If health could be solved with one pill, we'd all be well. But medical, social and economic realities mean that health is often the result of a complex series of actions. It’s just too easy to miss a treatment or involve an expert far too late. Stakes couldn’t be higher for each patient, but for the people seeking to deliver compassionate care while navigating an increasingly complex healthcare system, the challenge can seem overwhelmingly futile

Patients do best when the entire team is able to collaborate on treatments and solutions for medical and social needs. And ‘entire team’ includes the family, regardless of whether or not they’re physically in the room. This often means the exhausting and mistake-riddled effort to coordinate care across multiple institutions, records systems, and individuals.

For Activate Care Chief Medical Officer Narath Carlile, who’s solved similar communication and process challenges in economically-strapped hospital systems in Africa and Mexico, the solution lies in the intelligent scaling of compassion, care, and expertise through technology.

Activate Care's collaboration platform not only provides an easy way for the patient and family to track the myriad medical appointments, test results and social services required for health and well-being, but is also developing technology to suggest moments when it might be worthwhile to bring in additional expertise — and because the platform encourages engagement, the team provides an effective and natural feedback process. The platform functions like a guided tracking system that helps the patient discover a 360-degree view of health.

Many healthcare solutions focus on reducing the dollar cost of healthcare, says Carlile, referring to the tough decisions hospitals and other providers face on a daily basis, but “the most costly care is the wrong care.” Activate Care aims at making it easier to get it right.

Security and Authentication Key for Collaboration

A recent pilot program with Boston Medical Center and Baystate Children’s Hospital relied on Activate Care to help coordinate care holistically for complex pediatric patients. These patients require 24/7 care across multiple siloed settings. Thanks to the ability to coordinate complex care through Activate Care, parents and caregivers saw an improved quality of life, while the hospitals enjoyed savings of greater than 20% over the course of a single year, with even greater savings expected over the long term.

During year one, a local labor union’s national health plan sponsored care plan realized an impressive 80% engagement rate saving an estimated $823,500 with the help of Activate Care’s platform.

To run initiatives like the ones above effectively, the patient must trust Activate Care with sensitive information. Activate Care relies on a complex series of permissions to decide who can access what when. This allows them to provide experts who might become part of the team with enough data to make informed choices, while still protecting a patient’s privacy. To make sure that only the right people have access to the right data at the right time, Activate Care relies on Auth0.

“In creating a collaborative environment for you and your loved ones, we wanted to have the best level of security and authentication that’s available in the industry today. That’s why we partnered with Auth0,” says Carlile.

Carlile continued, “We hadn’t expected to be able to find a partner like Auth0 who would be so focused on security, proper authentication, and yet create a platform that’s incredibly well-documented, easy to test, and is HIPAA compliant."

Internal Analysis Reveals Big ROI

Patient needs can be dynamic. To serve them well, providers need fast and secure access for a wide variety of health and government institutions, each with different ways of verifying identity. Add in the need to provide the appropriate yet minimum necessary context for different team members without unnecessarily revealing private data and Activate Care could have ended up with an extremely costly method of authentication. Plus, Activate Care’s recent modernization project required the ability to offer HIPAA-compliant social and enterprise Single Sign On (SSO)

“We have done our own analysis internally to compare the time that we would have spent implementing authentication including engineering, devops and integration time, and have found Auth0 to be at least two times more cost effective for us,” says Carlile. “I think the reality is that it’s also giving us the opportunity to have quick access to the newest and best-of-breed approaches to security and authentication technology. That’s hard to quantify as ROI, but has tremendous value. Ultimately I think the biggest value of this partnership with Auth0 will be in working together to continue to provide the best security and authentication available for the patients and families that we serve.”