A previous article, “Patient Scheduling and Pre-Visit Intake: Let’s Give Patients What They’re Asking For” discussed technological solutions to patients’ frustrating scheduling experience. This article addresses the entirety of the patient experience, and its interdependence with the staff experience. Technology has the potential to improve both simultaneously.
Vendors Help Create a Future
athenahealth has copious uses besides the ones mentioned in the previous article. athenahealth’s integrations with hospital EHR systems allow the platform to receive discharge instructions when a patient leaves a hospital. From there, athenahealth can trigger workflows such as contacting a patient to make sure they schedule a follow-up visit, or reminding the patient to make a payment.
The previous article also introduced a platform from Weave that handles common patient engagement tasks automatically. An advanced feature mentioned by Branden Neish, Chief Product Officer, was flexible text communication. A patient can request a chat on a laptop and move it to a mobile device or vice versa. The patient is warned to be careful if they choose a channel that is not encrypted, such as standard text messaging systems on mobile phones.
Weave can also send a bill in a text message, making it easy for the patient to pay on their phone. Often, the phone has recorded credit card information and can populate a form so that the patient doesn’t have to enter the numbers manually.
Skyscape offers a unified platform called Buzz for communications in text, voice, and video, used both between clinicians and for clinician/patient exchanges. Buzz works on both desktops and mobile devices and supports dictation. Automation is supported by exchanging data with the EHR and other sources of information, such as the user’s location.
I talked at Skyscape with Founder and CEO Sandeep Shah. He pointed out that everyone wants increased functional collaboration between care teams, but that any new technology implies increased time burdens. Buzz streamlines the work instead of just adding more.
Patient-centric care teams are formed in Buzz groups and carry out case management through secure messaging within each appropriate group, which on average, contains ten providers. Buzz saves all communications so that members can review them later.
Skyscape’s Buzz has significantly boosted home health agencies’ care team satisfaction by simplifying communication with patients to manage consents, medications, and visit-related logistics.
One of Skyscape’s sample applications is working with a pharmacy to send reminders to a patient to take their medication.
I talked to Jason Burum, VP and General Manager, Healthcare Provider Segment for Clinical Effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer’s Health division. The company’s service can help identify patients in need of a clinical event such as an annual wellness visit or cancer screening, and it can reach out to patients through various media channels.
If the patient has opted in to notifications, the service contacts the patient automatically. Otherwise, the clinician contacts the patient by phone or text message and encourages them to sign up. In order to generate notifications that are desired and not annoying, machine learning determines the best time of day and the ideal type of communication to use, based on the patient’s demographics, location, etc.
Wolters Kluwer also offers patient education and remote patient management based on information from a medical device.
Azalea Health is building a platform where third-party vendors can offer patients a variety of services, which are called “niche web applications” by Nathan Shepard, VP of Product there. The idea is similar to the open source SMART Platform, which I have covered several times starting in 2011.
Taking a Step Back and Looking Outward
The litany of technologies cited in this article confirm what healthcare reformers have long insisted: Currently available technology can transform health care. All that’s needed is a willingness from clinicians and payers to implement these cutting-edge systems.
As the success of the companies in this article shows, change is happening. But the adoption of new technologies isn’t happening at the speed of, say, televisits, which were resisted for years only to be adopted en masse when the COVID-19 pandemic left no other option.
Not everything is going in the right direction; consider for instance the AP News article,
Want to email your doctor? You may be charged for that.
I understand the rationale for charging for email. Answering email is a big time drain for doctors, and some patients send excessive messages. But discouraging direct patient-provider communication can lead to negative health outcomes and unhappy patients.
It’s also important to identify weak spots in new health care technologies. We must make sure, for instance, that the technology doesn’t complicate workflows by breaking up post-visit tasks into multiple parts.
It’s also disappointing that, even though Black and Hispanic patients are more likely to use patient portals than their White counterparts, “this has not translated to substantially lower frustration with the healthcare system, including understanding of coverage and claims.”
John Lynn, editor of Healthcare IT today, published 5 Tips to Retain and Attract More Consumer-Oriented Patients. As usage of the technologies rise, both the platforms and the clinicians’ comfort with them will improve.
