On Wednesday, March 5, Mike McSherry, CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based Xealth, spoke at an educational session at the HIMSS annual conference about quantifying the value of digital health. Mainly, McSherry discussed Pittsburgh-based UPMC’s approach to establishing a framework for measuring the impact of its digital health tools and the results that they have shown.
“Digital health is a nebulous, amorphous term,” McSherry said at the start of the session. Quantifying and justifying the value thereof to stakeholders is key to ensuring that money is well spent and ensuring financial and economic benefits.
McSherry advised asking yourself the following questions: What are the KPIs? What are you measuring, and based on what? How do you gauge the service lines? How do you deploy something and get the service lines, the clinicians, the staff to adopt the solution and build it into the workflow so there’s a seamless patient and clinical experience?
McSherry informed that when a use case is deployed at UPMC, several lenses of measurement quantify the value of that digital health initiative. They will look at efficacy, value, and ROI. Clinical efficiency, optimizing time spent with a patient, infrastructure, and incorporation with the current IT system are all factors to consider. “When you have the infrastructure, you can do more.”
McSherry said UPCM has justified a large investment in its patient portal. UPCM built its own customized patient portal and had to justify increased usage that patients actually used it. UPMC wants more patients to use the app. There is value attached to every download.
