Dr. Graham Gardner, Founder and CEO, Kyruus Health—a leading care access platform on a mission to connect people to the right care.
Navigating healthcare is overwhelming.
Providers with different kinds of expertise practice across multiple care settings. Insurance coverages offer varied benefits but opaque costs. Consumer preferences and context are too often ignored. Technologies designed to connect it all instead lack integration and alignment. Each represents puzzle pieces that must come together to complete even a single healthcare journey.
How those pieces come together (or don’t) profoundly impacts patients. World-class surgery is wasted without access. Benefit designs are irrelevant if patients don’t understand them, can’t afford them and don’t use them. Stand-alone applications add complexity and confusion—isolating data in silos and fracturing what should be an informed and transparent care experience. Without a coordinating platform, we cannot fully contribute our expertise.
Many of us have devoted our lives to improving the healthcare system—whether as clinicians, investors, administrators or technologists. Perhaps understandably, much of our focus is on the contours of our own puzzle piece instead of the overall picture. At times, we even compete with each other, denying access to data or workflows as a mechanism to grow our individual pieces.
It’s Time For A Care Access Platform
I believe there is a better way. As a clinician, I saw patients struggle to access the care they needed, and I’ve dedicated my career—from practicing physician to healthcare entrepreneur—to helping solve this lack of access to care.
I also believe that we all bring different gifts to the world. When given the time and resources to develop those gifts, we have an opportunity to contribute in unique and powerful ways. Evidence of this exists all around us—in sports, where teams use statistics to build line-ups that leverage each player’s talents, and in medicine, where we seek out counsel from colleagues trained in different specialties. Similarly, each of us working across healthcare brings something that can improve the overall experience. We simply need a way of collaborating together. We need a care access platform.
The Four Components Of A Care Access Platform
A care access platform helps collect, organize, and provide access to the data and workflows necessary to deliver optimal care journeys for people everywhere. It is built on a premise (and a promise) that there is a path for everyone to access the care they need. A path that solves for each constituent and, in the process, delivers a care experience that rewards each stakeholder for the role they play.
There are four essential components to a care access platform.
Provider data management. Because patients can receive care from different kinds of providers across retail, virtual and in-person settings, the platform must catalog conditions suitable for each care setting in a standardized, accessible, transparent and governed way. This helps patients find clinically appropriate, in-network providers matching their demographic, geographic and personal preferences.
Search. Patients need transparent, understandable and actionable options when scheduling care. Preferences might vary for a long-term relationship with a primary care provider versus elective procedures. Patients must easily sort through real-time options based on what is important to them.
Connectivity. Each healthcare constituent must be able to platform either a data, workflow vendor or care destination. Standard ontologies and robust APIs enable information sharing to ensure the right information and actions are connected to the available care origin.
Analytics. Real-time feedback on capacity, flow and outcomes provides insights into consumer behavior and utilization, analyzes trends and refines providers’ approaches. Different members of the care ecosystem often lack the ability to understand supply-and-demand dynamics and the value of the service they provide within the overall context. Only with feedback can each provider optimize how they contribute to care.
Healthcare Trends Support The Need For A Platform
Given recent trends in healthcare, integrating data, features and workflow is critical. Digital health funding nearly quadrupled between 2019 and 2021, from $8.1 to $29.2 billion. This has resulted in dozens of solutions focusing on specific parts of a patient’s healthcare journey. These offerings frequently enrich the experience for previously underserved populations but can simultaneously fragment the patient experience.
When these companies fight to occupy parts of the journey instead of partnering together, patients must either work across disparate systems or compromise and accept a suboptimal experience. There are no “winners take all” in healthcare. We clinicians learn this very quickly when caring for patients: Healthcare is too complex to go it alone—you need help from your colleagues—colleagues who all put the health of the patient first.
A care access platform allows different constituents to contribute to the journey in different ways and at different times. In the same way that an infectious disease specialist and orthopedic surgeon can collaborate to diagnose the cause of postoperative fever, a health plan and provider must collaborate to close gaps in care. A virtual behavioral health company can offer compelling access to important therapy—but only if visible to a member researching options on their health plan directory.
When everyone works on a healthcare puzzle together, everyone benefits. Providers practice at the top of their license—caring for patients for whom they are uniquely trained. Payers help route patients to high-quality, cost-effective care destinations that may sometimes lie outside the four walls of a health system. Retail and virtual offerings are accessible to the people for whom their offering is uniquely tailored. Pharmaceutical companies can inform patients of new and better therapies—and ensure they can find the right providers to administer that care. But most importantly, patients have access to the information and workflows that they need to make the right choice for themselves.
For that to happen, patients don’t just need the right doctor. They need the right us—providers, payers and solutions vendors sharing data and capabilities to deliver the care that patients need and deserve. Let’s start putting our puzzle pieces together, finding ways to build off each other’s contours and construct a better path for patients.
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