By Robbie Hughes, Founder and CEO, Lumeon

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Lumeon’s care pathway blueprints. Our first-to-market offering of ready-made workflow templates, combining best-practice clinical guidelines and operational care models to accelerate providers’ ability to optimize care delivery.

Care pathway blueprints are fundamentally the recipes for how to optimally deliver care. Delivered through Lumeon’s care-pathway management platform, they will allow healthcare providers to quickly and reliably configure and put in place efficient, evidence-based care processes.

These processes coordinate and automate activities across care settings for a given patient over time. They personalize care to account for a patient’s risk factors, preferences, and compliance level, and engage the patient and care team in meaningful dialog. Due to the automated nature of these blueprints, they are consistent and scalable across an entire healthcare institution.

The value of care pathways has been well-recognized for decades. The challenge has always been how to operationalize them. Care pathway blueprints are destined to become the heart of day-to-day care delivery.

A library of blueprints

We have developed a starter library of 15 care pathway blueprints that address high priority areas. They focus on where care coordination tends to be challenging and where there is great potential to improve outcomes and efficiency using automation and virtual engagement.

Some examples of the blueprints in the library include diabetes screening, pre-surgical optimization, post-discharge heart failure and post-discharge comprehensive care for joint replacement (CJR). We are in the process of developing blueprints in pediatrics and cancer care and alongside these blueprints, have developed a standardized methodology that allows us to create new, potentially custom, blueprints in a matter of days – to allow us to meet the ever-evolving needs of customers.

Each pathway has its own set of operational and clinical KPIs and is supported by a clear business case.

You can view the library here.

Creating standardized workflows

As the healthcare market shifts toward value-based care and reimbursement models, providers have to deliver care in a way that is substantially more efficient and effective to be profitable in a low-margin market.

Sophisticated providers recognize they must focus on orchestrating patient journeys across care settings instead of providing siloed care. They also see a need to streamline, digitize, and automate the many manual processes that cause inefficiencies.

Traditional methods of managing care pathways are usually paper-based or checklist-oriented, and implemented with a non-standardized, or worse, ‘one size fits all’ approach. Organizations frequently invest a lot of time and resources in designing, adapting, and managing care pathways. Care administrators may conduct their own research and develop consensus around pathways based on the experience of their clinicians. These pathways may be less formalized, evolving over time based on organizational practice and resulting in non-standardized care and unwarranted variation.

Lumeon’s blueprints, by contrast, are based on the latest evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and operational care models. Combined with more than a decade of experience in care pathway management, our clinical and technical pathway experts map out key tasks and milestones that must be achieved to deliver the right care to the right patient at the right time.

Capturing efficiencies

Providers recognize that they must manage their technology portfolio differently in order to successfully move away from inefficient vertical ways of working and to embrace a more horizontal approach to patient care.

Unlike traditional pathways that primarily focus on what needs to be done clinically, Lumeon care pathway blueprints also focus on how care is optimally delivered operationally. Healthcare providers no longer need to make the upfront resource investment in translating clinical guidelines into operational practice. They can start with the art of the possible and can realize financial and clinical benefits in weeks rather than years.

Care pathway blueprints are applicable and available to providers at various sizes and levels of organizational maturity. 80% of the work to deliver best practice care is ready out of the box, and the last 20% is designed to be localized to the customer’s specific circumstances, minimizing the change-management on the ground and building on the innovation that has happened at a local level but never scaled. Institutions can decide how hands-on they’d like to be with the design of the pathways, even working with Lumeon experts to custom-design entire end to end care pathways for their operations.

Lumeon’s unique combination of technology and expertise in evidence-based pathways helps providers meet the particular needs of each patient while streamlining their operational effectiveness. Our new care-pathway blueprints will be a key element in that process. By acting as an end-to-end care pathway delivery partner, we are leading the movement away from point solutions as a scalable enterprise-ready platform that addresses the sophisticated needs of health systems of the future.