Live @ Vive Partner Perspective Q&A with Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO, Artera: Health Systems Must Bring Governance to Patient Outreach

In an effort to better engage with patients, many health systems have gotten themselves into a pickle by going overboard. Today, with almost every department running its own patient engagement efforts, those at the end of all that attention are feeling overwhelmed. But there’s a better way, and it starts with governance, according to Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO, Artera. In this Live @ ViVE interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, de Zwirek makes the prediction that, in order to get their arms around the problem, most health systems will have patient engagement committees in the near future. He adds that, when it comes to apps seeking to consolidate and streamline patient outreach, success is all about getting the operations right. Finally, de Zwirek talks about Epic’s introduction of texting, and why there’s still plenty of room for organizations like his to continue innovating around it.

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… (hospitals have) adopted so many different technology tools over the last decade and many of them are engaging with patients, and we’ve got a massive problem. We’ve got patients that are getting over-communication. They are getting the wrong communication.

… there’s this whole universe outside of Epic that the vast majority of health systems also need to manage. They might have other EHRs. They might have a call center. They might have a CRM vendor. They probably send out regulatory surveys. They probably send out patient education. For as formidable of a company as Epic is, they don’t solve 100% of healthcare problems yet, and I don’t believe they ever will, not because Judy and her team can’t, I think they can. I just think the FTC will come in at some point and say, ‘hey, you have too much market share.’

I think the key is being really honest with yourself about where you have the right to win and where there might already be somebody that’s a good option for them, and then focusing your time on everything that’s differentiated.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s Live @ ViVE Interview with Guillaume Zwirek, CEO with Artera. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Gui, thanks for joining me.

Guillaume: Thank you, Anthony.

Anthony: Very good. Let’s start off with a little bit about your organization and your role there.

Guillaume: We founded Artera nine years ago, and we help hospitals have great relationships with their patients. We solved the legacy reality that the vast majority of communications in healthcare happen on the phone. The world has evolved and most folks want asynchronous communication, on their time, and on their terms, and we have the infrastructure that connects all of the different pieces of software, departments, people at a hospital, and allows them to deliver a seamless experience to their patients when they’re not using their app.

So everything outside of the app, your doctor saved as a contact on your phonebook, you can text them about anything you want, get an answer very, very quickly, most of it is automated and we do this for organizations in all 50 states, in Canada and for about 100 million patients every year.

Anthony: Very good. We did a webinar together a little while back. It was very interesting, covered a lot of areas here. How would you describe the core difficulty that health systems face that you address?

Guillaume: Let me start with an analogy and I’ll give you the answer. I know people aren’t going to see this on camera but I’m a skinny guy and I guess I’m built that way and when I go to the doctor, the nurses always tell me that folks like me are the dangerous ones because we don’t know if something is wrong with us, right? We don’t know we have diabetes. We don’t know that we have cardiac issues because you don’t see those signs in an outward fashion.

The same thing is going on, I would argue, with every single practice physician,