6/27/2019

Healthwise’s Commitment to Health IT Innovation
 

Josh Schlaich, Director of Product Marketing

Industry pioneer and Healthwise founder Don Kemper once said that in order to make a difference in health care, we must “encourage innovation from every position…give employees the freedom to think creatively and [provide] access to advanced engineering tools.” 44 years after its inception, our company still embodies this. Healthwise offers its teams the space to learn, think, and debate, all in the name of improving the delivery and experience of health care.

Innovating since 1975

Innovation has been a core tenet of our organization since it was founded in 1975, when Don led the development of the Healthwise^® Handbook. The handbook was designed to help new moms on Medicaid understand their own health and the health of their children. That commitment to innovation lives on today as Healthwise continues to make exciting advancements in the field of health education and patient engagement.

Thinking creatively

To maintain this culture of creativity, Healthwise has multiple teams working to stay on the cutting edge of health information technology.

• Subject matter experts, partner and client organizations, consumers, and technologists come together during multi-day discovery sessions to identify problems Healthwise may be able to solve. A team of cross-functional Healthwise leaders then brainstorms possible solutions by using best practices in design thinking. Walls plastered with sticky notes and white boards covered in sketches often lead to innovative new products, capabilities, features, services, and approaches to test with our clients and partners.
• Our solutions team reimagines existing products to make them more robust. By analyzing user data and in-house research, the team identifies and creates the features health systems, hospitals, health plans, and care management organizations across the country need the most.
• The Healthwise accelerator team embraces disruptive technologies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to new content formats. Anything that offers new ways to engage and educate patients, providers, and health plan members is on their radar. The accelerator team’s goal is to push boundaries and find new ways to achieve the quadruple aim of health care.

Using advanced engineering tools

Not only do we have operations and culture around innovation, we’re testing the latest in technology capabilities and standards. In fact, Healthwise was one of the first organizations in the country to adopt the new Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) standard, which promises to drive interoperability and convert health IT to an open ecosystem. By working with some of the largest electronic health record providers in the world, we have a deep understanding of the capabilities and opportunities FHIR offers.

To really see what a difference this new standard can make, we’re engaging with provider organizations across the United States to test and launch patient education applications that will optimize communications between clinicians and patients. By using the foundation of our health content in combination with new FHIR technology, we can offer compelling experiences that address quality, costs, and clinician-patient experience.

We’re also partnering with some of the most successful technology organizations in the world, envisioning a future where evidence-based, consumer-focused health content is delivered at the right time in the right channels. From cloud computing to big data, Healthwise is there, looking for new approaches to our current and future capabilities.

Co-creating

Without our customers and partners, we couldn’t do any of this. That’s why we provide opportunities for our clients and partners to co-innovate with us. We invite them to be involved in the discovery stage, spend time with our accelerator and solutions teams, and test new tech in their organizations.

The innovation happening across health IT right now is unprecedented, and we are excited to see what we can develop together to improve the future of health education and engagement.