At the 8th Annual Becker's Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Meeting, two Optum leaders — Eileen Russo, PhD, vice president of finance and operations for Optum Advisory Services, and Puneet Maheshwari, CEO of Optum Patient Access and Engagement — led a group of healthcare leaders in a roundtable discussion on the challenges and opportunities in delivering digital healthcare services.
Dr. Russo and Mr. Maheshwari highlighted the great potential to improve patient experiences with digital tools but acknowledged it's often difficult to deliver on this promise due to various barriers like complexity, the need for personalization and the varying demands of different patient demographics. The discussion centered on the importance of aligning technologies — from chatbots to artificial intelligence — with patient needs and expectations, and ensuring they complement rather than replace human interaction.
Here are the three takeaways from the discussion.
Patient stories can spur digital interventions
Digital engagement in healthcare is about streamlining and reducing friction in core moments that really matter to the consumer. According to Mr. Maheshwari, those key moments generally fall into three transactional buckets: helping patients locate the right care at the right place and time; understanding and navigating patient financial responsibility; and accessing medications. The challenges and frustrations for patients, he reiterated, lie in how disjointed these experiences often are.
Dr. Russo said her team frequently hears anecdotes of patients' frustrations through executive partners. "CEOs will hear a terrible story of a patient's experience, and it becomes very real to them," Dr. Russo said. "It spurs the leader to say, 'that's enough.'"
Personal accounts like these offer color and context, and they can inspire leaders to initiate change. But driving innovation to meet the needs of patients should be primarily grounded in one key area: data.
Segmenting patients' needs + preferences informs meaningful change
Patients are neither monolithic nor homogenous. As such, healthcare leaders must consider how they'll best serve their patients with services, including digital experiences, that are personalized. This can be achieved, Dr. Russo said, by starting with small steps that are data informed — like segmentation by patients' needs and preferences. Doing so enables healthcare organizations to prioritize digital interventions.
"You have to know your market," Dr. Russo said. "We do this through surveys that ask, 'What do you want to do digitally? What do you want to do on the phone versus in person? How do you want to receive this information?' It helps to determine what to start with — not finish with — to make an impact on patient experience."
With this approach, Dr. Russo explained, healthcare organizations can group patients and decide where to target interventions or start making changes.
Adaptive processes & systems drive improvements in patient experience
Healthcare is dynamic. It's riddled with inherent complexity, variability and uncertainty. And much like other industry forces, patients' preferences and needs will continue to evolve as well. Meeting their needs and demands — while keeping personalization front and center — is challenging on its own, but another key barrier lies in health systems' often-rigid processes and systems.
"We're applying deterministic models to indeterministic problems, and that's where the breakage really is," Mr. Maheshwari said.
He offered the example of patient scheduling, an area ripe for innovation in which fixed templates are typically used. "Why do we have to have fixed templates? Why can't we monitor demand patterns?" he said. "We can do that now — we have enough data, enough sophistication to be able to start doing those things."
The path ahead: honing a data strategy + putting patients first
Hospitals and health systems have a common vision of creating a comprehensive, patient-driven digital health experience. However, delivering on this promise is only possible to the extent patients' needs and preferences are understood. It's essential for healthcare leaders to use data to drive those deeper insights and inform meaningful changes to the digital healthcare experience that will ultimately meet patients' needs.