As we recover from a worldwide pandemic—a crisis that has cost millions of lives and crippled economies, infrastructure, and governments—many healthcare organizations are realizing that they can achieve far better outcomes if they consider all of the social determinants of health.

If money were no issue, building more clinics would be a great way to prevent referral leakage, but short of that, organizations have to find a way to differentiate their network’s care as better, safer, and more convenient than the competition.

While hesitancy to enter a nursing home during the COVID-19 pandemic was expected given the challenges the industry faced in 2020, patients expressed a growing preference for home over nursing care even pre-pandemic. This meant that the industry’s focus had to expand into home health agencies, infusion providers, non-emergency transportation, durable medical equipment and home medical equipment providers, and more.

In a healthcare setting, processes may be interdependent and overlap in various areas of responsibility, potentially impacting patient experience and outcome. Process management, especially for clinical approaches, is typically articulated in a set of repeatable algorithms, or protocols. In a hospital setting, for example, the ED and ICU teams may be involved in the same patient care continuum but have very different roles and responsibilities.

COVID-19 has made it more difficult to bring assistance into the home, so much of the hands-on care for patients falls on untrained family or friends. To make matters worse, economic disparity means those with the least resources during the pandemic are often suffering the most.