InnomarLive Summary: Healthcare Innovation

Key takeaways from the session included:

Sandra Anderson, VP of Consulting and Business Development at Innomar Strategies, kicked off the day by introducing keynote speaker Alex Muggah, Director of Synapse Life Science Consortium. Alex inspired the audience with the concept of clusters, interconnected and supporting organizations that operate within a geographic region, and their value in forming an innovative healthcare ecosystem. He concluded with a few important messages:

Innovation requires the collaboration and commitment from a diverse group of key stakeholders
Innovation clusters help shape regional competitiveness, as corporate leaders we can become key catalysts in strengthening our regional cluster

As the day progressed, three key themes emerged throughout the presentations: navigation of our healthcare ecosystem; fragmentation and custodianship of patient data; and engagement with today’s informed and digitally connected patient.

Navigating the Canadian Healthcare Ecosystem

Patient navigation of our complex Canadian healthcare ecosystem is difficult due to the variety of stakeholders, perspectives, and regulatory bodies. Samuel Duboc, Chair and CEO of Mind BEACON and CBT Associates reinforced this notion by stating that even as a member of the healthcare ecosystem, including his work to create and launch the BEACON digital mental health platform, he had a hard time navigating the system as a patient.

Kristy Dickenson, Patient, Founder and CEO of Chronically Simple, experienced this complexity first hand after being diagnosed with a rare disease. She found herself attempting to organize her appointments, medications, and overwhelming volume of medical records and test results that she needed to share with her circle of care. Understanding that her experience mirrored that of others, she collaborated with patients and caregivers to build a digital tool that would empower patients to take control of their healthcare by integrating all of their personal data, working around the gaps in the system.

Fragmentation and Custodianship of Data

Patient health records are currently siloed among prescribers, pharmacies, hospitals and government. Ali Mir, Managing Principal of Telus Health, Dennis Giokas, CIO at MedChart Inc., and Ontario MD CEO, Sarah Hutchison, all made it clear that fragmented and disparate data sources are one of the key obstacles that we face in Canadian healthcare. With an average patient over 65 seeing 8 different physicians in one year, and no single source for sharing those medical files across physicians, we are impeding our ability to access timely and relevant information at the time of patient interaction.

Ned Pojskic, Pharmacy Strategy Leader at Green Shield Canada flagged that with the increased popularity of remote delivery of healthcare services using digital technology, we are introducing the additional risk of fragmentation of care, as these apps do not inform the primary physician of the outcome of remote consultations.

The custodianship and privacy of the data was another hurdle that was explored. Healthcare data ownership is spread across hospitals, clinics, physicians, and multiple jurisdictions. This makes it very difficult to link records to a single source and to provide continuity of care for the patient. Laura Crestohl, Senior Health Policy Advisor, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, explored the risks and privacy policies when sharing personal health information between custodians, especially through less secure channels such as email.

Ian Lording, Group Director, Pharmacy Relations at Canada Health Infoway took the audience through how Canada Health Infoway is creating digital health solutions to help Canadian patients and healthcare providers to access personal health information and to provide safer access to medications through e-prescribing. Ian stressed that a high level of standardization was crucial to work with different jurisdictions to ensure that a single solution could meet varied regulatory requirements, and a governance model must be carefully designed to provide leadership and accountability.

Bridging these silos and developing a safe and integrated view of the data will allow for more robust data analytics, will improve early intervention, and provide more informed treatment for chronic diseases.

Engaged and Informed Patients

The digital evolution is changing the way we engage and communicate with patients and healthcare providers, and helps enable patients to take a leadership role in their healthcare. Virtual care, remote monitoring, and disease prevention and management apps can help to empower patients and bridge communication gaps between the clinician and patient from diagnosis to ongoing treatment.

There is a lot of interest among payers in digital health interventions to help educate and improve the health of their plan members. Ryan Weiss, Assistant VP, Great-West Life explained that it is a new, complex era for payers as they need to factor in generational considerations by addressing the needs of millennial, baby boomers and everyone in between through their engagement tools. With the anticipated volume of baby boomers entering the healthcare system, payers are exploring such things as incentivizing healthy living to promote a change in behaviour towards preventative care; and for younger generations, the use of digital technologies such as predictive analytics to deliver context-based messaging and personalized member care to enable their plan members.

Clinicians are also having to make changes to how they manage their practices based on today’s highly informed and educated patient. Dr. Sacha Bhatia, Director, Women’s College Hospital Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care discussed how his patients have access to the same research and reports online that physicians do, have heart rate monitors on their watches, and expect the same level of communication from their physicians as they do with other service providers (e.g. text, email, chat.) This can mean more patient self-diagnosis, and increased expectations for a physician response outside of office hours, creating a time and care management problem that they have not experienced before. We need to think of patients as consumers and adjust our communications as they become more and more knowledgeable about their healthcare.

This forum was important to keep industry members ahead of the rapidly changing healthcare landscape. Understanding the patient, physician and health system needs and challenges is key to building optimal engagement strategies that will ultimately help to improve patient care and health outcomes.