In hospitals, more and more opportunities to support care digitally are arising. Be it an e-consultation, telemonitoring or an information video. The actual use of these digital applications is strongly influenced by the medical specialist. But what does the specialist think about the digital support of care?
Healthcare can no longer be delivered as it has always been. Rising staff shortages and the contemporary needs of patients demand a more digital way of delivering care. We call this hybrid care for short. IG&H surveyed 90 medical specialists to find out what they think about hybrid care.
Download the full report (please note the report is in Dutch)
There’s a will, but not yet a way
The IG&H survey shows that medical specialists are not satisfied with their own use of hybrid care. They give themselves 'only' a score of 5.7 for this. According to them, the main reason for the low use is the digital adoption of patients. Over three-quarters of the specialists feel that low literacy hinders the accessibility of hybrid care. And nearly two-thirds of specialists say this is also due to patients' digital skills. However, medical specialists are not only pointing fingers at patients. They are also self-critical, with one-third indicating that they themselves lack knowledge and digital skills to some extent.
The supply of digital applications is not the biggest problem, according to the specialists. The availability of digital applications often matches the need reasonably well. According to them, only online insight into research results is still insufficient. More than two-thirds of the specialists have a need for this, while only half are already able to use it. The need for digital repeat prescriptions is also high (70%), but this is already available in many cases. As are information videos (70%) and digital questionnaires (64%), but these are viewed as somewhat less important by medical specialists. A striking result from the survey is the low use and especially the low importance that medical specialists attach to applications on which a lot of time, energy and budget is spent nationally, such as the e-consultation and the Personal Health Record (Persoonlijke Gezondheidsomgeving in Dutch).
The road to hybrid care
The usability of digital applications is a key success factor for hybrid care adoption, according to almost all specialists (94%). For half of the specialists, this also involves authentication and authorization, or easy log-in and viewing of information. The integration of information and systems into the Electronic Patient Record is also seen by a large proportion (86%) as a determining factor. As is the participation of healthcare professionals in the creation of hybrid care.
In many IZA applications (the Dutch Integral Care Agreement), we see the transformation to so-called e-care pathways. This is still quite a task because it requires hospitals to develop a vision, select care paths, determine suppliers and make a calculation. The latter in particular is not always easy, but it is necessary to obtain funding from insurers. A calculation expects the transformation plan to include metrics (KPIs) in addition to a business case. Furthermore, it expects a development and implementation organization to actually get the transformation done. From this study, we learn how important it is that the healthcare professional is properly involved and that attention is paid to the development of digital skills of patients as well as healthcare professionals.
Would you like to know more about hybrid care? You can reach out to:
Walter Kien
Director Healthcare
T: +31 6 29 56 52 08