What If…Healthcare was as Important as Pizza?

The following is a guest article by Tim Dubes is Senior Director of Marketing at Documo.

Earlier this year, I walked into a national chain restaurant to order a pizza. I’ve ordered pizza from their other locations in the area and I was hungry again. I went to the counter and let them know that I had an appointment to get a pizza. The counter person gave me a form to complete: my information, bank account, and questions about how hungry I was, my favorite toppings, any allergies, and my family’s experience with pizza.  

The questionnaire was extensive, but I wanted pizza, so I filled out the 8-pages and gave it to the counter person. They had me wait for a while, then called me to a room behind the counter.  There I met with a pizza specialist who reviewed the questionnaire with me to ensure I understood the questions. The specialist then left the room to enter my information into the Pizza parlor’s computer system. After a while the pizza cook came into the room to explain the benefits of pizza to me, explained the menu options. Finally, the counter person gave me a document that indicated where I could pick up my pizza.

On my way home I remembered that I needed to see my oncological surgeon to set up an appointment. I logged into my healthcare provider’s website and selected “approval requests” for recommended tests. 30 minutes later I received appointment confirmations and directions to the facility for my labs and MRI.

Back to Reality

If you are familiar with either the pizza or healthcare industries, you know that I juxtaposed the two experiences above. I spent three hours in the waiting and exam rooms of a surgical specialist exchanging information that – 70% they already had in my medical record, and 30% was being shared in the most arcane manner possible (pen to paper to paper to key entry.)

Meanwhile the pizza vendor maintains a database of my orders, saves my preferences and allows me to track the process from order to delivery or pickup online (with a fairly pleasant user interface.)

Now, I’m not suggesting Pizza and Oncology belong in a comparative discussion of customer/patient encounters. But as a document automation specialist, I can’t help but feel the level of process automation is inverse to the value of the encounter.  Any restaurant would go out of business if they offered a typical clinical patient encounter experience. And I would propose that patients would be delighted by the automated, customer-centric experience provided by any fast food chain.

So, in my best 4th grade questioning mode, why is this the case? The first thought is that automation is adopted more quickly when revenue is associated with the transaction. That is partially explainable by the commercial nature of the restaurant industry.  Yet this year, the revenue generated in the US pizza industry ($55.5B) is approximately .5% of national spending on healthcare ($9.32Trillion.)  The difference of course is who is paying for the service. I suspect if our allotment of Pizza was financed via a third party payor, the customer experience might resemble an ER waiting room. 

The validity of my “what if” premise on the customer experience is debatable. The fact that automation–particularly of document driven processes–improves the user experience is not. Healthtech advances are available that allow clinicians, and providers to focus on caregiving and curing by automating administrative documentation and workflows. This does not even take into account the need to improve efficiency as healthcare staffing reaches critical levels.

Inspiration for innovation often comes from examples observed in unrelated industries. The concept of improved user experience coupled with staff productivity and accelerated processes is standard operating procedure in the competitive retail environment. It is time for healthtech users to give their example careful consideration. 

About Tim Dubes

Tim Dubes is Senior Director, Marketing with Documo, a developer of document-driven applications for health tech innovators & healthcare providers. 

   

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