AMA Releases Blueprint for Optimizing Digitally Enabled Care
The American Medical Association (AMA) has released “Future of Health, Closing the Digital Health Disconnect: A Blueprint for Optimizing Digitally Enabled Care,” which was developed to help bridge the chasm between the potential of digital health and the reality of its impact and use today.
The blueprint, prepared by the AMA and Manatt Health with input from dozens of experts representing a range of stakeholders, is designed with six pillars to achieve optimized digitally enabled care:
- Build for patients and clinicians
- Design with an equity lens
- Recenter care around the patient-physician relationship
- Improve and adopt payment models that incentivize high-value care
- Create technologies and policies that reduce fragmentation
- Scale evidence-based models quickly
The blueprint includes opportunities for various healthcare stakeholders to contribute to the full optimization of digitally enabled care and includes case examples featuring organizations with care models that leverage the blueprint’s six pillars.
Opportunities for stakeholders include:
Physicians: Implement workflow tools that create efficiency and optimize care; participate in technology design and implementation; connect with peers; optimize EHRs; partner to extend capabilities
Health plans: Evaluate effectiveness of new models; offer equitable payment; better design VBP; enable equitable cost sharing to in-person services; require information sharing with members’ PCPs; simplify administrative burden
Employers: Incentivize employee relationships with PCPs; require information sharing with employees’ PCPs and adherence to quality metrics; develop multi-condition platforms; create on-site virtual care environments
Policy makers: Permanently extend telehealth flexibilities; increase broadband and effectiveness research funding; strengthen interoperability; support equitable coverage and payment of telehealth services
Health tech companies: Seek patient and provider input; center designs in health equity; simplify provider workflows; incorporate “privacy by design”; improve coordination with other providers
Venture capital and private equity funds: Direct investments to companies that work with incumbents to help ensure coordination of care and reduced fragmentation, address needs of vulnerable populations and perform efficacy research of their products.
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