Improving Patient Experience with Digital Transformation

Becoming patient centric in your organization isn’t something that you can do all at once. It’s a slow process that requires you to think about the patient experience in every single aspect of your organization. This is especially important when you are establishing new practices in your organization, such as when you’re integrating digital transformation. That way your organization will be patient centric from the beginning, rather than having to go back and re-do it.

But how exactly does digital transformation impact the patient experience? We reached out to our lovely Healthcare IT Community for their answers to this question. Read down below for their responses.

Marmmett Horton, MSW, ACM-SW, Senior Vice President & General Manager, US at Strata Health Solutions

Patients are driving digital transformation in healthcare. As patients become more tech-savvy, they expect to maintain that digital experience across all realms of their lives. Health systems can set themselves apart by creating smart, seamless, and consistent patient experiences across the continuum of care. A significant opportunity for improvement exists during the transition to post-acute care. The digital transformation of this process will improve patient education and engagement in the transfer from hospital to post-acute settings, resulting in better outcomes for patients and health system finances.

Masoud Nourmohammadi, Chief Technology Officer at Strive Health

Ten years ago, most of the healthcare data was captured in paper. Growing adoption of EHRs, however, created a movement to capture the data in a digital format. Today, a digital transformation in healthcare means we can gather data from a host of different sources with the goal of improving patient care, but it’s up to healthcare professionals to make sense of it and build meaningful insights from it in order to develop a better understanding of someone’s health journey. It’s too early to determine our level of success around digital health initiatives but Covid-19 certainly forced us all to reexamine how and when we provide care to patients.

Doug Biehn, Chief Commercial Officer at Cala Health

Historically, the standard of care has relied on drugs or surgical intervention. As a result of digital transformation within the industry, however, we’ve now created a completely new category of wearable treatment. Digital therapies are now a viable alternative to traditional drugs, which offer multiple benefits. They empower patients and providers to take ownership of their health, enable personalized treatment, create efficacy without side effects, and offer data that can be used to optimize treatment and report results. Going into 2023, we can expect to see even more innovation in personalized, wearable treatment options.

Brad Genereaux, Global Lead, Healthcare Alliances at NVIDIA

Innovations in the digital transformation of healthcare have delivered improvements across clinical ecosystems. With AI helping to streamline menial administrative healthcare tasks, clinicians are empowered to focus on giving the best possible care for their patients.

Branden Neish, Chief Product Officer at Weave

Digital transformation is the key to modernizing your healthcare practice. It integrates fast-moving, administrative processes throughout the business in real time, allowing practices to operate more efficiently and deliver better patient experiences. Right now, transformation is crucial for the healthcare industry to be able to withstand staffing shortages and improve the patient experience. When it comes to small practices especially, improving communication with patients through digital improvements must be a top healthcare transformation priority.

According to a recent Weave study on healthcare staffing, 97% of small healthcare businesses say delivering good patient experiences requires the right tools or technology, yet only 27% have invested in these tools for employees to do their jobs. To improve, small practices should focus on investing in tools that allow for enhanced patient communication, such as online chats with patients through practice websites, texting with clients to schedule appointments or pay for services, and sending automatic appointment reminders.

For practices with a limited number of workers juggling multiple tasks, patient communication needs to be streamlined, reliable, and effective. If small healthcare practices can make digital advancements in these areas, they will improve patient satisfaction while also making employees’ jobs less stressful.

Dan Rodrigues, Chief Executive Officer at Tebra

Consumers are paying more and more for their healthcare. As a result, they’re demanding a much more modern, digital-first, convenient healthcare experience. Unfortunately, many traditional healthcare practices don’t have the tools or know-how to deliver an experience that matches today’s patient expectations. Practices need to modernize the patient experience with tools built for the new era of healthcare; tools that connect patients to the best providers in seconds and deliver a digital-first patient experience.

Mudit Garg, CEO at Qventus

Patients, as consumers, expect healthcare to work just like everything else in their personal and professional lives. They not only want to access everything at their fingertips, but they also expect everything to run incredibly smoothly once they’re inside the front door. In recent years, health systems have delighted patients with consumer-friendly mobile apps and telehealth offerings, but their patients are still frustrated when they experience discharge delays or have to schedule surgery far in the future. Leading organizations are now focused on digitally transforming their care operations, and efficiency is becoming a new strategic advantage.

Hua Ye, Chief Product Officer at Lightship

We have certainly seen that telemedicine has the potential to enhance the participant experience. Telemedicine was of course around before the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarly, in Lightship’s space, virtual-first clinical trials and hybrid approaches were also providing participants with choice, which is key for reaching historically underserved people. During the pandemic, everything suddenly switched to telephone and the adoption of new approaches using virtual tools, including apps for patients and clinicians, accelerated. Research from McKinsey found that in April 2020, telemedicine usage surged to 78 times higher compared to the previous month.

After the pandemic, there has not been a big switch back to physical appointments, with telemedicine becoming a permanent fixture because of the choice and ease it can offer patients and how it helps to improve access. Now utilization has levelled off at around 38 times higher than pre-pandemic levels. Telemedicine will continue playing an important role within the hybrid model, including medical facilities, the patient’s home, and the “third place” (such as mobile research units and other community-based locations) providing patients with greater convenience and helping to scale equity in healthcare.

Shahar Nordia, VP Digital Health at Eitan Medical

The last few years of the pandemic have driven a digital transformation enabling healthcare to be delivered remotely. With hospital space at a premium, home-centered care, powered by connected digital health devices, has become a preferred option for both caregivers and patients. The resulting ability to deliver previously hospital-centric provisions such as infusions in a home environment has led to expectations from patients for home-based care.

Brad Kittredge, Co-Founder and CEO at Brightside Health

We’re rapidly moving into the next phase of telehealth. No longer an online visit between patient & provider, this is tech-enabled healthcare, delivered remotely, that allows for rigorous care protocols that use data & consumer-grade patient experiences to drive better outcomes at scale. The next step is to integrate & adopt this into traditional health care systems. Together, these systems & telepsychiatry providers can ensure that every person gets timely access to the highest quality care.

What great answers! To share your insights on how the patient experience has been impacted by digital transformation, leave a comment down below. We’d love to hear what you think!

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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