Fast Forward with Mandira Singh, SVP & GM, Acute and Payer Markets, PointClickCare

In this Fast Forward interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Mandira Singh, PointClickCare SVP of Go-to-Market and Operations for Acute and Payer Business, to learn about the key technologies and practices driving the marriage of consumer, patient and individual profiles in home health care.

During the conversation, Singh also explains how the pandemic has expedited that transformation while offering her prediction for where these trends will lead home health and home care professionals in the coming years.

HHCN: Tell me a little bit about the path that led you to that role.

Singh: I came to PointClickCare after the acquisition of Collective Medical, where I served as Chief Operating Officer. Prior to that, I ran product and product strategy for the company. I’ve been in health tech my whole career, helping to scale health-tech businesses in the acute and payer markets, and now the long-term and post-acute segments at PointClickCare.

Fast forward. Where do you see yourself and PointClickCare three years from now?

I think we’re at a really exciting inflection point from a company perspective. The combination of Collective and PointClickCare has given us the ability to truly connect all different points of care. Collective brings a health plan and acute perspective, and PointClickCare is a behemoth in post-acute care and long-term care; the opportunity to truly follow the patient and coordinate across the full continuum is incredible.

I see us owning that experience and helping all of the stakeholders in the patient’s health journey collaborate with each other. This is an opportunity to influence and fill the key gaps in that patient journey and to drive depth of engagement across all the stewards of patient health. The platform is solving key problems and I am so excited to be part of that journey.

What do you think will be the most significant challenge during that time?

When you have an ambitious goal to connect every single node on the health care continuum, solve a problem for each of them, drive depth of engagement and drive cross-continuum collaboration, you can’t accomplish it overnight.

If you don’t focus your energies, you end up doing a little bit for everyone, but falling short of driving true transformation. We have been successful because we don’t take the responsibility of solving problems for our users lightly. We solve a real problem for every node we take on, ultimately driving a more productive and healthier network. For me, the biggest challenge is continuing to focus on that and the next set of providers in front of us. If you don’t take the time to do that, the foundation of this healthy network will weaken.

What do you think is the greatest source of health care disruption that we’ll see in the next three years?

The events in the last year will play a major role in determining that. In the next three years, I want to see what trends persist as we come out of this pandemic.

Will we continue to live in a world where we challenge the assumptions of what should happen in person? I think it opens a completely new avenue of disruption. Telehealth is no longer a shiny object; it’s table stakes. The next frontier will be driven by how we think about the security associated with all of our health care interactions in the cloud. I am also interested in the next iteration of preventative care. One of the trends we’ve seen in the last year is patients having emergency visits on telehealth but skipping wellness visits. How many people are going to find out that they have an advanced disease state because they skipped that annual visit last year? I think a lot of learning will take place as we redefine the gold standard of care in a post-pandemic environment.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the most exciting economic or bottom-line opportunity?

It won’t surprise you that I’m going to talk about the silver tsunami and our aging population because that’s what we all wake up thinking about every day. To add a slightly different lens, let’s talk about specialty care and some of these more fringe specialty needs.

I think the next bottom-line opportunity will be breaking care back up into specialties. Thinking about one piece of that puzzle, look at menopause. How many folks have spent their time innovating for menopause? Not many… but I am thrilled to see this area get more attention from innovators lately. How many other specialty services like that exist to serve specialty needs as our population gets older?

The other piece that has become clear to us in the last year is that we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about caregivers. This last year has highlighted how much care is given at home, how many individuals care for their own family members and the health of those individuals as part of that ecosystem. There is an opportunity to think about holistic health, not just in terms of “how are you doing as the patient,” but “how are those taking care of you doing, and how well equipped are they to actually care for your health?”

In terms of technology, what do you foresee as the greatest advancement on the horizon with respect to PointClickCare or your own experience going forward?

We’ve talked about care collaboration, predictive analytics and machine learning for a long time now. I’m interested in what happens when you bring those things together.

The ability to combine automated insight with subjective insight can unlock what’s in the provider’s brain and what’s in the stakeholder’s brain so it can drive intervention across a care team. Combining that with more automated insight through machine learning could have a significant impact.

If we can automate the different connections and insights, it would allow our providers to spend their time doing what we want them to do, which is focusing on patient care.

What do you think will be the greatest social influence on the industry around health care during this near-term future?

As a mom of two little ones, I think the focus on caregiving, mental and behavioral health and self-care will be very influential.

Our ability to think about holistic health, not just social determinants of health, is going to be a major focus going forward. At the end of the day, we’re all patients, consumers and individuals, but we think of those as three separate profiles when they’re really one.

How do we connect the patient to the consumer so they are proactive in addressing their health needs? It’s an interesting paradigm that has surfaced in the last year under the theme of languishing — the importance of understanding how you thrive and making sure you’re monitoring your mental behavioral health.

What consumer product or service do you think will have the greatest impact on the industry in the near term?

I find myself very excited about some of the technology and solutions that are meeting the patients where they are. There are several coaching apps and telepsychiatry apps that have become more popular over the last year by enabling consumers to find help and connect with another individual. It empowers them to address their challenges without needing a mental health diagnosis or putting their hand up to say, “I have a mental health issue.” I think the more we’re able to do that, the less stigma there is going to be transitioning consumers to patients.

Complete the sentence, three years from now, I hope care delivery will be …

Truly patient-oriented, with regulatory and technology stakeholders meeting the patient where they are and orienting around the patient experience, not the partitioning of data.

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