Heading into 2020, healthcare leaders will lean on patient engagement technology to drive patient-centered care principles.
Patient engagement technology will be the name of the game in 2020, as more healthcare providers look toward new and innovative tools to learn more about their patients and address the shift toward consumerism in healthcare.
While patient communication, access to care, and satisfaction all defined 2019, healthcare experts are expecting the industry to take a more technological turn in 2020. Between different healthcare systems that make sense of patient data to new tools that ease patient care access and create a consumer-centered experience, medical professionals can expect the patient experience to go digital this year.
This does not mean efforts to drive a person-centered, compassionate care episode will no longer be important, experts warn. However, as healthcare consumers become more accustomed to a digital front door to other services in their lives, they will expect the same from healthcare. And in an effort to keep up, health systems are going to deliver.
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PatientEngagementHIT.com spoke with three leaders in the healthcare field to understand how technology is going to shape their efforts looking ahead into the new year.
HEALTH TECHNOLOGY HELPS IDENTIFY HIGH-RISK PATIENTS
Population health management is not a new concept, with industry leaders long recognizing its importance in delivering on value-based, patient-centered care.
What is new is working to understand more individual patient needs, triaging those needs, and connecting the most at-risk populations with community resources that can address the social determinants of health.
At the Dallas-based Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI), technology is going to be the lifeblood of those programs. While PCCI president and CEO Steve Miff, PhD, advocates for person-centered community-based care, it’s the artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that makes this kind of care possible.
“We’re going to continue to see the evolution of applications of both AI and machine learning to understand this broader information about individuals and patients,” Miff said in an interview. “We’re going to see more of the specific applications of this in communities that demonstrates the impact and the value of it. Too much of the conversation has been theoretical up to this point. I think we’ll see more concrete use of these applications across communities.”
And from there, Miff said the industry can expect to see further investment in social risk factors and the social determinants of health.
“We’re going to see much more activity and meaningful communities coming together to address isolation and mental and physical health and particularly around a new models to address and scale services for mental behavioral health.”
LEANING ON TECH TO EASE PATIENT ACCESS TO CARE
At Banner Health, the new year will ring in more efforts to create a consumer-centered experience, and technology use will be at the heart of that, according to Chris Pace, the senior director of digital marketing at the Arizona-based health system.
“Next year Banner is really heavily invested in driving traffic to our website. We have invested a lot of time and energy on building out a simple, frictionless experience so that customers can land on our site and find a pathway to care within two clicks,” Pace told PatientEngagementHIT.com in a separate phone call.
With the understanding that about 85 percent of healthcare consumers begin their healthcare experience with an online search, Banner recognizes the importance of not only being present in Google search but having a strong, navigable website that helps patients connect with the care they need.
And from there, Pace and his team at Banner are focused on making it easier for patients to actually access a Banner provider. This means more patient-facing technology tools that make healthcare a commodity they can access the same way they’d access Amazon or Uber.
“The other piece is to fulfill the digital journey is to make sure that we have as many online check-in or appointment booking solutions as possible,” Pace stated. “Banner is invested heavily in ambulatory care. We have 40-plus urgent cares. We have a significant footprint of imaging centers that we just acquired. And we will be delving into the consumer-facing telehealth space in 2020. Making sure that we have the ability to not only be discoverable, but the actionable to consumers is going to be really important so that we can scale and grow.”
MAKING CARE MANAGEMENT AN AMAZON EXPERIENCE
Healthcare should be easy, as Pace’s 2020 predictions suggest. But that includes more than helping patients access their care; it also entails the care management process and making it workable in patients’ lifestyles, according to Mikelle Moore, the senior vice president for community health at Intermountain Healthcare.
“We really believe that we need to be more digital in our engagement as consumer, that in order to reach people we need to be as responsive and easy to access as Amazon and other digital platform based organizations,” Moore, who is also Intermountain’s chief community health officer, said.
Using more digital technologies has supported and will continue to support Intermountain in driving patient activation in care into 2020.
“Shifting healthcare into a platform mindset is going to be really difficult but it’s really important. We’re finding pockets of success as we engage people in diabetes prevention and as we engage people in their medical care using different technologies. It’s picking up very quickly and we think that kind of interface is going to be important for engagement.”
At the center of each of these predictions is the patient and understand how to better serve the patient. While this will also require an interpersonal touch, healthcare experts and expect to see technology supplement patient-centered care, helping to fill in gaps where providers may need.
Source: Patient Engagement Hit