By Mark Clermont, CFO, Lumeon

The healthcare sector is full of opportunity these days, particularly in the U.S. One of the biggest of those opportunities is finding ways to remove barriers that prevent physicians from diagnosing and treating patients effectively.

In that context, I am thrilled to take on the position of CFO of Lumeon. Previously, as president of Provant Health and CFO of the clinical effectiveness division of Wolters Kluwer, I learned intimately the importance of patient-first intervention and of flexible, customizable point-of-care clinical decision support. Lumeon, the only company whose platform enables healthcare providers to customize best practice care pathways to fit their own objectives, opens up new horizons to really make a difference to patient treatment.

The patient is being brought to the forefront in U.S. healthcare. The environment is shifting from a fee-for-service approach to a patient-centered orientation driven by a need to improve quality and transparency, reduce costs and ultimately restore trust in the patient-provider relationship as well as the relationship that the practitioner has with the care delivery mechanism. Value-based care can reduce costs and bring increased benefit, but regulators, providers, and patients together must transform the healthcare delivery model to bring better balance to the cost/benefit equation.

Patients and physicians are increasingly demanding tools that facilitate good clinical outcomes and effective care delivery, instead of complicating them. Patient-first care has to be care that works. And that need is sparking transformation. The legacy systems currently in place serve an important function, but few would characterize their transformation as expedient; some would even say that the installed inertia of those systems reinforces or even creates the roadblocks that are rife in U.S. healthcare. Moreover, healthcare providers have wrapped these systems with a tangled web of operations which are often held together manually, making them susceptible to failure.

Fortunately, we are seeing pockets of successful transformation, notably at some physician groups, ambulatory surgical centers and community-based hospitals. These proactive facilities have been honing their community outreach, re-thinking how they leverage all communication modalities to stay connected with patients, and re-defining patient processes in a holistic way that extends beyond the clinical walls. Many of these facilities are demonstrating efficacy in these efforts and need a means to scale.

Lumeon’s patient-first approach aligns healthcare resources around the patient journey, rather than trying to fit patients into inefficient or broken processes, delivering what health systems have longed to achieve: superior outcomes at lower cost with delighted patients and satisfied clinical teams.

By assisting healthcare providers to do things as seemingly-simple as providing communication channels and bringing data about the patient journey together in one place, a physician gets access to rich contextual information for decision-making, a patient can have more confidence knowing where they are on their care pathway and what will happen next, and the whole care team have relevant and clear visibility to ensure care is coordinated.

Lumeon provides a pathway for physicians and patients to work together to improve their care, and this is exactly the right time for this innovation. It is more than care coordination. It is more than clinical workflows and it is more than patient engagement.

The way I see it, Lumeon has the technology and the operational expertise to transform the way care is delivered. The sooner we introduce its unique benefits to those in the U.S. healthcare system, the better off all of us — patients, physicians, and payers alike — will be.