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2024 Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit – Improving Patient Experience in the Digital Era: Pros and Cons
“Healthcare is a people-centered business. Patients want to feel like someone is caring, someone is listening to me, someone understands my pain.”
— Cathy Azeez Narain, Chief Digital Innovation Officer, Hoag Health System
Digital technologies can support the mission of improving people’s lives, but they are not an end in themselves.
“Patients want the best doctors, and that’s a human being,” Narain said. “You can’t digitize patients and completely cut off the human connection. People want connection.”
This is the 13th installment of a 14-part weekly series sharing insights from our Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit in 2024. We spoke with a wide range of healthcare professionals who are leaders across all aspects of healthcare organizations, from the boardroom and C-suite to the patient’s bedside. We covered a variety of topics, including why personalization is important, how to shape organizational culture so people know they matter, and what CEOs can learn about personalization from nurses.
This article presents highlights from a panel discussion on improving patient experience in the digital age.
The panelists are:
Cathy Azeez Narain, chief digital innovation officer at Hoag Health System, and Chase Idleman, vice president of market development and strategy at Zimmer Biomet.
What do people really want?
Narain, who is the chief digital and innovation officer at Hoag Health System, has spent time studying what people actually want when they hear the phrase “digital experience.” What kind of experience do people actually want?
“Digital technology can’t be at the forefront,” Narain says, “The role it can play is secondary in the ease of reaching someone in need and connecting with a doctor. But healthcare is a human business. It’s not a commerce business. It’s not shoes. It’s not iPhones. Healthcare will continue to operate in a very unique space.”
For one, “the technology decisions[health systems make]aren’t just about the system. There are payers, there are regulatory environments, there are physician needs, there are patient needs,[all of these]drive the experience. That’s what makes health care complicated.”
That being said, there are some basic things people want: efficiency when buying things like shoes or an iPhone.
“All the administrative tasks we have people do in healthcare that have been improved in a lot of other industries. We’re investing in how to make the basics, the foundational things that we don’t really think about, run smoothly, but we’re actually creating barriers for people to do things.”
She again mentioned that dreaded phone call, as mentioned in a previous post.
“If I had to call to make an appointment, I probably wouldn’t be able to get one or find the time to call,” Narain said. “But with digital scheduling, maybe I can get an appointment for a treatment that I’ve been putting off. I just don’t want to pick up the phone.”
She said there’s still a lot of room to make health care more personalized, and while technology can help with personalization, it’s also one of the barriers.
“There are micro-moments of personalization, but we haven’t even explored or scratched the surface yet of what that means and what it looks like from a consumer perspective,” Narain said. “And I think the systems themselves have invested so much in their electronic medical record (EMR) platforms that they’re creating barriers to actually delivering on personalization. I don’t see having access to a patient portal as personalization; that’s just telling me all the bad things that have happened to me. And I think there’s a lot of benefit to be had from cracking some of the fundamentals, but there’s a lot of ground that hasn’t been covered yet.”
Technology in Patient Care
Chase Idleman, vice president of market development and strategy at Zimmer Biomet, one of the world’s largest orthopedic implant companies known for knee and hip implants, said he surveyed patients and those involved in the orthopedic musculoskeletal health field, asking, “What is most important to you before, during and after getting a knee or hip implant?”
The answer is, people want to know if their recovery process is going well, so Zimmer Biomet has developed technology to help improve the process.
Idleman said that was a lightbulb moment: We had the data, we had the remote monitoring, but how do we make it actionable and useful for patients and care teams?
“A typical orthopedic patient is given a piece of paper with pre-op education and instructions for how to recover,” Idleman says. “We took that as inspiration and created a digital experience called mymobility, which is our patient engagement tool.”
The tool provides patients with education, self-directed video exercises and more, and provides caregivers with up-to-date monitoring data.
“A care team member can see that this patient has taken 432 steps in the past five days,” Idleman says, “moving at an average speed of about two miles per hour. They’re doing 50 percent of their exercise and 25 percent of their education.”
Artificial intelligence can also be used to compare a patient’s recovery with others in their cohort by comparing their walking style and speed.
“We can look at patients from 15 to 40 days after surgery and predict with a high degree of accuracy where they’re going to be at 90 days,” Idleman says, “so we can intervene earlier[and with greater insight].”
One barrier: limited resources.
Idleman said there is often a gap between available digital capabilities and what a given provider can manage in terms of the unique resources needed to bring that technology to patients.
“Not everyone has the care team members who can devote the time to this,” Idleman said. “Reimbursements are going down, so people are being asked to do more with less. And they’re saying, ‘Oh, now I have to sign on to another tool to monitor my patients?'”
Another barrier is payers.
Idleman said insurers are still figuring out what they will cover when it comes to this new technology.
Narain said similar uncertainty is being experienced within the health care system.
“We all talk about health in terms of health care, but our system is designed to support you when you need it, when you’re sick, and there’s no way I could charge for anything I do in the realm of prevention to achieve that health every time you do something,” Narain says, “so the cost always comes back to the person who’s going to be working on some of these products.”
Digital technology is bringing important benefits to the patient experience in healthcare, according to Narain, including greater access through technology that allows people to connect in new ways and, as Idleman described, improved patient care.
Her role as digital and innovation officer involves exploring how to use technology to solve challenges in improving people’s experiences, which often goes beyond the technology itself.
“The work of digital people and healthcare transformation people is not technology-based,” Narain said. “They spend very little time looking at technology and a lot of time solving problems like how do you bring the data together? You need payer data, electronic medical record data, all the data from this person’s (digital health tracking app) before you can even whisper about the possibility of personalization.”
For more information about the panel, check out this short video.
Next time, we will conclude the series with the most important change strategies for healthcare leadership.
