What’s Going On in the Market?
Healthcare provider organizations have benefited from greater levels of digital maturity, including addressing improvements in processes, work experiences, and productivity enabled by digital/IT solutions. Providers continue to expand the unlocking of available enterprise data centric to patient care, applying analytics, AI/ML, and other data techniques to said data, creating visibility and insight never before possible.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally,[1] making the therapeutic area one of critical importance for treatment, prevention, clinical trials, and wellness services from providers. When it comes to cardiovascular services, health systems are actively working on strategies to achieve and improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes through investments in technology, expertise, sites, and more.
Frost & Sullivan has observed an expansion of thinking around the patient care pathway in the market, improved identification of patients for specific treatments or procedures, and the need to intervene under population health and care management philosophies changing the way or with what aspect of healthcare services a patient may encounter in their healthcare experiences.
Cardiovascular Services are Immensely Complex
Cardiovascular services are immensely complex as a service line[2] (CVSL) in terms of provider clinical staff involved, site and setting locations, and patient data (including structured and unstructured). When it comes to health IT, both at an organizational level and tied to any major therapeutic area, decision-makers are overloaded with various software solutions. This often makes it difficult for provider organizations to determine what investments need to be made to improve services and the best overall potential roadmap for them to take. Even before thinking about “solutions”, it is still a challenge for many to understand effectively what is going on, in a grounded form, from available data.
Improving Cardiovascular Care Delivery
In transforming cardiovascular care delivery, a digitally enabled approach is the next phase to move things forward. Leading companies involved in this area that support providers think about this challenge at the cardiovascular disease level, working with organizations to understand where they are and achieve where they would like to be.
Important areas of thinking by providers include:
- Looking across their patient population in a holistic view
- Identifying patients who may need further help or treatment in advance of them having a particular cardiovascular adverse event
- Closing the loop on cardiology-centric incidental findings from patients captured in acute care
- Encouraging referrals
- Improving performance operationally, clinically, and financially
Success Points
A first step in Frost & Sullivan’s view is assessing the current state from available enterprise data across clinical and non-clinical IT sources. Data aggregation, unification, or just unlocking data is an important task to achieve and can be a hurdle for many organizations.
As part of recent discussions related to this topic, we spoke with Brian Maher, MPH, Vice President, Business Development from Biome, who shared that despite most cardiovascular service lines being “data rich”, the data to which they have access are incredibly challenging to use in practice. The act of bringing disparate data sets together in and of itself is oftentimes a significant hurdle, particularly for health care systems that do not have the technological capabilities and/or IT resource bandwidth to complete the necessary work. This underscores the need to have close partnerships with data and analytics vendors to equip CV service line leaders with the necessary tools to achieve top performance.
“We believe that data in aggregate is just data. You must have action associated with it. We feel incredibly strongly in our ability to serve as “force multiplier” to help move health systems and cardiology service lines forward. Not only do we provide health systems with never-before-seen insights into the health of their cardiovascular service line and identify areas that are problematic, but we also work collaboratively with key stakeholders to drive performance management initiatives.” ‒ Brian Maher, MPH, Vice President, Business Development, Biome
Patient identification is a crucial focus in the market right now to more easily identify and find patients who are eligible for a clinical trial study, as well as make physicians aware of trials that could apply to patients under their care. This need is deeply aligned with the use of a digitally enabled strategy and enterprise data utility, including data analytics, for better outcomes.
We also recently spoke with Jessica Neufeld, Chief Operating Officer from egnite, who discussed the company’s platform and how they are helping providers in cardiovascular care in this regard.
“We will automatically map in inclusion/exclusion criteria from structured data sets to go from a patient population of, let’s say 150,000 patients that the hospital currently serves to the 84 who meet all 23 inclusion/exclusion criteria and are walking the halls of the hospital. We can make it easy for them by making that data accessible. What we found is that through deploying this type of data-driven approach, we’ve been able to increase trial enrollment by 50% within six months.” ‒ Jessica Neufeld, Chief Operating Officer, egnite
Many other factors enable successful outcomes in optimizing the CVSL. Important concepts include finding the right clinician or administrator to champion the initiative, getting support from stakeholders from the top of the CVSL down to those on the floor with patients (e.g., nurses), training, willingness to work with an external partner on improvements, and establishing a philosophy for proactive management of the cardiovascular patient population.
Outlook
Cardiovascular diseases are a top priority investment area of healthcare services. Provider organizations are assessing how to best deliver cardiovascular services in personnel, technology, data, and infrastructure. It is paramount for leadership teams to create a strategy enabled by the right digital tools, services, and partners to help with today’s delivery of care while also preparing for what is both desired and potentially unexpected tomorrow. Such an approach will transform the patient experiences in cardiovascular care and that of the cardiovascular service line.
As part of our work on this blog, Frost & Sullivan thanks the following companies for their time and insights. If you are interested to learn more about their work enabling the optimization of cardiovascular care, please see:
egnite
Biome
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[1] World Health Organization Cardiovascular Diseases Fact Sheet. Last accessed August 2024 at https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cardiovascular-diseases-(cvds)
[2] Biesbrock, G., Sauer, J. (2018). The High-Performing Cardiovascular Service Line: Evolving Leadership and Governance in the Value Economy. Cardiac Interventions Today. Last accessed August 2024 at https://citoday.com/articles/2018-mar-apr/the-high-performing-cardiovascular-service-line-evolving-leadership-and-governance-in-the-value-economy
