“Healthcare is a human-centric business. Patients want that feeling of being cared for, [to know] someone’s listening, someone understands I’m in pain.”
— Kathy Azeez Narain, chief digital and innovation officer, Hoag Health System
Digital technology can support the mission of improving people’s lives, but it’s not the end in and of itself.
“Patients want the best doctor, and that’s a human,” said Narain. “You can’t just digitize them and take them completely out of that human connection. People want that connection.”
This is article 13 in a 14-part weekly series, in which I am sharing insights from the 2024 Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit. We heard from a wide range of healthcare experts—leaders spanning all facets of healthcare organizations from the boardroom and C-suite to the patient’s bedside. We covered topics such as why personalization is important, how we can shape our organizational cultures so people know they matter, what CEOs can learn about personalization from nurses, and more.
In this article I’ll share highlights from the panel discussion about boosting patient experience in the digital era.
Panelists included:
- Kathy Azeez Narain, chief digital and innovation officer, Hoag Health System
- Chase Idleman, vice president, market development and strategy, Zimmer Biomet
What do People Actually Want?
As chief digital and innovation officer for Hoag Health System, Narain spends time researching what people actually want when they hear the words “digital experience.” What do they actually want that experience to look like?
“The digital technology can’t be front and center,” said Narain. “What it can do is play a secondary role in how easy it is for that person to reach who they need to or connect with a physician. But healthcare is a human business. It’s not a commerce business. It’s not shoes, it’s not an iPhone. Healthcare will continue to operate in a very unique space.”
For one thing: “The technology decisions [a health system is making] are not just up to the system. You have payors … you have regulatory environments … there are physician needs, patient needs, [all of which] drive the experience. That makes healthcare complex.”
That said, there are certain basics that people want—the efficiencies they experience when buying things like shoes or iPhones.
“All thhe administrative things that we make people do in healthcare—those have been improved upon in many, many other industries … investing in how to make frictionless journeys around doing basic things, foundational things that we don’t think about often, but they actually create barriers for people to do something.”
She mentioned those dreaded phone calls again, as discussed in a previous article.
“If I have to call to schedule an appointment, I’ll probably never get the appointment, I’m never going to find the time to call,” said Narain. “But my ability to do that in a digital capacity makes it something that I might actually schedule and get care for something that I’m delaying. I just didn’t want to pick up the phone.”
She said there’s still so much room for healthcare to be more personalized. While technology can help with personalization, it’s also one of the barriers.
“There are micro moments of personalization, but from a consumer lens, we haven’t attacked or even scratched the surface on what that could mean and or look like,” said Narain. “And the systems themselves have invested so much on electronic medical records (EMR) platforms that I see that as a barrier in how they’re going to be able to actually achieve personalization. I’m not convinced that going in my patient portal is personalized. That just tells me all the bad things that happened to me. And I think there’s a lot of benefit to unpack in some of the foundational pieces, but there’s still a lot of room that we haven’t covered.”
Technology in Patient Care
Chase Idleman is vice president of market development and strategy for Zimmer Biomet, one of the largest orthopedic implant companies in the world—known for knee and hip implants. He said they surveyed patients and people within the orthopedic musculoskeletal wellness space, asking: What is most important to you before, during, or after getting a knee or hip implant?
The response: People want to know if their recovery process is on track. So that’s a place where Zimmer Biomet has developed technology to help improve the process.
Idleman said that was an epiphany moment: they have data, they can do remote monitoring—but how can they make it actionable, so it’s useful for the patient and for the care team?
“When someone goes in for a typical orthopedic experience, they’re given some paper with preoperative education and how they need to recover,” said Idleman. “We took that and we made a digital experience, called mymobility. It’s our patient engagement tool.”
This tool provides education and things like self-directed video exercises to patients, and updated monitoring data to caregivers.
“A care team member can see that this patient has moved 432 steps over the last five days,” said Idleman. “He’s moving around two miles per hour on average. He’s knocked out 50% of his exercises, 25% of his education.”
They also use artificial intelligence to see how a patient’s recovery compares to others in his cohort—comparing gaits and walking speed.
“We can start to look at days 15 through 40 in that postoperative window and be able to tell you with a high degree of fidelity where that patient is going to end up on day 90,” said Idleman. “So that allows you to intervene early [and with more insight].”
One barrier: limited resources.
Idleman said there are often gaps in what digital capabilities are available versus what any given healthcare provider can manage in terms of their own resources needed to make that technology available to their patients.
“Not everyone has a care team member who can spend the time on this,” said Idleman. “Reimbursements are going down. So people are being asked to do more with less resources. And they’re saying, ‘Hey, I have to sign on to another tool to monitor patients?”
Another barrier: payors.
According to Idleman, payors are still trying to determine what they’ll cover in terms of this new technology.
Narain said they experience the same uncertainty within health systems.
“We all talk about health in the word healthcare, but our system is designed to support you if you have a need, a sick moment—and to achieve that word health whenever you do something, there’s no billable way for me to do anything on that preventative spectrum,” said Narain. “So the cost always goes back to the person trying to engage in some of these products.”
There are key benefits that digital technologies have brought to patient experience in healthcare, according to Narain. Benefits like expanded access through technologies that let people connect in new ways, and the technologies that improve patient care like what Idleman described.
Her role as a digital and innovation officer, in seeking ways to solve this challenge of using technology to create a better experience for people, often goes beyond the technology itself.
“The work of digital officers and transformation people in healthcare—our work is not technology based,” said Narain. “I spend so little time looking at the tech and more of my time trying to solve things like, How do you even bring the data together? I need payor data, I need electronic medical record data, I need all this data from this person’s [digital health tracking app] before I can even whisper the word personalization as a potential possibility.”
Watch this short video for more from the panel.
Next time: closing the series with the most critical reinvention strategies for healthcare leadership.
