Inadequate Health Equity Access
RADECTHealth goal is to be a GameChanger - Making you proactive in your health.
A central challenge for preventative and primary healthcare is inadequate access. This means capturing and making all information available. It compounds when you need multiple health services and needs. By being proactive in your care the healthcare system can help reduce medical practitioner burn out and make your care more personalized and better. So why is this not being done today?
The current focus has been for nurse practitioners and primary care to do more. They are being asked to understand your mental health. They may need to understand if you have a general auto-immune disorder. This is before they consider a referral to a rheumatologist. They receive questions about dieting. And this is exacerbated for expanding clinician expectations to address Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) and lifestyle issues. Where, clinicians are without the training, resources, and system improvements, and they are already burdened with excessive workloads and insufficient resources.
There is just too much information to learn about you. The nurse practitioner or doctor may follow up for medication management, but then it is your responsibility to address diet, exercise, health literacy, and all the other components that could be important. This is what we call ‘soft’ healthcare. It even becomes challenging as these relate, but then you see a specialist and they need to know this information. Healthcare can build care teams. Yet they generally come into play when a problem is big enough. It is interdisciplinary.
Another example is if you have depression. It could be the diagnosis is Major Depressive Disorder. Your primary care or psychiatrist has prescribed an anti-depressant. Great! This makes it easier for you to cope. The underlying reasons for the depression may be based on SDoH, trauma, limiting beliefs, exercise, improve your environment, or a combination. This means receiving community health, psychologist, fitness trainer, social worker, nursing, and coach. Yikes! You need the medication with other things which takes time. This is so much.
Healthcare is implementing health guides and nurse case managers. That is a great step. They are awesome. They help you navigate the healthcare system, understand your needs, build a relationship and trust, teach you and check in about complex care, set goals, and try to work to an environment by knowing ‘you’. Nurses are phenomenal at this as well. What they call the nurse intuition is amazing. Nurses spend time with you and know how ‘you’. This comes down to greater access. How can we make access better and more scalable?
To be proactive in healthcare, you as the patient, must know which information you can add to your health record. We need to understand not just from a meeting but tracking what motivates. How all this relates with better health literacy, or seeing improvement, or greater trust. We need to make care plans that integrate and community health, psychologist, fitness trainer, social worker, nursing, and coach from our example to understand how to effectuate change based on the motivations, which information to add to the health record, and bringing knowledge from whole care teams to learn about in support of your health. We want to make this for prevention by having you teach the health team about you. No longer is it waiting for a problem to occur, but like a journal. This is your longitudinal record.
The health system needs to figure out how to gather this information. RADECTHealth is creating this health by not only checking up on you but bringing this health knowledge in being proactive about you. This is built into your lifestyle, gaming, and web usage, creating activities, social interactions, and collecting and aggregating knowledge from healthcare practitioners that learn the specifics of others, and care plans of others, to learn about you. Healthcare will not be just the telehealth appointments but integrated into your life that is fun. We are starting with wellness and exceptional yoga instructors because they can bring this together.
Being proactive will allow healthcare practitioners to focus on the things the do best. They will have a team now at their side helping them. We hope this will provide the access our healthcare system needs as the next step. We want you to be a part of this and RADECTHealth.