Holistic Decision-Making in a Digitalized Health-Care Environment
In today’s digitalized health-care environment, the quality of decision-making tremendously depends on the quality and availability of the underlying data. Smart data integration can make a major contribution and help to increase the quality of decision-making, especially in health care, where clinical decision makers face multiple barriers and challenges along the patient pathway. Complex health-care decisions may fail because data is inaccessible or too extensive to evaluate, information is overlooked or guidelines are ignored, which can lead to inefficient and costly workflows and compromised clinical outcomes.
In medicine, decisions have a clear goal: the health of the patient. These decisions are shaped by professional standards, expert knowledge, the wishes of the patient and therapeutic possibilities. In today’s health-care environment, achieving this goal increasingly depends on the smart use of medical data. The continuously expanding, multidimensional health data from electronic medical records, image databases and other multilayered, often fragmented IT systems is becoming more and more important in making up-to-date, patient-oriented decisions and designing care processes accordingly.
Of course, not all medical decisions are necessarily difficult. There are uncomplicated health-care situations in which professional medical knowledge is sufficient to find an expedient solution; decisions are then straightforward. However, decision-making becomes more complex as the number of diagnoses and treatment options increase, and as the amount of relevant patient data and risk of possible complications grow [CMS – Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2020), Evaluation and management services guide (MLN booklet)].
The challenge in this case is to integrate a wide range of data from a variety of sources—such as clinical, radiological or laboratory information, genetic and pathological findings and insights into behavioral and social conditions—in such a way that medical decisions meet the highest possible quality standards and take into consideration the personal situation and preferences of the patient. Medical decisions occur along the continuum of care, from initial clinical contact to follow-up.
Health-care providers need to address these questions:
• What needs to be done diagnostically and therapeutically?
• How can I use my resources in the process efficiently?
• With whom should I share information and coordinate to achieve the best possible outcome for the patient?
Digital technologies can potentially improve decision-making in all these dimensions and provide valuable decision support along the patient pathway. Complex decisions may fail for various reasons: patient data might simply not be accessible or too extensive and unstructured; information might be overlooked; or guidelines might not be sufficiently executed. These challenges can be solved with a scalable and flexible digital platform that has the ability to gather patient data from various sources, and provides caretakers with easy access to data across all touchpoints of a patient’s journey—ultimately providing a more comprehensive picture of the patient and supporting holistic medical decision-making enriched by smart data integration.
To achieve this goal, today’s IT architectures must be enabled to grow along with changing needs and constantly evolve. The Siemens Healthineers digital health platform, for example, is a flexible tool that leverages the increasing importance of health care data. Its integrated marketplace provides one-stop access to a growing number of proprietary as well as curated and pre-vetted partner applications, enabling advanced and customized digitalization for a wide range of health-care providers and care situations.
Digitalization is not only a matter of technology, but also conception. For medicine to fully harness the increasing abundance and complexity of health data, a threefold paradigm change is necessary:
• First, health-care providers need a digital infrastructure that is as simple as possible, yet versatile and adaptable—ideally as a system-wide platform for networking data.
• Second, intelligent applications are needed that can meaningfully prepare networked data for specific operational and clinical scenarios.
• Third, although digitalization is changing the very nature of medical decision-making itself, medical decisions will continue to be the responsibility of doctors and patients. Nevertheless, individuals involved in the care process will increasingly have to make use of advanced digital decision support to bring today’s wealth of data into their deliberations and use it in a beneficial way.
We believe that medicine in the future will increasingly leverage data science. Flexibility will prove to be the greatest asset in a digital world, and a flexible platform capable of integrating more and more data will be key to increasing the quality of decision-making.
