Beyond the Buzzwords: Does Your Integrated Healthcare Platform Deliver?

If you Google “integrated healthcare platform” your search will deliver dozens of companies and consultants offering their services or solutions. There are many companies adept at pointing out what’s wrong in an organization. But revealing vulnerabilities accomplishes only half the battle if these companies don’t then provide solutions for solving those problems.

It’s like a doctor telling a patient, “You’ve got diabetes” and then ushering them out the door without a care plan.

There’s also no shortage of companies that offer solutions without taking the time to diagnose the problem. And while traditional training and educational opportunities often promise performance improvement from their “integrated solution,” they do it without pinpointing the most important issues and understanding the skill and knowledge gaps of each individual caregiver. How can that kind of one-size-fits-all approach help anyone get better? In other words, when was the last time a provider offered a prescription for an undiagnosed ailment?

At Relias, we’ve been talking to healthcare organizations across the country and hearing firsthand how many of these “integrated solutions” may check the box on learning hours, but don’t sustainably change behavior and improve performance.

We’ve striven to help our clients understand better their most critical issues and areas for improvement, and then help to address them. It’s our own form of “integrated care” and we think it’s as crucial to the health of your organization as your efforts to address the continuum of your patient needs.

Improving Performance Improvement

Ultimately the goal of any integrated healthcare platform is to improve your team’s performance and deliver better clinical and financial outcomes. Organizations fall short of these objectives either because their solution is not comprehensive or because their efforts don’t result in true sustainable behavior change. Without changing the behavior of your teams, you won’t eliminate the variation that’s impacting their performance.

An important part of our company culture at Relias is to constantly seek change and improvement, not least because we recognize that healthcare is in a state of constant change, and that means that you and your organizations have to address one issue after another in your goals to effect change and improvement.

We studied change management and structured our process to incorporate the motivational incentives that providers respond to. Our planning tools are evidence-based, keying off of each organization’s data and specific goals. Our skills assessment capabilities and learning modules are built on the science of adult learning. We’re not about long shots or taking chances — our process is proven to bring about behavior change in a transparent, measurable, continuous cycle.

Solutions That Solve Problems

Healthcare organizations are as individual as their patients, clients or residents. Our solution has to be applicable in multiple settings for multiple healthcare situations such as large hospital systems, behavioral health clinics, acute and post-acute care, hospices and home health. Our approach helps uncover and understand their specific issues and then assess the strengths of the individuals on their staff. The results of those assessments inform personalized learning to help change problematic behavior. Personalized learning means taking each learner down a path that adapts to their knowledge and knowledge gaps, skills and skill gaps, and how consistently they apply their skills. We don’t waste learners’ time by teaching them what they’ve already demonstrated mastery of; that just frustrates them and dilutes the overall effectiveness of the learning.

So, for example, in the Obstetrics department of a health system, we can help identify which physicians have higher rates of C-sections in certain risk populations.  Then we can assess what’s leading to this situation and incentivize the appropriate providers with personalized learning to improve their performance — and not waste their time.

The same applies, to, say, a behavioral health program where we can uncover critical insights into treating depression. Or in a senior care facility where variation in wound care could lead to costly re-admissions. The problems are different so the specific training is personalized to address those needs, but our approach is the same: we help team members learn more so that each individual can get better.

True Continuing Education

Another key pillar of the Relias approach is that we don’t believe that we’re ever finished “solving” problems. Performance improvement is an ongoing process so we build in ongoing performance management reporting, continuous assessment and, of course, additional personalized education opportunities into our integrated platform.

Patient populations are constantly changing and it’s unrealistic to think that continuous optimization isn’t needed. Take for example our opioid learning path. We’re currently finalizing robust content modules that can support both behavioral health organizations and acute care centers; rehab facilities and public safety institutions. Each of them have different patient populations to be sure, but those populations are evolving as we learn more about how we can be part of battling this public health crisis.

Why Does This Matter?

In the end, we’re about helping people know more about their organization, the people in their care, and their performance. As we help them know more, we help everyone get better.