The Health Care Blog recently published an article written by our CEO Linda T. Hand that reveals serious gaps in our already broken healthcare system, exposed by the pandemic. As an industry, we tend to wait for people to get sick before treating them, when shouldn’t we be promoting wellness and preventing people from getting sick in the first place? 

COVID-19 has brought us to a moment of truth: Healthcare decision makers must make a choice between reactive healthcare and proactive healthcare. 

This proactive approach, as Linda describes it, is “a radical shift in mindset” that’s made possible by recent technological solutions. These innovations empower provider organizations and insurers to predict future healthcare episodes, but even more, they help them to identify underlying clinical drivers and guide engagement strategies for individual patients. Patients no longer have to react to their health, they can actually redirect its course. 

What does proactive care look like in real life? The article walks us through, step by step, a case study of an individual named “Maggie” in two alternate realities—first, the current paradigm of broken reactive healthcare, then through the new paradigm of proactive healthcare. It’s night and day.

Linda also highlights the following:

• New, more powerful tools. First-generation population health tools made great strides in empowering organizations to use EHR data to make broad-brush predictions about population-level risk. But organizations are now looking to go deeper, and next-generation tools now allow them to do so.
• A quantum leap in predictive power. Using recent advances in machine learning, next-generation predictive analytics can unearth insights that are both precise and actionable at the patient level. They can mitigate risk through proactive outreach and engagement in programs that will direct members to the next best action.
• Advantages for proactive organizations. For organizations that are ahead of the curve in terms of adoption, the advantages will be transformative in terms of costs, outcomes and member satisfaction. 

Proactive healthcare has the power to positively impact the health trajectories of millions of patients in the near future. Or we can stick with the status quo. Let’s make the right choice.