Podcast

Podcast: Tom Foley, VP of Growth at AMD Global Medicine

March 22, 2021

Tom Foley is the Vice President of Growth at AMD Global Medicine, which focuses on expanding and enhancing the virtual care delivery model. Foley previously launched the WW Health Solution strategy at LenovoHealth, as well as moderated the Health Innovation Think Tank (HITT). He served two years on the UPMC Board of Center of Connected Medicine. Most recently, Foley was an executive leader at Cerner responsible for Consumer Strategy inclusive of telehealth, remote patient monitoring, portal, CRM and mobile apps) across the federal market – advocating virtual care delivery model.

Foley speaks to us this week on how he started in healthcare, how tech plays a role in healthcare’s transformation, the switch to value-based care, and the one health metric that’s more important than all others.

Below are a few highlights from our interview, but be sure to listen and subscribe to The Patient's Journey podcast, linked at the bottom of the page.

What advice would you give to healthcare organizations looking to adopt new technologies?

Primarily, I would say to think outside of the box. Don’t just buy something because of the brand name of the product or how you’re going to utilize it short term, buy something based on a long term utilization plan. Day one: how will you use this technology? What about day one thousand? Does this tech have the scalability to bring you to day one thousand? If it doesn’t, it’s not the right purchase.

We need to think about really reimagining care delivery. And not just the use of technology, but the entire care delivery process. We need to take the time to imagine where we want to be 1-5 years down the road, and ensure that any tech we adopt is scalable and adaptable to that roadmap.

You’ve mentioned a few times that the entity that truly knows the patient the best is often the payer. When thinking about this industry-wide transition from fee-for-service to value based care, how can we facilitate this transition on the payer level?

That’s a great question, and I think we can look at it from a parallel perspective: how do we move the patient from awareness to wellness? It’s all about patient empowerment. If you can educate patients on their condition, that education drives different behaviors and outcomes relative to healthcare.

A patient may spend a total of 15 hours in appointments across 9 different doctors and specialists a year, but the issue isn’t within those 15 hours. The issue happens in the other 8,745 hours that the patient isn’t in front of a doctor. That’s where the real behavioral change is required and necessary. If we’re really going to get to a value based care model, you need to ensure that the patient embraces it. The patient needs to be fully educated on their own condition and care, not just the health system. If the patient never changes their behaviors, they may never make the changes that result in better health outcomes.

Healthcare systems often rely on bed turnaround time as a pertinent metric. As we move to a value-based care model, what do you think are some of the most important metrics that we should be tracking?

All healthcare really comes down to one metric: am I getting better? Am I achieving wellness? Bed turnaround time doesn’t really matter, especially when you consider the needs of our aging patient population: older patients can still maintain bed occupation while achieving wellness.

We need to look at metrics like: is my condition getting better over time? Are we reducing the amount of folks developing diabetes? Are we reducing the number of patients developing other chronic conditions? It’s not really about the utilization of a brick and mortar facility, it should fundamentally be about the health of an individual.