➤ Healthcare providers are looking at ways to integrate technology that can harness patient data to improve health outcomes.

➤ Providers see potential in new software and cloud-based services that can improve physicians' use of the electronic medical record system.

➤ Real-time location monitoring could change how patients receive care outside the hospital.

Formed in 2014, ConvergeHEALTH is a unit of Deloitte Consulting LLP that provides platforms for life sciences and healthcare companies to improve patient experiences. These offerings include MyPath for Hospital in Home, which joins together cloud-based and analytics technologies to monitor and coordinate acute care in patients' homes, and MyPath for Clinical, which accelerates digital clinical trials.

ConvergeHEALTH's chief technology officer, Jay Compton, who is also a managing director with Deloitte Consulting, spoke to S&P Global Market Intelligence about the new technologies that U.S. healthcare providers are adopting to make better use of data and monitor patients away from the clinic. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

S&P Global Market Intelligence: How prepared are healthcare providers for implementing digital tools into their systems?

Jay Compton: Providers have spent an egregious amount of time investing in the [electronic medical record] and expecting it to be the be-all-end-all platform that all end-users are going to engage with, and that has not been realized to this point. What the EMR serves as is a system of records for clinical experiences for an individual with a certain provider. So provider systems are beginning to realize that there is a whole host of technology available to us today that can be an uplift to what the EMR is very good at doing and can contribute additional capabilities and services.

Lastly, providers are beginning to realize the value of software-as-a-service and cloud-based systems so that there is less capital expenditure, and it's more of an operational expense to implement new technology that they may not have the time, capacity or staff to manage. So it gives the provider a much easier trajectory to implement new and innovative capabilities into their systems to better serve their customers.

Are healthcare systems more interested in digital tools that are patient-centric or improve internal processes?

A couple of years ago, anecdotally, that first foray into creating a better healthcare experience for all stakeholders was looking at what the person's digital experience was. Everyone was building their own digital experience, which complicates healthcare's ecosystem because individuals are then expected to be able to interact across multiple interfaces [and] their data resides in different places. So the experiences became fractured because the data was fractured.

Fast forward a little and suddenly you have standards bodies like Health Level Seven Inc. creating standard data formats, then regulatory bodies like [the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] began to establish standards. That really is when things started to change ... to enable data to be exchanged and used in a way that benefited a consumer or provider more effectively.

Many digital tools have been accelerated by the pandemic. Which are you most excited about for the future?

Real-time location monitoring is super interesting to me because the technology has come far enough where we can create systems within the home, within hospitals and within other facilities to help a network of providers understand how an individual is doing. [It] creates an interaction model that's different than we've had in the past.

It's not just expecting me as a [patient] to log into a mobile app and do a survey and log that I've taken my meds and so on. It's actually able to do that on my behalf and then feed it directly into the clinical systems that are relevant so that when I see a provider or see them on a video conference, they can look at the progress that I'm making, or not, and adjust my care plan as needed. That's really powerful because it allows hospitals to have an air traffic control system to better manage devices, people and services.

The next passion point of mine is looking at how we increase an individual's well-being, using the same facility. So you have socio-economic ... determinants of health, and really being able to create a complete view for an individual based on the computational power that we have at our disposal today, and leverage that to give people the ability to live their best life.

Those are some of the things that are newer to the market but are definitely going to make a huge difference in the future.

How do you mitigate security and privacy concerns with the technologies you've described?

Security has to be defined as a first-class citizen and a feature of everything that happens within that system so that we can make sure that providers, individuals, payers and any other stakeholders are comfortable that the right level of security is there, all the regulatory requirements are met, and that the consumers' best interests are kept in mind.