The Seattle-based health system, long focused on keeping competitive with consumer tech, is using its platforms to help manage “the biggest disruptor we’ve had,” says its chief digital officer.
A recent IDC Health Insights presentation focused on health IT industry trends during and after the COVID-19 era. It examined some of tools and strategies that stand to gain ground in the months ahead as health systems build on lessons learned during the coronavirus crisis.
Among the connected health trends on researchers’ radar, of course: “accelerated deployment of telehealth/virtual visits, chatbot assessments, and remote health monitoring.”
In addition, the public health emergency should stand to refocus attention on “vulnerable populations, including the elderly, underserved, homeless, and incarcerated.”
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More broadly, IDC researchers looked ahead to consumer-facing patient engagement and experience, trends such as “Creation of the ‘digital front door’ to engage patients at every touchpoint using consumer technology.”
This term “digital front door” is not a new one, of course. More and more health systems, having recognized the ubiquity of smartphones and other consumer tools, are embracing that strategy and shifting toward “community-based digital health services,” as IDC defines it, “engaging with consumers using their own technology.”
The COVID-19 public health emergency has put a spotlight on the value of being able to connect with patients where they are, and with their own technology, to help assess and triage symptoms.
And when, hopefully, the crisis recedes, those health systems that have been leaders with digital front door innovations stand to be well positioned when it comes to population health management and patient experience, as IDC Group vice president Lynne Dunbrack recently told Healthcare IT News.
“Organizations that embraced that approach before this are probably in a much better position to respond quickly to be able to enable the community-based care that’s so important for flattening the curve,” said Dunbrack. “As they’ve made these investments and consumers have gotten used to using these technologies, I think there will be staying power if it was deployed well.”
Even those providers that scrambled to deploy connected-health tools as the coronavirus pandemic spread should eventually be able to “go back to a second wave of deployment,” having gained insights from the challenges of recent months, she said. “Well, we did it really quick to get it, you know, ready for the surge. Now how can we redeploy them to have that digital front door at any time – not just because we’re in the midst of a pandemic and we need to respond.”
“Big, needle-moving opportunities”
One health system that’s been a longtime advocate of the digital front door approach is Seattle-based Providence, which in March found itself dealing with surges of new patients as Washington State became the first American epicenter of COVID-19.
Just the previous month, in a February interview before the pandemic had taken hold in the U.S., Providence Chief Digital Officer Aaron Martin spoke with Healthcare IT News Contributor Benjamin Harris about the critical need for health systems to investment in consumer experience technologies.
“We still make people make phone calls to schedule appointments,” he said. “What other industry does that?”
Most folks who have been paying attention in recent years have noticed that CVS-Aetna, the Big Five tech firms, Walgreens, Wal-Mart and any number of smaller and nimble startups have been laser-focused on disrupting the healthcare status quo.
And Martin – who joined Providence six years ago from Amazon and immeditately started building a digital team of about 120 software engineers – has been keenly interested in finding “big, needle-moving opportunities” to help Providence build and maintain a digital edge when it comes to personalization and user experience.
Source: Healthcare IT News