The Future of Health Is Here: Partners new digital health initiative

Partners has launched a five-year strategic digital health initiative to improve patient experience, boost digital innovation and transform clinical care across our system’s hospitals. The initiative, Enterprise Data and Digital Health (EDDH), will work to further engage patients on their health care journeys, build upon Partners foundational investments in data and technology and develop and scale existing digital care projects.

“We need to make healthcare easier for our patients,” says Gregg Meyer, MD, Chief Clinical Officer at Partners HealthCare. “Our patients want healthcare to operate like every other sector of our economy, and this initiative will help us to engage patients and ensure that they are getting the care they need, when they need it. By leveraging data and technology, we can democratize the expertise of our clinicians and free ourselves from the balance of geography so that wherever patients are in our system, they will be able to access world-class care.”

Recent Changes and Changes on the Horizon

On July 21 improvements were made to the Partners patient portal, Partners Patient Gateway. The site has a new look and feel, is better organized and more intuitive and the changes made to the framework will enable patients to access additional features in the future, such as online scheduling, real-time emergency department wait times and broader telehealth options.

Later this year, the digital health initiative will expand patient access to several innovative start-up solutions and novel programs developed at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. These programs have already demonstrated success and are revolutionizing the care and treatment of a number of serious medical conditions by using big data, machine learning and algorithms.

We will also standardize the way we capture information across the system and coordinate data and analytics professionals from across Partners hospitals, clinics and our health plan. These measures will give clinicians, researchers and staff better access to operational data and help drive improvements in many areas of hospital operations including bed capacity management, asset management, supply chain and clinic operations such as optimization of clinic schedules and access and revenue cycle operations.

“We are working to optimize the systems and programs that we have in place while at the same time building a structure that we believe will help foster future innovation,” says Alistair Erskine, MD, Chief Digital Health Officer for Partners HealthCare. “We must make these investments in digital health in order to meet the changing expectations of our patients.”

The EDDH initiative is expected to run through 2024 and updates on EDDH projects will be announced as they are launched.