Policy often lags behind innovation, so figuring out how to provide value for the patient should be top-of-mind for healthcare organizations.
Healthcare Innovation’s Rajiv Leventhal recently spoke with healthcare leaders Keith Algozzine, UCM Digital Health CEO and Dominick Bizzarro, chief of innovation at Schenectady, N.Y.-based health insurance company MVP Healthcare on the idea of rethinking the telehealth landscape — and about their views on the current moment in telehealth, how they view the future and more. Below is a snippet from the interview, which can be found here.
How does the near-term future look to you in terms of continuing to make investments into telehealth? Do you see it as a worthwhile endeavor to continue to build out and evolve this infrastructure with an unknown telehealth policy and payment landscape?
Algozzine: In our world, we actually don’t really think of it as uncertain at all. And we don’t look at it from a policy perspective. Policy lags behind innovation, almost everywhere, so our real mindset is how do we provide value for the patient? We find that if you provide value for the patient, there are tons of people who will pay for what we’re doing. Value can be defined in lots of different ways—access, quality, predictability, portability, convenience, and satisfaction. There are folks who are more than willing to pay for that value, because ultimately, it is the patient who needs to derive value, and those who are charged with helping the patient in healthcare need to take the lead in this. So, we don’t really see it as an uncertain environment. We really see it as a constant press toward providing value to the patient, and honestly, the rest takes care of itself.
” … the quality that matters is what the patient defines as quality because they’re the end user.” -Keith Algozzine
Rajiv Leventhal is Managing Editor of Healthcare Innovation, covering healthcare IT leadership and strategy. Since 2012, he has been covering health IT developments for the publication’s CIO and CMIO-based audience, and has taken keen interest in areas such as policy and payment, patient engagement, health information exchange, mobile health, healthcare data security, and telemedicine.
