Is Vision Overrated?

Like 40,000 other health IT professionals, I’m traveling to the HIMSS Conference and Exhibition in Orlando this weekend. My ambitious agenda for HIMSS17 includes participating in the Digital & Personal Connected Health Forum, attending lots of educational sessions, meeting with health system professionals, and walking the exhibition floor. The cross-country flight gave me an opportunity to catch up on some reading, where these three words in a KLAS white paper caught my eye: “Vision is overrated.”

I read the words a few times and then continued with the rest of the white paper, but kept coming back to that idea. Is vision really overrated? For people like me who are passionate about healthcare in general and patient engagement in particular, it’s exciting to hear about innovative ideas that have the potential to radically change the industry. But at a KLAS summit to define core competencies for population health tools and identify challenges to population health IT deployments, leading provider organizations made it very clear that the time has come for more than big ideas. The KLAS report says: Many if not most vendors today have a great vision of where population health is going; however, providers are looking for real wins in the present. While big ideas are still important, it’s time to deliver on our vision.

Those of us who are providing solutions for patient engagement and population health management need to show health systems how they can achieve real results as they transition to patient-centered care. At Wildflower Health, patient engagement tools have been our sole focus since 2012. Initially, we worked with health plans and employers to support healthy pregnancies through mobile engagement. Over time, our scope and solutions have evolved to include patient access and care coordination, so that now our Grow platform manages the full spectrum of family health, connecting consumers directly to health systems for care at precisely the right time. Our vision to grow healthy families has always been based on our belief that connecting families to the healthcare system can promote healthier, happier lives. Wildflower Health delivers on that vision today. Since the release of our Grow platform in 2016, our early results show high, ongoing engagement among consumers who download our app and connect directly with resources and services offered by our hospital clients. Here are just a few examples of the “real wins” our clients are experiencing:

• One community hospital converted 70 percent of consumers who downloaded the Grow app to active users, with more than 65 percent of users connecting to local health resources via our client-branded milestones.
• A large high-tech company is connecting more than 60 percent of its employees to health benefits and resources every month.
• At a large national health plan, 64 percent of users view benefits details and resources, with 50 percent responding to in-app Health Risk Assessment questions.

This week at HIMSS, I’ll be running full-speed from one session to another. I’m looking forward to informative discussions about connected health, and conversations with other attendees who not only share Wildflower Health’s vision for patient-centered care, but also our commitment to building patient engagement tools that deliver real results. Feel free to contact me to discuss how your hospital system can benefit from those tools. Connie Phelps is Vice President of Hospital Solutions at Wildflower Health.