Our vision

CareOps

Our product vision revolves around building the leading CareOps platform. We believe CareOps will become mission-critical for all care providers, just as DevOps has become mission-critical for all software development teams in the last decade (read more on http://www.careops.org ).

In a world where care providers increasingly compete based on the cost of care delivery and patient outcomes, a strong CareOps practice is key to survival and staying competitive.

Awell as the leading CareOps platform

The Awell software can become a single application to manage the full CareOps lifecycle. Our product enables care providers to design, operate and improve care flows to deliver better care for patients and care teams, accelerate time to market, and increase care team productivity while reducing dependency on engineering.

Below are the different stages of the CareOps lifecycle, with 1 additional stage that is relevant for our customers when using the Awell platform (Manage).

Each stage has a list of product categories we are investing in or planning to invest in. This list will evolve over time. A category is like a mini-product that consists of features. Think about a category as something that other companies might be building as a point solution. Having a single application that avoids the need to build integrations between these point solutions is an important value driver for teams using Awell. However, we do want to play well with others and make it easy to integrate with any point solution out there.

The stages of the CareOps lifecycle

The following capabilities are transversal to the lifecycle stages:

• Alignment with healthcare-specific standards in data (SNOMED, ICD-10 / 11, …) and interoperability (FHIR)

• Collaboration (concurrent editing, comments)

• Everything related to data security, privacy, and compliance in the different geographies our customers operate

Manage

Note this is not one of the CareOps lifecycle stages but an important category with regard to how our customers can extract the most value out of the Awell software.

Executives' “jobs to be done” is to maximize business value produced by their organization. With regards to CareOps, there are two main levers to increase value.

Lever one is the value each care flow delivers to patients, taking into account the cost of providing that care. This means identifying which of their service lines are (under)performing and require investment, and which investments have paid off. This is what Portfolio Management is about. Questions executives are asking include “Is our diabetes care flow leading to expected outcomes for patients based on scientific literature?”, “What bottleneck in our patient onboarding flow should we remove to increase adoption of our service?”, “What improvement initiatives have led to a meaningful impact in the cost of care delivery?” and similar. With Portfolio Management it becomes easy to list and prioritize initiatives to drive value across the different care flows at an organization.

Lever two is how efficient and effective the organization is at creating, implementing, and improving care flows. These questions revolve around “What is the lead time from idea to live for a given care flow?”, “What are the bottlenecks in my care flow creation process?”, “How often do we iterate on a care flow?” and similar. In other words, with Value Stream Mapping a care provider gets visibility on their CareOps practice and is able to benchmark their organization against the CareOps metrics.

Design

This stage revolves around making it simple to create powerful care flows. People from clinical operations, clinical experts, and product are the main roles in designing these care flows, supported by engineers and compliance. Our benchmarks are Figma and Miro in terms of the intuitiveness of our product.

Design combines two important axes: how can our software support the uniquely complex needs of care processes (as opposed to business processes) and enable non-engineers to design these flows?

Important categories in this stage are the different action types our software supports: Forms for data capture, Notifications, Tasks, Scoring, Integrations with existing systems, and the ability to tie everything together with powerful Workflow logic.

Ultimately we are working towards a Library of template care flows and care flows developed and maintained by customers that can be reused and customized by others who don’t have the resources but want to use state-of-the-art care flows to drive their care operations.

Validate

Besides the people active in the Design stage, important personas in the Validate stage are external clinical experts, compliance people, and in the case of training the whole care team.

Designing without testing creates the risk that the process blueprint doesn’t match reality and therefore doesn’t get implemented (fully) in daily operations.

This is a highly prevalent problem with healthcare processes - how many flowcharts that were designed are actually implemented? And for those that are implemented, what’s the gap between the design and the implemented reality?

In our software, the Validate stage allows our customers to Preview care flows and organize role-playing sessions between stakeholders before a care flow is published and available for real patients. In the future, Simulate will allow to define a population and run a high volume of Previews to see how this impacts capacity and care operations, in order to pre-emptively deal with potential bottlenecks.

The ability to prove that a given flow will be executed as designed creates necessary proof for compliance and regulatory purposes. It even helps commercially because it shows that care delivery is to some extent standardized and can be scaled with limited risk of quality decrease.

And given that many care flows impact clinical decision-making, many customers want to organize Approval flows to officially sign off on a care flow before it goes live.

Build

https://awellhealth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AH/pages/3515547683

Operate

The Operate stage is where patients are enrolled in the care flows that were designed, validated, and built into the end user-facing applications such as the patient app, practice management app, and EMR.

The most important persona in this stage is the members of the care team, including the patient, as they interact with live care flows and see what activity needs to be done by whom. This is what Care management is all about.

Measure

The measure stage enables tracking multiple aspects of live care flows as they are being orchestrated, ranging from Error monitoring used by software engineers to tracking important business Metrics like patient-reported outcomes, engagement, and drop-off rates by clinical operations, product people, and executives.

Improve

The ability to learn faster than your peers is arguably the only sustainable competitive advantage. Our product plays a crucial role in closing the feedback loop. How are our care flows performing and what do we need to change to improve outcomes, or drive down costs? The answer is data and running experiments.

In this stage, the same personas as in the Design stage extract insights from the data collected in care flows and set up experiments through A/B testing in order to understand how variations in care flows potentially impact outcomes and cost. Over time, given the unique data set of how the process leads to outcomes we will build out prediction capabilities to further help improve care flows.