Transforming the Veteran’s Digital Health Experience
[Author:
TOM DOUGLAS | Executive Director, Digital Patient Support Solutions]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has released its Digital Healthcare Playbook, an essential guide to help accelerate digital transformation, encourage collaboration across disciplines, and ensure veteran patients have access to the most effective care whenever and wherever they need it.
We all too often hear stories about our armed service members not receiving adequate resources, nor the healthcare they need and deserve. The VA clearly recognizes the conversation needs to change, and industry partnerships can play an extremely important role to understand and meet veteran’s unique needs. We can help.
At Medocity, we are dedicated to supporting patients, their families, and the healthcare professionals who treat them throughout the journey. To best support our veterans, we must tie resources together to help them and their families seamlessly navigate the appropriate clinical services, understand their health needs, and obtain personalized medication management.
Medocity’s digital ecosystem aligns clinicians, educators and researchers in real time to work together to deliver exceptional, all-inclusive care for patients with chronic conditions, as veterans may need not only routine primary care, but also behavioral health and specialty care services.
To improve healthcare for this underserved and deserving population, we advocate approaches that focus on the following 5 key areas:
1. Provide more accessible access
By expanding access across both virtual and in-person care options, doors are opened to essential treatments and provide options for military members and their families. Access is important to all individuals, but for veterans, such options could be the difference from suffering with an untreated chronic illness to living a more healthful life.
2. Educate
Knowledge is power, and education can fuel the patient journey. Whether it starts in the ER, ambulatory facility or their PCP’s office, providing our veterans, their caregivers and families with information and resources to support their care back in their homes is crucial to empowering and engaging these patients. Such care can extend beyond with the medication reminders and disease state education that integrated care platforms like Medocity’s can seamlessly provide. By digitally connecting with the patient, challenges are better understood and addressed in real-time, and care logistics are efficiently coordinated.
3. Deliver Value
The needs of veterans, active military and their families are unique. Veterans can battle homelessness, mental health issues and service-related diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Consequently, they may need a more integrated approach to their care than most to achieve effective outcomes. The early detection and proactive intervention provided by the Medocity platform is also designed to lower the total cost of treatment, while connecting with the veteran patient how, when and where it matters the most.
4. Be Impactful
Caring for veterans means you are also caring for their families. The Medocity platform can be deployed to capture real-time digital feedback listening channels to capture the voice of the veteran, family members, caregivers, and survivors. Access to this crucial information in real time can help providers address patients’ immediate and short-term treatment needs sooner. It can also lead to long-term system improvements from the actionable insights the platform collects about the specific encounters veterans experience at the point of care.
5. Spread awareness
Healthcare organizations are already entrenched in the overall community. The Medocity platform can be an excellent foundation to announce programs and services to various advocacy leaders and veteran’s groups.
At Medocity, we focus on helping organizations embrace Digital First strategies, solutions, and approaches. By synthesizing patient-centric information with the power of Medocity’s Digital Care Platform, connected ecosystems, analytics, machine-learning, and artificial intelligence, we can effectively support the VA’s mission to provide the best care anywhere. And continuous improvement can be achieved with real-time, data-driven feedback to VA leadership and employees to understand and improve the veteran patient experience.
To learn more and/or schedule a product demo, contact Tom Douglas at tdouglas@medocity.com