Dr. David Jacofsky is founder and CEO The CORE Institute and HOPCo, a Phoenix-based orthopedic practice and practice management organization.
Dr. Jacofsky shares the physician’s perspective on innovation and the most exciting clinical applications for healthcare consumers today.
Question: What is the most interesting patient-facing innovation you are working on today?
Dr. David Jacofsky: Wearable sensor technologies that allow us to remotely measure the movement patterns and overall health of our patients. This allows us to risk stratify patients based on their health conditions at the time they present to our practice, to customize and optimize their care pathway. Further, we can monitor their progress on the road to recovery and take appropriate interventions such as increasing or decreasing therapy intensity/frequency based on their actual function.
Q: What will be the most important patient experience innovation 18 months from now? How are you pivoting in that direction?
DJ: Value based care will be increasingly delivered to patients through such tools such as population health, clinically integrated networks and wearable sensor technologies. The patient experience will transform as the system works together to be more effective at preventing illness, promoting wellness, and providing evidence-based alternatives to procedure-based care. Patients will be a part of the care team and be kept better informed about the decisions they make based on real-time data delivered to them through technology.
In addition to our pioneering clinically integrated networks, we are developing new apps that monitor patient stability and fall risk, and customizing a physical therapy program that is delivered through videos on their mobile device while monitoring their compliance and performance with the prescribed exercise program.
Q: How have you recruited and built your innovation team? Who are ideal candidates or team members and what are their backgrounds?
DJ: The key to a successful innovation team is an interdisciplinary approach. You can have the best technology innovators on board, but they need to work hand in hand with experienced leaders and innovators in healthcare delivery in order to be successful. It is not as simple as taking programmers for Silicon Valley and expecting them to be successful in healthcare innovation because the complexity of the healthcare delivery system poses unique challenges to data scientists. Our team has been carefully selected to address these challengers.
Q: If you could make your hospital or health system more like one other company or industry, what would it be?
DJ: There are aspects of Amazon that serve a model for efficient healthcare delivery. In one stop, you have complete pricing transparency, and complete quality transparency (in their reviews), so the consumer can determine the value of a given product or service. In order to bend the cost curve of healthcare delivery, we owe it to patients to be more transparent about the costs and quality of our services, and how that compares to competitors who may, in fact, be charging high prices while delivering poorer outcomes.
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