NASHVILLE, Tennessee—It's not much of a secret that healthcare is slow to change, and adapting to new technology is no exception.
Katya Andresen, chief digital and innovation officer at the Cigna Group, joined the insurer about a year and a half ago from the banking industry and said during an interview at the ViVE conference last month that she's seen this glacial pace firsthand.
"I don't think it's breaking news to say that healthcare is a bit behind compared to other industries," she said.
Andresen, who came from the banking industry and has spent nearly two decades working in technology, said she sees three waves of technological innovation, and healthcare companies fall across that spectrum as they push for transformation.
The first phase, she said, focuses around digital enablement, which aims to make digital platforms more readily accessible She said that organizations working in this step will often describe their goals as "omnichannel," allowing patients to have different avenues to access care.
Most healthcare organizations, she said, are in what she views as phase two: digital differentiation. This means they're aiming to find ways to stand out in a crowded field and elevate the end user experience.
For example, this would include point solutions that target specific conditions or patient navigation services and platforms, Andresen said. These are innovations that may improve the patient's experience but doesn't upset the industry wholesale.
"I think navigation is necessary, because it's so hard to navigate the healthcare system," she said. "But there's something fundamentally incremental about that, when you think about digital innovation, because you're basically saying, here's the GPS to this maze."
In addition, there is a slew of point solutions on the market or in the pipeline, which could actually make the navigation issues worse and compound healthcare's already fragmented design, Andresen said.
In the final phase, digital innovation truly disrupts the status quo, Andresen said.
"Disruption is when instead of saying to people, 'We're going to make it easier for you to navigate the system we have,' we can say, 'We're going to personalize it for you, around you,'" she said. "So that's what I came to healthcare to do. That is, to me, the really hard, exciting thing."
Successfully disrupting healthcare's existing paradigms requires "dismantling a lot of the way we've been thinking about things," she said. It means gathering interoperable data and rebuilding the patient experience to ensure patients' experiences can be individualized at scale.
Andresen noted that healthcare organizations aren't necessarily on a linear journey through these phases. They don't always start building out the enablement tools, then graduate to differentiation before tackling true disruption, she said.
"There are plenty of companies … that are launching into stage three," she said. "There are some legacy players who are trying to go from one to two, and there's some who want to skip two and go from one to three."
Fully taking advantage of phase three means looking at digital and virtual solutions as more than just an individual avenue for the patient. It requires an approach that's led by these technologies, Andresen said.
"There's a difference between seeing digital as a channel and seeing digital as a way to create connective tissue for the healthcare system around an individual," she said. "And that's what I'm excited about, and that's where we need to be."