ORLANDO, Florida—Healthcare executive Kristen Valdes has a daughter with an autoimmune disorder, and accessing her medical information means sifting through 17 patient portals on the clinical side of her care alone.
“Now, because [electronic medical records] are trying to solve for interoperability, they’re actually propagating erroneous information to other doctors in her care. But the only person who doesn’t have a say in what that looks like is my daughter," Valdes, CEO and founder of b.well Connected Health, told attendees at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Global Conference.
During a HIMSS session on designing consumer-centric digital innovations, Valdes and Matthew Warrens, managing director of innovation at UnityPoint Health, discussed how to move toward more connected care that centers around the patient experience.
The idea of a “digital front door” to create a streamlined consumer experience in healthcare has touched every corner of this year’s HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida. When Valdes asked how many attendees had heard the phrase during the conference, laughter rippled through the crowd, and every person in the audience threw up their hand.
“The reason digital front doors are so hot, is because healthcare is full of friction for consumers,” Valdes said. “When somebody shows up at your door, are you helping them to find the right kind of provider at the right level of care? Are you navigating them through the appointment and giving them the experience they want all the way through paying a bill?”
Warrens noted the phenomenon of “point solution fatigue” across all players in the healthcare system. But building solutions on top of a healthcare organization’s platform is time-consuming and expensive, which means it’s often more feasible to contract with existing companies.
Still, that leaves the often-complicated task of integrating the solution into the system of record.
Valdes suggested that when choosing a solution, organizations should “make the company do the work for (them).”
“Put them into the population and be relentless about asking, do people use (the solutions)? Do people like them?” she said.
But total digital transformation for an organization goes beyond creating a digital front door, Warrens and Valdes argued.
They identified four challenges in healthcare today: chronic disease, pay for outcomes, consumerism and geo-agnostic care. Those hurdles create opportunities for organizations and their partners, including shared decision making, personalized medicine, price transparency and digital front doors.
To take advantage of those opportunities, Warrens said, innovation should be woven through the organization so everyone is accountable for its implementation across the care continuum.
“It’s really about creating that culture of innovation across the entire organization,” Warrens said. “Do you, as a patient, want to go to the hospital in your town that’s not innovative? As a nurse, do you want to work in a hospital like that?”
The entire C-suite team must be united in that goal, because “there’s going to be people that pull in the opposite direction because it’s easier to do things the way that they’re set up today,” Valdes said.
The push for consumerization in healthcare also gives organizations a chance to reimagine provider directories, which were originally designed around payers’ needs, Valdes argued.
Consumers care about provider characteristics like race, sex, languages spoken, whether their provider offers telemedicine and if they can reach that provider over text, and how difficult it might be to get a same-day appointment, she said.
“We need to think a little bit differently about how to match consumers with providers upfront and then you navigate them through that,” she said.
A long-time venture investor in healthcare, Warrens said UnityPoint Health Ventures considers between 600 and 700 companies every year for investment, with just over a dozen in its portfolio.
To find the early-series startups championing potentially game-changing innovations, Warrens said he looks to the startup’s team and whether their work challenges what’s possible.
“Once we meet with a company, we reach out to the clinical subject matter experts in our organizations that we can show this to,” he said. “We’re looking to show (the experts) something and have (them) react: 'Oh my gosh, I don’t know if this will work, but if it does, we really want to do that.'”