Bill Klaproth (Host): This podcast is brought to you by Mytonomy, a leading provider of health education and engagement solutions. Mytonomy delivers optimized engagement leading to improved safety and quality, better patient provider experience, risk mitigation, and more clinical efficiencies across the patient journey with award-winning evidence-based content produced in the Mytonomy Film Studio and delivered through Mytonomy Cloud for Healthcare, an enterprise platform optimized to support the health journey. To learn more, visit mytonomy.com.

 This is Today in Nursing Leadership, a podcast from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership. I'm Bill Klaproth, as we talk about transforming safety, quality, and experience by modernizing patient education and engagement across the patient journey, as we talk with Anjali Kataria, founder and CEO of Mytonomy. Anjali, welcome!

Anjali Kataria: Thanks, Bill. Great to be here today.

Host: Yeah. And great to talk with you, and I guess congratulations are in order, as Mytonomy was recently named by Newsweek as one of the World's Best Digital Health Companies of 2024. Congrats. Tell us about that.

Anjali Kataria: Thanks, Bill. You're up on your news. Yeah, that just came out. We were surprised and thrilled at the same time. From what I understand, I think they had some independent analysts that looked at the impact that these large investments in so many digital health companies that have been made over the years and kind of whittled it down to 400 companies. And we were fortunate enough to make that list. And it had to do with financials and had to do with the impact that your solution could have from what I understand.

Host: Wow, that is quite an honor, so congratulations on that again. Yeah. So, let me ask you this, could you tell us just a little bit about yourself and what's driving you to work on this transformation that is getting such global attention?

Anjali Kataria: Great. Yeah, no, happy to do that. It's always hard to talk about yourself, but I love patient education and engagement as the space that we have cornered that we want to really make an impact in. I think it's been overlooked as an important catalyst in driving so much of the change we want to see in healthcare. Patients are half of the equation. And when we focus on system improvement and nursing and efficiencies, we really sometimes forget about what can the patient do more better of, how do we empower the patient as part of our ecosystem with provider-led patient education and engagement. And there's an opportunity there to digitize and automate that. I get super excited and jazzed and I'm very passionate about the scale at which we can impact change.

Host: Yeah. So, when we talk about transforming patient education and engagement, why is this transformation needed?

Anjali Kataria: It's a great question. You know, the transformation in this space started in the '40s with handouts, beautiful handouts that were considered state-of-the-art back in the 1940s and '50s, and we still use those handouts today as the primary means of education. Or, you know, we send a patient home with an after-visit summary and 30 pages attached. And that certainly reaches some people because people do like to read, but a lot of people in this day and age really rely on video. In fact, you know, there's been a number of surveys, anywhere from 70-75% of people, consumers surveyed, prefer video-based education over written education. And we know that video supersizes engagement from the consumer and retail space. Internet online education and advertising knows that we know with Tik Tok, we know with so many social media outlets that a short video really can be very powerful.

And that's why we need to transform healthcare. We need to bring it into the 21st Century when it comes to patient education and offer a modern, consumer-oriented, video-based option alongside the written education so that our diverse learners, our diverse society can absorb the clinical instructions that are being given to them. It's almost like a patient is drinking from a fire hose when they've got a new diagnosis or a lifetime chronic condition that they're going to have to manage. And we've got to think about different ways to train them in how to care for themselves. And so, that's why this transformation is needed. We've got to really rethink patient education and engagement and think about training people. When healthcare starts and ends at home, we need to start at home with them before they've even arrived.

Host: So, when we talk about patient education, when you kind of boil it down, , there's a better health outcome for them and it also helps our nurses, too, if we have a more informed patient. Is that right?

Anjali Kataria: That's absolutely right. At Mytonomy, we believe, as I mentioned, healthcare starts and ends at home. So, we start educating the patient before they've even made a decision to have the surgery or the treatment. Or when they have a visit coming up, when they schedule that procedure or visit, we go into motion, right? They get into the Mytonomy digital journey and it's very tailored to their particular condition or procedure. And I think that's what nurses need to focus on as they rethink their patient education strategy. We've seen a lot of really great results when your strategy starts before they come in for the appointment as opposed to waiting for discharge.

And if you start before they come in, with a cloud-based solution, you're going to see improvements not only in outcomes, which are very important, you're going to see that optimizing the engagement leads to improved safety and quality. You're going to see better patient-provider experience. So, the providers themselves are going to have a better experience. You're going to have more job satisfaction. They're going to spend less time per patient. They're going to be able to go deeper. And they're going to have easier patients to manage, which really improves job quality. There's going to be risk mitigation for the health system. There are going to be a lot of clinical efficiencies because that patient is now partnering with you. They're partnering with you around safety in the inpatient room and preventing falls, because they watched the videos about preventing falls and making sure they have someone in the bathroom, for example, where a lot of falls take place. They're going to be a partner to you in identifying if their wound site feels hot or red so that if you're starting to see sepsis or you're starting to see an infection around a surgical wound site, that patient is activated and knows what to look for, they become a partner in care.

Host: So, the benefits are easy to see, better provider experience, better nurse experience, and as if not more important, better patient experience as well. So then, how do you work with healthcare systems today? How do you integrate all this, Anjali?

Anjali Kataria: So, we work with healthcare systems, we work with pharma, and we work with payers. So, this health education and engagement strategy is pretty similar many ways. We're an enterprise-wide platform, a cloud-based solution, which is what nurses should really look for when they're thinking about this strategy, because then you're taking it into a different level of management, right? There's less resources on your side required to do the integration. There's less resources to update. You get a lot of self-service capabilities where you can upload your own content with Mytonomy. You can make changes to your content at any time. You can use our content library. And those are some of the things you're going to want to see. That's how we work with health systems. We provide them with a standard library off the shelf, and then we allow them to make any changes they want to any of the videos. And typically, we include a certain amount for free just as part of the license. And they can always add more videos that they want configured into their contract. And we find that that really makes it tailored to the health system or to the payer with their care plan being now reflected in the video content. So, the patient feels like they're getting content that's very tailored to them. And the capabilities we provide allow us to work with healthcare systems very closely in uploading their own content and then adding that right into the digital care plan so across that entire patient journey, we're able to reach the patient in meaningful ways, and the patient is able to use the Mytonomy platform, which is usually white labeled to the health system 24/7. So, the patient feels like, "I'm getting all this great care from my nurse and my care team, I love them," and they haven't even seen anyone yet.

Host: So, this is a cloud-based video education and engagement system you mentioned on the Mytonomy platform. Can you give us a little more insight into how all of this works?

Anjali Kataria: Yeah. There's lots of approaches people have tried in the past around engagement and text-based engagement. We took a very different approach. We said, "All right, many health systems are going to have a texting application." And we know the video is more powerful than the text. We know that people have their favorite show that they're watching outside of hospital, outside of healthcare. We're a streaming society now. So, we love to learn through videos, we love to watch our favorite shows,. So, Mytonomy said, "Hey, let's bring in the power of consumer-oriented content streaming, and let's build an engagement capability around that. Let's think of a Netflix for healthcare, but supersized with lots of engagement capabilities." You know, you wouldn't get surveys popping up and text messages and emails sent to you when you're watching your favorite Netflix show. But the fact that we can take that consumer behavior of content streaming, that is very much an Amazon Prime or a YouTube or a Netflix, Hulu-like experience, bring that into healthcare, so a private streaming network, and that gives it a very consumer-oriented approach. And then, we layered in a ton of really relevant, intelligent engagement around each condition area. So, each condition, each workflow has different points in the journey that needed to be optimized for optimal engagement, right? So, that's how it works.

Host: This is fascinating. So then, how do you produce clinical evidence-based content? And what's important for healthcare systems and nurses to recognize as they start thinking about the actual clinical content when applying these strategies? I guess you would customize them if someone's coming in for a knee replacement surgery, you would have a video on that. Is that how that works?

Anjali Kataria: That's exactly right. We would have several videos, because the way we produce content here at Mytonomy is with microlearning science. So, we take not just short videos, but we take the science of microlearning that's been around in consumer training and corporate training for 20 plus years. We've been training our workforce, very diverse workforces across the country with microlearning principles.

And that's what we do at Mytonomy. We take those microlearning scientific principles, how the brain learns, We break that down, we apply that in a healthcare setting, and we create, on average, our videos are between one and three minutes each. Some of them are even shorter. And we, cover things like repetition and spacing and like different principles of modern learning science.

In the video, we have a patient perspective. They're very patient centered. So, unlike other education that's out there, we're not taking a nursing library or a clinical decision support library and giving that to a patient. We're actually harmonizing with those same nursing and medical standards, but we're refilming and recreating that content from a patient centric point of view.

We're also leveraging a lot of the respectful language and, empowering patients where they feel hope and they feel energized. We had a, an IRB study where we showed we could reduce anxiety with the content that Mytonomy produces in our studio, which is overseen by an in house medical team.

We have a national clinical advisory network of uh, Subject matter experts in each area that we're producing content in, and they get assigned as peer reviewers to our module. So it's a large operation. We have over 200 doctors, nurses, other clinicians that are experts in their field, which allows us to cover a broad range of content and to go very

deep.

Bill Klaproth (Host): So, back to my knee uh, knee analogy, I, I'm loving what you're saying here, Anjali. So, would I watch these, would there be a video pre op and then a video post op as well?

Anjali Kataria: from Mytonomy, you would get a playlist of videos. Short, one to three minute videos, pre op. Telling you everything you need to know about your knee, what's happening to it, you know, why you need this surgery, what the surgery is going to entail. Then you're going to have all the things you need to do to prepare for the surgery in that playlist, right?

Might even be a series of playlists. You're also going to have access right up front to all of the content you'll need to watch when you go home, so that you can watch it before you get to the hospital, right? That's so consumer oriented today, like, we love to Set expectations in the hospital hospitality industry.

For example, if you're going to go on a vacation You're gonna be able to preview the plane and the seat you're gonna be in before you get to the airport You're gonna pick that seat same principle for expectation setting You're gonna be able to see the hotel you're gonna go to you're gonna see what restaurants they have there You might even make some reservations before you arrive.

Same type of consumer oriented capabilities now are available in Mytonomy and should be in front of any nurse that's thinking about a patient education strategy. So for your knee example, you're gonna see how to set up your home when you come home from surgery, how to use crutches, how to use a walker.

You're gonna see all the exercises you're gonna need to do, and there's a range. Now your doctor may prescribe. A few of those exercises and not all of them, but we're very comprehensive. So we're giving you the full window into what you might expect. Now, when we work with a healthcare system, we'll tailor that entire library against their protocol.

So it'll be their specific exercises, their specific pre op prep, their specific discharge instructions, but we have a really solid base and foundation. to work off of. So making those little, you know, snips or, or tailoring that content is actually quite

efficient, very fast.

Bill Klaproth (Host): It's easy to see how it is efficient and fast, and I like how you, earlier you called it the Netflix for health care. So that really paints a picture on the mind of what you're able to deliver to the consumer. So, Anjali, you just mentioned consumer oriented strategies. Why are those so important, and how do you see consumer oriented strategies being delivered in public health?

Care.

Anjali Kataria: Yeah, I think that that's a real differentiator in this space where there's been a lot of longstanding incumbents previous vendors that have been around for a very, very long time. We're probably the only enterprise patient education, engagement platform like I'm describing. That was built after the iPhone.

Can you believe that? So like we're talking about really introducing a whole new wave of consumerism into patient education and engagement that just wasn't there in a lot of the legacy approaches. So things like self service, like being able to upload your own content at any time you want. as a health system so that your providers that have great articles and presentations and they have their, own instructions already created can use them through a central platform, one source of truth, one place where all of the education is stored because at the heart of our patient education and engagement system to make it more consumer oriented is a content management solution.

So, things like that, being able to set those expectations up front self service, expectation management, and customization, tailoring, personalization. These are the elements of consumer oriented strategies that we see. In the retail or the online space. And that's really important to

bring into health care.

Bill Klaproth (Host): sure is. You really made a great point there. So, Anjali, can you bring this all together for us as far as patient education and engagement? How is this strategy delivering results? Is it mitigating risk? Is it improving safety? Is it improving quality care? Improving patient outcomes? Bring this all together for us.

Anjali Kataria: Yeah, yes, yes. And yes um, it's doing all of those things at the same time because it's an enterprise platform, right? So you are mitigating risk. You're helping. patients get assigned content by the health system, by the provider before they arrive. So you've got a legal record that you, educated these patients consistently.

Everybody got the same treatment for that condition or procedure. And that is a legal record that can hold up in court and can help you mitigate risk of malpractice um, as, clinicians. You're improving safety and quality like we talked about earlier in the call by empowering that patient. To be aware and recognize how their care is going, how their body is responding.

So they're alerting you earlier that, hey, I'm starting to feel hot. My skin is starting to develop a rash. And okay, if we know there's a problem, we can always do something about especially if we know, earlier on what to do. We have the best chance of being able to do something if we are informed early as clinicians.

So that's, where this education is just supersizes the partnership and helping you achieve safety and quality goals. It's also helping you improve experience goals because I can tell you when patients come in. happy, relaxed, they know what's going to happen. And that's the patient on Mytonomy.

What that is the Mytonomy patient experience when they use Mytonomy, they are coming in more relaxed, easier to manage as patients, more informed. If something goes wrong, they're still much more likely to have a better experience. And so you can see how, watching the videos, learning about their medications helps them.

Feel like when they leave that you educated them on

their medications, right? Just as an example.

Bill Klaproth (Host): Mm hmm.

Anjali Kataria: And of course, outcomes, of course, people are getting healthier because they're more engaged. I mean, we really, when we go back to consumerism, I would say there's another really important point there, which is usage.

I would say it all starts with usage. you know, I'm from Silicon Valley, that's where my first two companies were. We always measure usage, and that's how we built Mytonomy, and that's what patients that's what patients expect. They want to be able to easily use a solution, and you as a nurse, a leader, putting in a patient education strategy, that's one of the first things I think you should ask for, is what is the usage, and how do we drive high usage?

Because only when patients are really using the solutions that, And I think that's a very important point of

a consumer oriented strategy.

Bill Klaproth (Host): Yeah, that is a great point. And I'm thinking also a better educated patient can take some stress off of our nurses, right? It can help with burnout and job fatigue. Is that

Anjali Kataria: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Because now you're, automating, you know, what the nurse is doing. You're automating something that's mundane and you're giving the nurse an opportunity to really practice at the top of their license. So they're able to come in and come back to the kind of medicine that they first started We're inspired to, to study for in nursing school and practice.

They're able to really develop that relationship, go deeper with that patient and that rejuvenates them versus doing all this mundane

administrative work.

Bill Klaproth (Host): Yeah. So benefits all the way around. Well, this has been fascinating, Anjali. I want to thank you for your time, but before we go, I want to ask you, you do have an impressive background in addition to being a serial tech entrepreneur, you were the senior technology advisor entrepreneur in residence at the FDA, and you're also the executive office of the president, the EOP, during the Obama administration, so let me ask you this, What's your view on how we measure progress as an industry?

Because, you know, we all have so many lofty goals of where we want to go. do you think we're doing?

Anjali Kataria: Yeah, that's right. I was at the FDA and I was also at EOP, the executive office of the president. You know, One of the things I've learned in my time in government is, you know, I've We have a great country. We in America really are very fortunate. You know, I think one of the things that unites us all as Americans is we all wake up every day and we think today can be better than yesterday.

Tomorrow can be better than today. And I think that's a very simple but very powerful way to think about how we should be measuring our improvement in healthcare. That, are we creating a health care system today that's better than it was yesterday? And is the system and the strategy we're putting in place for tomorrow, is that going to be fundamentally better than what we have today?

And that's, that should be our guiding mission and that should unite our teams and our people to strive to do these very difficult things at work that can really transform healthcare. And I'm so pleased to be a part of this journey with all of our hospitals, our nurses, our physicians, all of

our clinicians.

Bill Klaproth (Host): Well, you are certainly doing your part, and what you're doing in Mytonomy is amazing. And it's, again, it's easy to see the benefits and how important patient education and engagement is and how Mytonomy is delivering those results. Anjali, thank you so much for your time today. This has really been fascinating and informative.

Thank you again.

Anjali Kataria: Thank you, Bill. It has been a great time. Thanks so much.

Bill Klaproth (Host): And once again, that's Anjali Kattaria, and thanks again to Mytonomy for sponsoring this podcast. Learn more at Mytonomy. com. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you.

This is Today in Nursing Leadership. Thanks for listening.