Fixing Healthcare Fragmentation

Introduction: Picking up the pieces

Remember the excitement you felt as a child when you were given a puzzle? You just knew that the pieces would eventually come together to form something amazing.

Well, after more than 20 years in digital healthcare, I'm still waiting for that vision of seamless, affordable and effective healthcare to materialize. The Internet was supposed to fix all that, but frankly, I'm more frustrated than ever. Digitalization? It's just created more work for healthcare professionals and less time with patients. And it's not just that the pieces don't fit or are missing: it's mostly that the people in charge aren't picking up the pieces. Not out of malice, but mostly out of ignorance and a one-dimensional view of healthcare: their own.

Yes, there are some good, capable, honorable people out there trying to make things work: creating and implementing those long-overdue interoperability standards that other industries have had for years. Broken processes, data silos, interoperability: all fixable, especially with today's technological advances. But there's one problem that technology can't fix: collaboration. Everyone is in competition with each other - payers, providers, medical associations, pharmaceutical companies, software vendors - all just trying to grab a bigger piece of the pie.

But first things first: why does fragmentation matter so much?

Reason No. 1: Inefficiency

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) have to perform repetitive, manual administrative tasks, as well as redundant testing and imaging when data is unavailable or not to their liking. While the hospital, lab, or imaging center may benefit financially from these redundancies, they cost time and money and slow down the time to diagnosis for both the patient and the pharmaceutical company.

Pharma companies ideally want to accelerate the patient journey, shortening the time to diagnosis and, potentially, their drug. Fragmentation does the opposite. It also forces them to spend tons of money on sophisticated omnichannel strategies just to figure out how to get their messages across effectively.

Patients, however, are the ones who really pay the price. They're spending more and more on health insurance premiums, sitting in waiting rooms for hours, and seeing multiple doctors for the same problem or second "opinions". They are reminded that medicine is still far from an exact science, and they may very well end up with the wrong diagnosis or treatment: a matter of "opinion".

Reason No. 2: Bad Medicine

Because of broken, fragmented processes and data silos, patients often don't get the right diagnosis or treatment. Or they lose critical time and suffer poor quality of life until the right solution is finally found. Medication errors that could easily be prevented may not harm the patient at all, but in the worse cases, may lead to complications or even death. More common a problem than we all think.

Reason No. 3: Unaffordable Care

In summary, we can see from everything I have laid out in this article that fragmentation makes health care a luxury. Unaffordable for many. It costs us much more than it should.

And now, the blame game begins. Who is responsible? Why is this happening? In my next post, Fragmentation in Healthcare: Who's to Blame?, I will show how each stakeholder, hospitals, patients, and the pharmaceutical industry, all bear their share of responsibility. Then, in the third and final post in this series on fragmentation, Defragmenting Healthcare: My Strategy Blueprint, I will show how a simple change in mindset can make all the difference.

An earlier version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn.