Introducing Outcomes Network: A Community-driven Approach to Improve Digital Health Adoption and Health Equity
Kyloon Chuah and Carlos Rodarte
This post is Part Two of a series discussing our vision and motivation at Veriteos to dramatically transform the experience of healthcare at a population-scale.
In Part One, we wrote about our thoughts on what consumerizing the experience of healthcare entails. Since our founding, we’ve engaged in hundreds of discussions with digital health entrepreneurs, healthcare payor executives, community health organizations and many other stakeholders within the US healthcare ecosystem. As a follow up post, we look to share our learnings on the immense challenges currently faced by digital health companies in achieving widespread patient adoption with sustained engagement, as well as explore our thesis on how we aim to meaningfully improve health-related outcomes by enabling digital health companies to reach their patients with a localized and community-driven approach.
Today, the typical go-to-market path for most digital health companies involves an arduous courtship process to identify and establish commercial relationships with their intended customers (e.g. insurance payors, self-insured employers, etc.), implement pilots for a limited subgroup of patients, develop relevant clinical and financial evidence, before finally achieving adoption at scale by the broader intended patient population. This gradual de-risking, albeit resource-intensive and time-consuming process is in addition to the expectation of digital health companies to actually develop and deliver effective and easy-to-use products for their ultimate end users — patients with unmet needs. As a result, this puts most of the innovative digital health solutions out of reach for most patients that are not covered by major health plans or large employers.
To fix this, we think it is prudent to expand access to digital health products via a bottom-up, community-based approach, with a strong focus on ensuring health equity. This presents an opportunity for all stakeholders to measure and quantify the true social impact from clinical outcomes achieved within a diverse population like in the US, which is especially relevant in the effort to transform our healthcare system to be more proactive rather than reactive to patient needs.
However, we heard a different tale from regional payors, small providers and other health promoting organizations. Despite having a deep understanding of their care population’s clinical and social needs, these organizations lack the technology and resources to effectively adopt digital health solutions, as well as worry about incurring wasted expenditure due to unmet expectations in terms of outcomes. Nonetheless, they have the advantage in delivering high quality and personalized care for their patients by leveraging strong referral networks and trusted homegrown services within their local area. We believe that these organizations have the ability to multiply their impact on health and social outcomes within their communities in a significant way, if only they are given access to tools enabled by modern technology to help them succeed.
All the above insights strengthened our conviction that we are on the right path to deliver on our ambitious mission — to enable our healthcare system to efficiently transact based on outcomes.
In this context, we are excited to introduce the Outcomes Network — a community of outcomes-centric Digital Health Companies and Health Promoting Organizations that share a collective mission of enabling access to affordable and effective digital health solutions to traditionally underserved patient communities.
Outcomes Network is the first logical step towards unlocking more inclusive commercialization paths for the digital health industry. The Outcomes Network is designed to be a mechanism for Digital Health Companies and Health Promoting Organizations to collaborate more effectively, serve a more diverse set of patients regardless of socioeconomic status, collect a more complete representation of outcomes data, and ultimately enable risk-aligned payment and reimbursement models based on outcomes performance.
Members of the Outcomes Network are committed to measuring what truly matters to people in participating communities — not just direct clinical outcomes. This includes social determinants of health, financial wellbeing, etc. that have the ability to drive higher individual engagement, better standard of living, and reduce cost to our healthcare system in the long run.
We are excited to see how the Outcomes Network can massively improve adoption of digital health in the community setting. Digital health companies will no longer have to deprioritize access expansion to potential customers that cover the long tail of fragmented patient communities in favor of large payors and integrated delivery networks.
Stay tuned as we will be announcing some of the inaugural members of the Outcomes Network and highlighting the Veriteos Software Platform — a technology enablement layer that complements the Outcomes Network by catalyzing and streamlining the data operations to make outcomes-centric healthcare a reality.
If you’d like more information on Outcomes Network, email us at partnerships@veriteos.com.
Thanks to Mitchell Nagao and Alex Vannoni for reading drafts of this post.
