The Collective: Scale Good Medicine Faster with Protocols from the Community

Today’s care delivery company needs the flexibility to adjust rapidly to the ever-changing landscape that is healthcare in the United States. Whether it is responding to Covid, the advent of new therapeutics, the change in healthcare consumption patterns, or changes in CMS reimbursement, every company will need to adjust their care delivery model in some manner each year. Outperformers will iterate faster. 

Traditionally, a health practice changes their process and policies long before their software tools can catch up, and that dislocation introduces costly errors and inefficiencies. To solve those problems, we built Canvas — a platform that gives care delivery teams control over their EMR and keeps their software tools in sync with their care model day in and day out. The platform can be a blank canvas, if you will, to design the care model that enables you to achieve the patient outcomes and business goals you want.

There are so many ways you will want to optimize your care delivery model and your EMR should reinforce your unique, evolving care model at every step along the way. The Canvas SDK allows customers to upload simple code to their Canvas instance. That code can customize the experience and turn the EMR from an inert repository of information to an active participant in the care model. The Canvas SDK can be used either to entirely automate certain rote workflows that do not require human supervision, or to streamline other sensitive workflows like clinical protocols by offering up precisely calibrated notifications or recommendations. The Canvas FHIR API is the other side of the coin. It provides the ability to bring data in and send data out of Canvas which provides triggers and context for actions and workflows both within and outside of Canvas.

A blank canvas, however, can be daunting. The Canvas SDK and Canvas FHIR API can be used for so much but where do you start if you're trying to build a direct-to-consumer weight loss clinic leveraging new medications? How do you ensure you're getting the right patients in the funnel? How do you make sure you have the right prescribing controls in place? How should you handle patient co-pays and reimbursement? Wouldn’t it be great if instead of starting with a blank canvas there were "sketches" or templates that could give you a head start? It would be awesome if there was a library of pre-built protocols that developers could leverage to not only set up an out of the box care model but also to customize a care model for their business. 

Today we are thrilled to launch exactly that — the Canvas Collective, or just "Collective" for short. It's a shared repository of protocols that developers and care team leaders can use to jump start their care model. The Collective is the first of several efforts we have been working on to make it easier to get started with Canvas. Over the next couple of weeks, we will share some exciting updates for our FHIR API, technical documentation, and a new form of how to guide for Canvas. Our goal is to make it possible for anyone to set up a care model with Canvas in hours, not days.

The Collective has answers to some of the exact questions posed above, ready for you right out of the box:

• How do you ensure you're getting the right patients in the funnel? → Send a notification to a patient facing application when a patient is disqualified based on questionnaire responses
• How do you make sure you have the right prescribing controls in place? → Trigger a patient questionnaire 1 week after a new GLP-1 prescription or a change in dosage
• How should you handle patient co-pays and reimbursement? → Surface recommendation to provider to request patient to engage in food journaling exercise when the patient has opted for insurance payment to satisfy prior-auth requirements

From the Collective website you can see the actual code that brings the protocol to life in Canvas. Copy and paste the code right into your Canvas dev instance to try it out:

We have big ambitions for the Canvas Collective. We're kicking things off with about 30 protocols for just two care models: a fee-for-service virtual diabetes clinic and a direct-to-consumer virtual weight loss clinic. And we plan on sharing 100s of more protocols spanning many different diseases and practice models. Sounds ambitious? Yes, it is. That is why we want your help! 

We are, of course, writing protocols ourselves, and even have some nice tricks up our sleeves using LLMs to speed up the process. But we do not want the Collective to be full of only Canvas-authored protocols. We are building a living library that anyone can contribute to and benefit from. The healthcare community is full of disciplined thinkers and experienced builders who have invented and launched dozens of inspiring new care models. Collectively, we can all benefit from each other's knowledge on how to get better and better at driving patient outcomes in the most cost effective and patient centered ways. If you are interested in contributing by building a care model or a protocol, we would love to put it up on the Collective for everyone to use. Send us a note and we will help you get it up. 

If you don’t see a care model or protocol that would be helpful for you, let us know. We will be constantly adding more and more protocols to choose from. The Collective will help care delivery companies launch and iterate on their care models more quickly and show the power of care modeling. We hope you'll join us in making the Canvas Collective a powerful resource to all.