Transcription:
Navigating a New Reality Series: Digital Opportunities as Health Systems Take the Journey Toward the Next Normal

Introduction: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of Dr Podcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth: On this episode of the SHSMD Podcast, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for digital transformation in healthcare. So we talk with Sara Vaezy about her key findings in the recently published COVID-19 digital insights series and the new digital requirements and opportunities that are emerging for health systems. Are you ready to learn? I hope so. Hang on. That podcast starts, right now. This is the SHSMD Podcast, Rapid Insights for healthcare strategy professionals in planning, business development, marketing communications, and public relations. I'm your host Bill Klaproth. In this episode, we talk with Sara Vaezy, the Chief Digital strategy and Business Development Officer for Providence Digital Innovation Group. And we talk about the Providence Health COVID-19 Digital Insight Series, a great report that is offered to you. So we're going to talk about that coming up, but first Sara, welcome to the SHSMD Podcast. We start every episode of the SHSMD Podcast with rapid insights. One quick tip someone can use to make their marketing communications better today. Sara, give us your rapid insight?

Sara Vaezy: Ensure that your inventory is discoverable and schedulable, number one task. And when I refer to inventory, I mean your provider appointments or your, either provider agnostic inventory like urgent care, retail medicine, those types of things.

Host: Love it. That is a great rapid insight. Sara, thank you so much for that. So Sara, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for digital transformation in healthcare from both a care delivery and business model perspective. So Providence Health has put together the COVID-19 Digital Insights Series that combines real world experience with deep research, including interviews with over 100 domain experts, both inside and outside of Providence. So can you give us an overview of the project and maybe one or two key insights?

Sara Vaezy: Absolutely. I'll start with saying often we think about disruption in healthcare and if someone were to ask, most healthcare executives out there, they would say what's the biggest disruptor of all time. Many folks would say, you know, we're seeing disruption from the big tech providers and we're seeing disruption from folks like Optim United, but in our view, the biggest disruptor of all times so far has been, COVID-19. Imagine a situation in which you suddenly overnight have to shut down all of your physical ambulatory sites and figure out how to still deliver care and still meet the needs of your community. So COVID has really put some new perspective out there for us health systems and from a digital innovation group point of view, we thought that it was really important to take a hard look at how things were going to evolve from here across several different domains, those domains, including how we think about digital health and distributed care, things like telehealth, remote, patient monitoring, etcetera, how we are serving our poor and vulnerable and traditionally under resource communities. What we're doing about the looming and worsening behavioral health crisis, how we rethink workforce and facilities and supply chain, and all of that with this underlying context of business model transformation.

So, what we did at the digital team was say, let's take all these areas and really examine them deeply so that we can inform ourselves as a system, as well as other systems, who may find this beneficial around, how do we think things are going to evolve and what are the implications for our health system? And what are the key things that we need to be doing as health systems to prepare for future waves? And really just think about business transformation in this context and not in the way that we've talked about having executed on over the last many decades. And so the body of work that we undertook was really to this deep examination and with an execution focused sort of ultimate output lens, I'll give you one really key kind of takeaway for us, which was COVID demonstrated very clearly for us as providers, the problems with having an offline fee for service business model, where we have limited engagement on the digital side with our patients between episodes of care. So when we say that, we mean like forcing our patients to, for instance, call, to make an appointment, going back to the rapid insight discoverable and schedule inventory is not as common as we would think. Imagine if you had to call to buy a book from Amazon, for instance, I just like the notion of that. It's just ridiculous.

And then also engagement. Meaning like once you're outside of very specific episode of care, we don't do that great of a job of staying in touch with our patients and ensuring that their needs are being met and that they're healthy and doing that in a scalable way via digital. So that was one key insight. And especially as business models, we believe will be transforming into increasingly value based arrangements. Again, something we've been talking about, but with an economic downturn and with just the need for keeping folks healthy, becoming much more starkly apparent those value based models we anticipate will grow significantly. So with all of that in mind, keeping folks healthy and engaged between episodes [inaudible05:45] important. One of our key insights was that like the digital front door, which we hear a lot about is now critical to health systems to create an engaged digital health experience that drives growth, drives efficient care delivery, enables new streams of revenue, and then actually makes managing patient populations and consumer populations and population health at scale possible. So that's just one example of kind of one of the key insights from this work.

Host: So, when you say you discovered that there is a limited engagement between visits, how did you come to that conclusion that, Hey, we're not engaging with people enough between visits?

Sara Vaezy: I would say it's even more fundamental than that, which is that most health systems don't measure engagement or even understand what engagement really means. And we haven't even asked the question in many digitally native industries. They think about for instance, this notion of monthly active users, which are the folks that are engaging with them on an app at least once a month, on average. And they look at that because engagement is a proxy for the frequency of utilization of your services. And the more someone is engaged, the more tightly they are bound to your, whatever you're providing to them. And they're less likely to go elsewhere. And so you don't have to constantly pay to reacquire them, which is extremely important from a marketing perspective. And in healthcare, most health systems don't even measure MAU, monthly active users. So we don't even really have this notion of that in many other industries that sort of frequency of communication that you have with your consumers is achieved by things like increased ad spend or increased really great experiences.

And health system is in this like very low frequency, low engagement, as well as low as spend quadrant, which is a very dangerous place to be. So that's how we're thinking about it, which is we just really need to move up into more frequent engagement. I've heard other health system executives put it very articulately, which is on average, a person out there will engage with a health system two to 2.5 times per year. And instead we need to think about 250 interactions, whether they're just messages or thinking about light touch points that work for an individual throughout the course of the year.

Host: So, you said, and this intrigues me, you said, we talk about engagement and often, wouldn't even know what engagement means. So what is engagement? Is that a simple touch point with the consumer?

Sara Vaezy: It's a contextually relevant, either communication or transaction or a piece of content or anything that's relevant to a person at a given time that they can consume and respond to.

Host: You said 250 times a year I think you said, is what we should be thinking about.

Sara Vaezy: That's more of an illustrative point, which is to say, we need to go from two Doctor's appointments per year to much more of a relationship. I don't, any of us would say, I have a great relationship with someone I see two times a year. It's that same notion.

Host: Yeah, I totally get it, I was just at that number. I was like, they're going to be like, they're contacting me every other day. Okay. Back off people. Okay.

Sara Vaezy: It's more about what's relevant to the person, given their preferences, their intent, their motivation, their needs, all of those types of things.

Host: And that's, I think that's the way to look at it. What you just said is understanding what is relevant to them, their needs, and then supplying them with the content that speaks to those things. Cause then they're interested in you. If it's stuff that you keep sending them and they have no interest in, then it becomes annoying. Then it's spam. So that research to understand them better, to send them qualified content is really the mission then. So they go, wow, they're speaking to me. What they send me is very useful and valuable to me. So I think that would help in the relationship as well.

Sara Vaezy: Absolutely. Our promise is know me, care for me, ease my way. And the kind of underlying enabler of that is this notion of personalization, which drives engagement that is relevant to an individual. So absolutely it's not just spamming folks with every last thing that you possibly can, but it's really identifying, knowing them and then providing to them what's most relevant given their needs.

Host: Know me, care for me, ease my way. You know, if you put that as a guidepost, that makes a lot of sense. So Sara, your report here, the Providence Health Report right now has 11 different reports offering new insight around the impact of COVID-19. So there's basically something for everyone in these 11 reports.

Sara Vaezy: There is, I would say that we really tried to, within the context of these 11 reports identify the major kind of movements that are going to occur in the industry as catalyzed by COVID highlight what their implications are for the industry, and then identify digital opportunities, digital innovation and technology opportunities, within those big areas that I mentioned at the beginning. Distributed care and digital health, being a really important one that our group spends quite a bit of time on, but we also look at where we're spending quite a bit of time on serving our more vulnerable and under resourced communities and thinking about things like serving Medicaid, insured patients, things like addressing health equity that have become very apparent throughout the last several months, behavioral health. So those areas that I talked about at the beginning, which are broad areas, and we've delved deep into each one to really pull out the implications and the opportunities.

Host: So, you've mentioned digital several times now, digital opportunities, digital front. So it sounds like you better have your digital house in order or else you're going to be left behind. Is that right?

Sara Vaezy: Yes. I think that digital can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but one way that we think about digital is especially from a patient consumer or member lens, even. So it's really about that front end for the organization. That's where the growth engine for organizations are in, and growth is more important than ever these days. If you don't have your digital house in order what's affected is every stage of your growth from discovery through the ability to conduct a transaction, things like appointment booking, delivery, like mechanisms for actually getting care delivered to folks, to engagement on the backend and in between episodes. So, if you don't get your digital house in order, like all of those touch points are affected. And beyond that, of course, lots of things on from an infrastructure standpoint, from a provider facing standpoint, from a backend standpoint. So it touches everything in your organization.

Host: So, then dovetailing on that. What are the new digital requirements, if you will, and opportunities that you've discovered that are emerging for health systems?

Sara Vaezy: One clarification that I would make is that these aren't necessarily new, but there is increasing momentum and some acceleration around these trends for health systems. And I was a speak from a consumer facing digital standpoint. There are a few things that folks just have to get, right? The first is your brand and your presence out there in terms of how you're showing up within all of your markets within your service lines, etcetera, brand is first and foremost. Then second is discoverability and driving transactions. So the ability for a patient or a customer to buy your services online is extremely important. And to have a great frictionless experience throughout that, like having 10 clicks to book an appointment is not a great frictionless experience. Think about how easy again it is on Amazon to purchase something. That cart experience is very easy and it's easy for a reason two, and delivering a really frictionless experience then earns you the right to engage on an ongoing basis. So it's the foundation for them saying, we did a transaction and now let's stay in touch.

And that engagement is the third piece of this that's required. It needs to be built off of personalization and it needs to be relevant to the goals of the individual as well as to the system at large. So I think those are the three big things, and there are elements like individual elements to that as well. So for instance, on the transaction piece, there are there's sort of provider specific transactions. Let's say I have a need for a specific cardiologist. I want to be able to find a specific person that like searching and matching is really important under those circumstances. Or maybe I just have, I wake up in the morning and I feel like I have an ear infection and I don't care who that person is. All I need is just a time slot. And I care about just someone seeing me according to accessibly and conveniently. So there are different elements to each of those three pillars, but those are sort of the foundations for how we think about digital transformation from a consumer lens.

Host: The three pillars. I love it, brand presence, discoverability. And then think about that frictionless experience. I love that term frictionless experience and then three, personalization, make sure that your content and your being relevant to the goals of the individual that is so good. Well, Sara, this has been fantastic. I know this report is available. Where can people go and get this great information?

Sara Vaezy: So, we recently set up a Providence Digital Resource Center. It's at Providence-digitalinsights.org, and anyone can go on there and access these reports for free. We encourage folks to do so, and then engage with us in conversation about it. None of this was intended to be 100% gospel or not unchanging. It's really about starting a conversation and continuing to kind of learn from everything that's going to be happening over the course of the next several months, if not a couple of years, as we are in the COVID times, but also beyond. So it's really intended to start a conversation around some stakes in the ground and we'll take it from there.

Host: This is really great that you've done this report and you are offering this up to all of us. So thank you so much for that. Any final words or thoughts or anything else you want to add about this report and what we all you really need to pay attention to as we continue to move through the ever changing COVID landscape?

Sara Vaezy: I just think, again, it's with the business model, changing with our care models, changing digital, especially how we show up to our patients and our customers is more important than ever. And we should continue to push ahead and maintain the momentum, how we've brought folks online with us since the beginning of COVID and continue to drive these great experiences online for our individual.

Host: Sounds great, Sara, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.

Sara Vaezy: Thank you.

Host: That's Sara Vaezy. And to learn more about SHSMD visit SHSMD.org and visit our education page to learn about other upcoming programs at SHSMD.org.education. And if you've found this podcast helpful, and again, how could you not, come on, please, please share it on all of your social channels and please hit the subscribe or follow button to get every episode. This has been a production of Dr. Podcasting I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya!