be true about this healthcare space has been reinforced and accelerated. We’ll help you to discern the noise from the NOW.
Part 4 - Introduction
Integrating healthcare organizations with public health and community-based efforts is paramount to getting our communities back on their feet, to preparing for the next bubble upon us, and/or to tackling the next pandemic head-on. Let’s face it, what we’ve experienced thus far is not a one-time anomaly event. The imperative of more seamless collaboration is here, but lingering beneath is the need for more widespread use of standardized content to capture and share real-time symptoms throughout our populations.
Engage Public Partners to Assess Needs & Opportunity
Public health departments are likely to see further upticks in funding and resources as our local, state, and federal politicians come to grips with what their ‘cost savings’ initiatives have done to our collective ability to respond to a pandemic like COVID-19. Work with your public health departments and community-based organizations now to understand the day-to-day (and moment-to-moment) shifts, and to sniff out opportunities for integration in the short, medium and long-term. Build a roadmap.
If there is a silver lining in this pandemic it is the opportunity to assess and prioritize technical data integration efforts now, and to marry such efforts with trumpeting the needs from the mountaintops (while we have the ear of those able to help communities to make moves). Results, of course, will vary. But as we begin to see a second pandemic wave hit areas of the country more skeptical to the needs, they too will come around to do what’s right. Don’t miss this opportunity to take them up on it.
Anchor Your Communities
As Martin Luther King said and Former President Obama often reiterates: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. The tide of public opinion is moving towards favoring more investment in social services, but the effects of a pandemic, when combined with currently underfunded public and community-based non-profit organizations, have laid bare the need for healthcare to play an outsized role beyond its own walls. That role in these times of great uncertainly, must be aimed at those with disproportionate social circumstances that negatively impact their ability to have equitable healthcare outcomes.
So where should you begin and/or invest further? If this is the a question you’re asking – refer to our white paper to get started. Generally, it starts with partnership building. From there, you should set and stick to standing engagement with your partners to:
Continue to understand opportunities
Work to integrate systems
Share trends, and
Iterate on an ongoing basis
Go! Don’t delay any longer!
Symptoms Require Data Standardization.
Speaking of needs and areas of opportunity to strengthen community responses to pandemics, I have a question for you (particularly those of you steeped in HIT know-how and lingo). Certainly, you’re aware of the level of standardization, mapping capabilities, and interoperability infrastructure in place for clinical components such as diagnoses, labs, procedures, and charges. But what about viral symptom capture?
A lexicon exists, it’s called SNOMED CT, and the SNOMED organization has done a great job identifying COVID-19 related content in order to map concepts to the clinical work related to the virus (including symptoms). But in the heat of a pandemic, every organization builds their own tools. Worth noting, this is not the problem. The problem is that our HIT world is one in which concept-level integration still tends to be an afterthought. And without concept mapping, organizations are left massaging and interpreting their data to share with downstream partners in meaningful ways. Whether integration exists (e.g. API, HL7 or SFTP) no matter; this effort to reinterpret and share multi-directionally without the standardized lexicon introduces critical delays.
When symptom trackers must be deployed rapidly, it is imperative that - as stewards of a better Healthcare IT future – we configure them such that integration is a foregone conclusion. Standardized symptom mapping does just that.
Conclusion
We’ve been given a unique opportunity to impress the importance of what we do upon our community leaders – local, state, and federal. For those of us at the forefront of population health and community-focused initiatives, what we’re experiencing is not new: we’ve known that to deliver equitable care and to stem pandemics we must have integrated and widespread use of tools already at our disposal.
My hope is that history looks back on this time of COVID-19 as one in which we rose to the challenge. Our HIT integration arc has been a long one, but we now have all the drivers we need to bend it towards what we know to be our moment to shine: to facilitate equitable delivery of care, to have it rooted in efficiencies designed to promote sharing and encourage collaboration. The Time is Now. Be the Change.
Thank you for reading. If this content speaks to you, please follow CJ on Twitter or LinkedIn to be made aware of future blog content when it’s hot off the presses.
