Integrating the experience: Principles for digital transformation across the patient journey

As medical science advances and the population ages, the prevalence of chronic conditions has also grown. The traditional model of care, with its focus on acute and episodic issues within the office visit, is not designed to meaningfully address long-term patient needs. With COVID-19 has come unprecedented digital adoption, bringing health care delivery to a critical juncture. While digital tools and technologies present vast opportunities for democratizing and decentralizing care experiences, their piecemeal application to the existing “sick care” model and its information technology infrastructure will not only limit their value, but will inevitably add cost, inefficiency, and burden to care teams. In order to build upon this momentum and reap the full benefits of practice digitization, care model transformation must occur. This entails holistically reexamining how every component of the health care experience, from the digital tools to visit interactions, synchronizes to address the full continuum of patient needs throughout the journey. By doing this, care shifts away from one-size-fits-all, fragmented strings of visits, toward seamless experiences that adapt to patients’ needs in real-time while integrating within their daily lives. Rather than acting as a substitute for care, technology instead is vital to promoting and amplifying the impact of all those involved. To achieve this, this paper outlines 10 principles for restructuring care to incorporate digital health capabilities. Each describes how all care model components work as a system that aligns with patient needs. By doing this, technology is now an integral in supporting relationships across the full continuum of care.