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Patients Need to be the Priority in Health Care Value Initiatives

Joshua Hoffman
April 7, 2015

The health care industry's technological revolution has settled a bit recently and the focus has been less on driving technical innovation and more on creating value through industry advances. This is a place where business process management technologies come into play, as using BPM as a code-free application development platform can give business users the freedom they need to align processes and technologies to optimize operations. In the end, the goal for health care companies is to drive efficiency so that staff can focus on patients.

According to a recent report from The Hill, this patient-focused goal has slipped to the back burner in some recent conversations about health care reform, but it is time to renew the focus on the patient experience.

Value creation is a major priority in the health care sector.

Creating value for patients

The news source explained that approximately $2.9 trillion is spent annually on health care in the United States, and there is a consensus that we need to find better ways to get more from our spending. This consensus exists across all levels of the health care industry, but up to this point, most of the conversations about value have focused on areas like research, care delivery and payment collection. All too often, patients are not really part of the conversation, and that needs to change.

"Health care companies need to drive efficiency so they can focus on patients."

Principles like accountable care operational models and patient-focused drug development are clear examples of how patient-focused value creation is possible, but these areas of the industry tend to get less attention. Accountable care, for example, focuses on reducing the number of tests patients are put through in an effort to make patients more comfortable, focus diagnosis processes and deliver higher quality throughout the chain of care, all while reducing costs. These types of operational models focus on creating value from the patient's perspective. Improving value across the entire health care sphere is critical, and emphasizingpatient-centric value is key in this process.

Using BPM to create value

BPM tools started out as process optimization and automation technologies that help organizations remove tedious operations to empower their staff to work as effectively as possible. This is still a huge component of the BPM industry, but the sector is also putting an increased emphasis on code-free development. This shift lets users easily customize apps and services to build process management functions into the different services they use. In health care, this can mean automatically passing key processes relating to patient care between different stakeholders within a health network, creating value for all stakeholders.