What’s a Patient?

For quite a while I’ve been pushing the idea that healthcare needs to move beyond treating patients. Said another way, we need to move beyond just helping people who have health problems which are causing them to complain and move into treating patients that otherwise feel healthy.

Said another way, Wanda Health once told me “The definition of a healthy patient is someone who’s not been studied long enough.”

If you look long enough and hard enough, we all have health issues or we’re at risk for health issues. There’s always something that could be done to help all of us be healthier. That’s a principle that healthcare hasn’t embraced because our reimbursement models are focused on treating a patients’ chief complaint.

In another conversation with NantHealth, they suggested the idea that we should work towards knowing the patient so well that you know the treatment they need before you even physically see the patient.

These two ideas go naturally together and redefine our current definition of patient. In the above context, all of us would be considered patients since I have little doubt that all of us have health issues that could be addressed if we only knew the current state of our health better.

While NantHealth’s taken a number of stock hits lately for overpromising and under delivering, the concept I heard them describe is one that will become a reality. It could be fair to say that their company was too early for such a big vision, but it’s inspiring to think about creating technology and collecting enough data on a patient that you already know how to help the patient before they even come into the office. That would completely change the office visit paradox that we know today.

This is an ambitious vision, but it doesn’t seem like a massive stretch of the imagination either. That’s what makes it so exciting to me. Now imagine trying to do something like this in the previous paper chart world. Yeah, it’s pretty funny to just even think about it. Same goes with what we call clinical decision support today.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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