Blockchain, interoperability and social determinants of health: 3 Qs with LexisNexis VP on the trends reshaping healthcare

The application, security and storage of data is a component of many of the emerging technologies and trends reshaping healthcare. Here, Shweta Vyas, vice president of market planning in healthcare business for data aggregations company LexisNexis Risk Solutions, answers three questions on emerging technologies and the trends driving industry changes.

Question: How will industry changes affect the role of patients in the coming years?

Shweta Vyas: With a shift to healthcare consumerism, patients are taking a more active role in their care. Patient portal adoption is at an all-time high. There is increased use of health-tracking apps and remote patient monitoring. Now, there's a push to task patients with managing all their medical records.

This all puts increased onus on healthcare organizations to ensure high standards on data quality, privacy and security. There are increased entry points for cyberattacks. There is increased risk of surfacing the wrong patient data to the wrong individual. 

As CMS challenges providers to solve the interoperability challenge, the question becomes how you strengthen data integrity and security in a world that is increasingly digital and patient-centric. The level of complexity increases substantially. Our recent focus group of hospital CIOs identified data security, interoperability and consumerism as their top three priorities for this year. All three challenges – and how the industry responds to them – will impact patients as they take on a greater role in their care in the coming years.  

Q: What technology has the potential to most greatly disrupt the healthcare industry today?

SV: Emergent technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence have numerous current and potential applications in healthcare. Our industry is usually slower to adopt innovations due to healthcare-specific concerns around privacy and patient safety. Still, multiple pilots are testing the blockchain's abilities in numerous applications, such as storing, sharing and using data across the care continuum. These include blockchain's ability to centralize patient records, facilitating better care coordination and patient record "ownership"; a provider credentialing approach to connect member entities and facilitate data exchange; as well as creating solutions for claims processing and secure payment transactions.

Similarly, AI is already being widely used to help providers better understand their patients, detect diseases earlier and with greater accuracy, and improve care coordination.

One thing will remain the same: the degree to which these technologies will benefit the industry is directly proportional to the quality of data they have to work with. Data quality is still the fundamental building block, and unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to driving high accuracy in data. Data changes frequently. An organization must take a deliberate and balanced approach, leveraging reference data, analytics and validation to maintain data that is trustworthy enough to enable these newer technologies. 

Q: What recent healthcare trend has had the most profound influence on the way your organization operates?

SV: The trend of using social determinants of health for care management. Medical care determines only 20 percent of overall health outcomes while social, economic and environmental factors determine 50 percent of overall health outcomes. The numbers are staggering, especially when you consider the greatest impact on our health comes from areas the healthcare industry has not traditionally had visibility into or addressed. With the current emphasis on value-based care, more and more healthcare organizations are beginning to see the need to treat the whole patient and not just the condition. We see a growing number of provider organizations and ACOs expanding their touchpoints with patients, complementing more traditional medical care, to ensure they are enabling the best health outcomes. With increased awareness of social determinants of health, there are more healthcare organizations partnering with home health organizations, Lyft/Uber, or jobs programs to meet the broader needs of patients.

The key for vendors like us is not just to provide access to social determinants of health data, but to truly make it actionable at the point of care. If someone is at higher risk for an adverse outcome, like getting readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of discharge, providers need to understand what is driving that risk, so they can engage in the right conversations and coordinate the right resources to hopefully change that outcome.

Although traditional approaches to care that rely on clinical and claims data are important, they do not provide that extra layer of insight that enables healthcare organizations to see the external influences creating barriers to improving patient health outcomes.

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