Keeping pace with chronic condition management
Nearly 95% of older adults have at least one chronic condition, according to research from the National Council on Aging. Almost 80% have more than one condition. The effects of a chronic health condition are well-documented: limited mobility, cognitive impairment, mood shifts, and other issues that affect aging adults.
The byproducts of chronic health challenges quickly become personal — for aging adults and the communities that support them. Our CEO Drew Schiller co-founded Validic after his grandmother passed away from COPD complications:
“Later in life, alongside obesity and hypertension, my grandmother was diagnosed with COPD. It was this last condition that unfortunately ended her life. She was in her room at an assisted living facility when her lungs gave out, and she passed out before she was able to call for help.”
It’s this issue — and Drew’s passion for improving patient care — that motivate Validic toward helping providers address chronic conditions faster and more efficiently.
Outlining the chronic disease burden
As they work to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and differentiate in the market, clinical teams face two undeniable facts:
1. Chronic conditions are rising. An estimated 60% of adults in the U.S. have a chronic disease. 40% of adults face two or more diseases. Chronic disease is the leading driver of the $1.4 trillion increase in national patient care costs. Pain management alone accounts for $635 billion of that annual healthcare spending.
2. Providers have less time. 84% of doctors in one survey said they don’t have enough hours in the day to adequately treat their patients, according to a Sermo study. Long waits, brief appointments, and increasing bills also cause friction on the patient side of the healthcare experience.
The above Sermo study also paints a grim picture for clinical bandwidth. 98% of polled doctors cited inadequate time in the day as a main driving factor behind their current level of burnout. Alongside factors like increased work hours, lack of flexibility, and an uneven work-life balance, too few minutes in the day will force an estimated 20% of doctors out of the medical profession in the next two years.
Prescribing personalized care for chronic conditions
Personalized care programs represent the future of chronic condition management. They help solve for the individuality of each patient, an underlying challenge that limits the number of patients a doctor can see in a single day and the tailored, personalized care they can provide.
Each patient is different. They have different goals, and need different levels of care at different times. Without complete data on a patient’s condition — data captured outside the provider’s four walls — they’re forced to rely only on the data available at the time of the appointment.
Episodic data leads to episodic care. And episodic care isn’t working. Under the episodic care model, traditional patient-provider interactions lack important details, with patients trying their best to remember and communicate their concerns to already-overworked clinical teams.
Personalized care solves for this, providing care teams just the right amount of data needed to make informed clinical decisions and helping patients take a more active role in managing their chronic conditions. The remote patient data is integrated automatically into the EHR and presented in a format that is clear, concise, and actionable.
Chronic condition prevalence isn’t expected to slow over time. An estimated 99.5% of American adults will face at least one chronic condition by 2050. If the U.S. healthcare system intends to meet these rising demands, it will happen because hospitals and their providers innovate, not because chronic condition rates slow.
Healthcare organizations that have already implemented the personalized care model have already seen program-wide positive change. Delaware Valley Community Health improved average UDS hypertension metrics control scores across a high-acuity population during a global pandemic. A nationally renowned integrated delivery network achieved 74% patient stability across their heart failure population — while improving provider efficiency by more than 230%.
Personalized care is better for patients with chronic conditions, and it improves the efficiency of the providers who treat them.
If you’d like to learn more about how your healthcare organization can spend more time acting on patient data — and less time collecting and analyzing it — we’d love to get in touch. Email us at hello@validic.com or contact us here. You can also connect with us @Validic on X and LinkedIN.