Digital Patient Experience in a Fragmented Health Ecosystem

The digital patient is a concept that refers to creating a digital identity that contains clinical and basic information to improve healthcare outcomes. In a fragmented ecosystem, the digital patient can be a powerful tool for improving communication and coordination between different healthcare providers, ultimately leading to better care for the patient.

Using technology to improve care for a digital patient can be a challenge. In a fragmented ecosystem, healthcare providers use different technologies and rely on paper-based processes, making it very difficult to share information and coordinate care efforts. In addition, the proliferation of health apps and other digital tools can create confusion for patients, who may not know which tools are reliable or how to use them effectively.

Different studies show that the more technology-savvy a patient is, the more he takes care of his health, and the more he takes care of his health, the more he becomes fond of digital tools, creating a virtuous circle.

The Mexican healthcare system should take advantage of the responsibility that patients are conscious of and the access they have to mobile devices and free applications. According to  government information, in Mexico there are 84.1 million users connected to the internet, and 9 out of 10 of them use a smartphone to surf the internet. On the other hand, a study by Funsalud revealed that 90 percent of patients consult various sources on the internet before going to a medical appointment. 

With the access to the internet and the initiative shown by patients in recent years, the digital patient can be a breakthrough in a healthcare system such as Mexico's, where follow-up medical appointments are widely spaced and disease management is difficult, especially in places with limited access to healthcare services.

However, it also represents a challenge for a health system that is fragmented, with a low level of digitization, and which is not yet unified. On the one hand, 30 percent of the population is affiliated to some public health system, with IMSS concentrating most of the population attended to, but this population also pays for a consultation with a private doctor.

The reasons why patients go to public and private services are diverse: from the availability and speed of essential services, access to medicines, care at highly specialized levels, and the quality of medical consultations. 

On the other hand, 60 percent of the remaining population does not have any government medical service and must pay their expenses out-of-pocket. In this fragmentation, medical insurance plays an important role, which seeks to serve this population, whose out-of-pocket expenses represent up to half of their income.

Amid the fragmentation of systems, digital health appears to be  the solution to provide quality, efficient, effective, and agile medical care. It also  seems to be the answer to the question that we have been asking ourselves for more than a decade: How can we unify the patient's information to give him a punctual follow-up at the different points of care?

The electronic medical record wanted to meet this need, but the lack of standardization of criteria to establish the use of these tools ended up digitizing the data in an isolated way, by institution, hospital, or office. At the end of the day, the information could not be unified, much less shared with the patient.

For many years, politicians, physicians, associations and various public actors have wondered how to reunify Mexico's healthcare system. The WHO has been one of the actors that has posed three key questions to achieve this:

1) Breadth of coverage: who is insured?

2) Depth: what benefits are included?

3) Level: what proportion of costs are covered?

To these questions should be added one more:

4) Digitalization: how do I take advantage of technology to transform the system and make it more efficient?

In this context, the digital patient represents a new challenge in this transformation and the ecosystem that is being created. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that digital health has been growing at a breakneck pace since 2013; the problem was (and still is) the inability to connect the healthcare environment to each other.

As we mentioned at the beginning, neither the patient nor doctors know which digital tools are connected to the healthcare system they use or work in. Interoperability has been an issue in the healthcare system that different players are trying to solve, in order to take advantage of all the possibilities that digital tools offer to the patient and doctors.

Healthtech companies are working to address this digital gap, and from different areas. We want to reduce the gap and increase access to quality medical services for the population. We still have a long way to go, and we seek the collaboration of different players in the sector to reach the goals.

Given the current delay in regulations in our country and the impact of recent events, at this moment we have a historic opportunity to carry out a significant "leapfrog" movement that allows us to standardize, legislate and standardize services to benefit the patients, but it is necessary that all the players of the ecosystem like governments, legislators, financiers and providers are aligned seeking to have common interests.