Imagine you’re on vacation, enjoying a good beach read while waves roll up the sandy shore.
As you finish a chapter, your stomach rumbles. You open an app, order some groceries to pick-up on your way back to the rental. Thinking about the rental reminds you to pay-off the remaining balance on the credit card you used to book the trip, all before you leave the comforts of your umbrella-covered towel.
What if healthcare were this easy?
As president and CEO of a large integrated healthcare system, it’s a vision that I’ve imagined for a long time.
We need to think differently about how we’re serving patients and how to meet the modern expectation of convenience in all things. The good news is this vision is closer than it’s ever been.
We learned two important insights during the COVID-19 pandemic: 1) a lot of people prefer virtual care and 2) innovation can happen really quickly when we need it to. Quite honestly, we didn’t really know the extent to which these were true before the pandemic.
When COVID hit, our organization trained some 2,000 clinicians on video visits in one week. While virtual care peaked during the height of COVID-19, roughly 15% of the care we provide is still delivered virtually. And in some specialty care settings, like mental health, that percentage is closer to 60%.
The challenge is how do we make sure virtual and in-person services work together to truly deliver a more convenient, connected and personal experience.
It’s the idea behind a new model that we’re implementing called Hybrid Care. To start, we’re using it for preventive care.
An expectation of convenience, whether it’s retail or health care
Think of Hybrid Preventive Care like shopping at Target. With Target, you can shop online, receive recommendations based on what the retailer knows about you, and then you can pick up your order at whatever location is most convenient.
With Hybrid Preventive Care, you do your annual preventive assessment online at whatever time works for your schedule, receive personalized recommendations, and get labs, imaging or vaccines at whatever location is most convenient.
Patients who have HealthPartners insurance will be directed to other relevant resources available through their health plan, too. We know increased personalization has a direct impact on outcomes. Through other work we’re doing to personalize health information, we know that it can improve vaccination rates, certain cancer screenings and reduce cancellation of some appointments.
This personalized hybrid experience is starting to meet consumers’ desire for simpler health care. It also has potential to bridge the gap that exists between virtual and in-person services. These gaps, by the way, are prompting consumers to shop for services more than they ever have before. According to a study by the data firm Trilliant, individuals are using more than four health care brands on average per year, which has implications for effective care coordination.
It’s a trend that employers are watching, too. Survey data from the Business Group on Health show employers are concerned that virtual health care is siloed and there’s a lack of coordination between virtual and in-person services. They’re increasingly worried about the fragmented, piecemeal care their employees are receiving.
These market insights remind us that we need to think differently about how we deliver care and serve consumers and employer groups.
A better-connected experience is better for patients and employers. A true win-win.
Hybrid preventive care also happens to benefit our care teams. In a post-pandemic world, a smaller health care workforce is caring for a growing number of patients. And, in spite of record levels of investment, the workforce pipeline continues to flow at a trickle, creating access issues across virtually every specialty.
In primary care, we have roughly 40 percent more demand than capacity. Wait times for primary care appointments are roughly 24 days. This new model of care provides an efficient approach to lower acuity visits and frees up clinicians’ schedules for more complex visits.
Behind the scenes of our innovative mindset
Our care teams already see the potential benefits of this more efficient model and they’re excited about reimagining how care can better meet the needs of patients and members. We’re building hybrid models for acne, back pain and other areas. We hope to make them available by the end of the year.
This ambitious timeline is a result of human-centered, iterative design principles that allow us to innovate more quickly. It’s a design philosophy that’s more common in tech than health care, and it allows us to build on other innovation started at HealthPartners, such as Virtuwell.
Virtuwell is the online diagnosis and treatment service we launched in 2010. At the time, we were trying to disrupt convenience care – and not without criticism. Some experts and patients balked at the initial list of conditions we treated, saying that the limited treatments would require them to go into a clinic even after using our new online clinic.
Since those early days, we’ve delivered more than a million treatment plans virtually, roughly half of which occurred since 2019.
Hybrid care uses this time-tested approach to gathering info from patients and getting that info to clinicians.
But, rather than using our Virtuwell platform to help patients heal after they’ve become sick, we’ve layered on algorithms and processes to support patients for planned, preventive care – to help them stay well.
The Hybrid Preventive Care experience is based on guidelines from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, United States Preventive Services Task Force, existing patient data in the health record, claims and other information that we have about their insurance plan. Scheduling for labs, preventive screenings or other areas of in-person care is built into the experience. What once was a siloed, separate experience is now a bridge to our comprehensive suite of services. Virtual and in-person teams are better aligned and communicate more effectively behind the scenes, giving consumers a simpler, more personalized way to engage with healthcare.
It won’t be for everyone, of course. Those who have complex care needs, medication refills, or other more urgent symptoms might require traditional care models. But, for us, Hybrid Care is the future. It’s a different way of thinking. It’s a better way to meet our patients and members’ expectations. And, it’s what’s going to help us make health care simpler and more affordable.
Andrea Walsh is President and CEO at HealthPartners in Bloomington, Minn.