How to Deliver Higher Value in Health Care by Increasing Standardization and Personalization - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM SIEMENS HEALTHINEERS

Health care professionals are under increasing pressure to generate more value, deliver services more efficiently, and respond to higher patient demands.

One of the keys to solving this complex problem is finding ways to better manage variations in care. Variations are fundamental challenges for health care providers, and they come in two categories:

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• Unwarranted variations are those not justified by specific patient conditions. These are harmful; they drive up costs, lead to poorer outcomes, and frustrate patients. As illustrative examples, these are differences in how care is delivered to similar patients with the same disease in different locations or in different departments or by different clinicians. Whether it's one of the 200 million iPhones purchased annually or one of the 4 billion cups of coffee sold by Starbucks every year, the customers who purchase these items do so with confidence that they know what they are buying. Maintaining this customer confidence-and doing so at a reasonable cost-requires an extremely high level of standardization.
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• Warranted or "good" variations are the result of better customization, taking into account patient individuality. These variations acknowledge a specific patient and his or her condition, allowing individualized care, which enhances patient comfort and improves outcomes. The patient experience in health care needs to be analyzed, measured, and factored into the evaluation, and we can see patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) increasingly being adopted in the clinical practices in various centers around the world. PROMs are questionnaires designed to characterize health status by asking patients to self-report their symptoms or conditions. Other social, functional, and behavioral characteristics of patients-for example, patients' level of health literacy, whether they live with a partner or on their own, their cognitive status, or transportation barriers they face-also can be helpful in ensuring that treatment options are optimized. So how can providers reduce unwarranted variations through standardization while also finding new ways to enhance the warranted ones through personalization? Digitalization is a key enabler for effectively managing both throughout the health care system, benefiting hospitals and patients alike.

Addressing these issues in hospitals and other health care organizations requires leadership and a willingness to learn from the effective standardization and personalization in other industries. CEOs and executives have the opportunity to learn from the successes of other industries and better understand the steps necessary to revamp their operations, especially in terms of evolving business models.

For instance, manufacturers have learned how to reduce unwarranted variation, improve quality, enhance efficiency, and keep unit costs low. The factory floors are organized, efficient, and calm. The routines and processes they have in place have been designed to do the same things the right way, day in and day out. To replicate this in health care would require greater standardization in three broad categories-diseases, procedures, and processes-and the need to overcome challenges related to human nature, organizational behavior, and the differences among patients and within health care organizations.

In health care, patients are not widgets in a factory, and within the practice of medicine, there is an element of "art" that must be acknowledged. Both points are valid to a degree. Looking at the totality of patient and clinical data suggests that the common term population health is somewhat misleading. There is no one homogenous, uniform population. Instead, there are multiple populations. It would be more accurate, therefore, to speak of populations' health.

And with digitalization, the changes that have taken place in industries such as banking, media, transportation, and hospitality provide insights on how to manage and use complex, big data more effectively and to make it easier to manage both standardization and personalization.

Several affordable lessons offer actionable insights for the health care sector. Digital transformation will be disruptive. But digitalization is a tool, not an end in itself, and a successful digital strategy is a companywide effort and cannot be treated as "a job for the IT department."

Read our in-depth analysis of what health care providers can learn from manufacturing, retail, and other digitalization-enabled industries.

Explore the implementation of some of these techniques at the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic, which were able to reduce costs and increase value by better applying standardization and personalization within their operations.

In the Cleveland Clinic system, identifying and embedding the stroke care path in the electronic medical record across different care settings increased standardization over different venues, resulted in better outcomes, and reduced costs through more consistent adherence to evidence-based guidelines. The number of invasive procedures dropped, and the number of related complications fell substantially. Additionally, the total cost of care decreased by 20%. This wasn't a result of a new discovery; it was the result of doing what should have been done in a more consistent way with a stronger focus on measuring compliance and variability. The Mayo Clinic saw similar results. More effective application of its existing stroke pathways resulted in a net cost reduction of nearly 10%, with no adverse impact on outcomes.

Click here to download the paper on the Siemens Healthineers website.

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