Looking ahead to 2022: Solutions Summit provides roadmap for future innovations at WellSky
At WellSky, our focus is on innovation, and this year we promoted this timeless priority through the theme “Innovate as One Team” at our Solutions Summit. Solutions Summit is an annual event for WellSky’s solutions management team to reflect on our progress, challenge ourselves with the latest industry thinking and best practices, and focus our innovation efforts on elevating care delivery to improve the quality of life for the millions of people that our clients serve.
This year’s virtual meeting was one of the best yet, bringing highly respected speakers from our industry, including, but not limited to, A.G. Breitenstein, founder and CEO of Folx Health and WellSky board member; Sachin Rekhi, founder and CEO of NoteJoy and former LinkedIn product executive; and Rajesh Nerlikar, product advisor, coach, speaker, and author “Build What Matters.”
Over the three days of Solution Summit, there were a few themes that emerged as clear signposts for what’s ahead in 2022 and how we can use and target innovation to differentiate WellSky.
Use data to drive decisions. We need to listen for our clients’ frustrations, needs, and questions, but we must go further. A.G. Beitenstein said, “Pay attention to the differences between what people say and how they behave [what does the data tell us?]. Users may not know how to express what they need, but what they do will show a lot about what they like, what they avoid, and what gets their attention. Those are the clues to where you can help them. Scott Castle from SiSense shared how using data to drive decisions moves us away from opinion-driven development to data-driven development, and results in higher performing teams.
Our clients’ success is our success. It’s not the release of solutions we create or the features we include that make WellSky solutions successful. It’s the outcomes our clients achieve with our solutions that differentiates WellSky and makes us successful. We learned from Sachin Rekhi about using technology to create a feedback river—collecting multiple sources of client feedback into one stream that can be queried at any time to ensure we have our finger on the pulse of what our customers are saying and experiencing. In short, the message is to have a thirst for feedback from clients and make it easy for stakeholders to access that feedback to ensure we are making them successful.
Payer–provider convergence is a market driver for innovation. Deepak Valecha, assistant vice president, consulting, healthcare plans and payers with CitiusTech, provided numerous examples of the convergence occurring in market between payers and providers. He shared that the drivers of this convergence are the transition to consumer health (33% of IT investments are earmarked for consumer engagement), a shift in care to the home setting (a 14% increase in home health spending pre-pandemic), an explosion of electronically available data (878% in the last five years) and a host of regulatory changes in the last two years, driven predominantly by the 21st Century Cures Act.
The final result of this year’s Solutions Summit is solid direction for WellSky’s solutions team to utilize the technologies and data now available to us to deliver more precisely, more efficiently, and with more certainty, solutions that positively impact our clients’ businesses and successes.