Digital Conversations

Most healthcare providers have been operating in a state of constrained human resources for years. COVID-19 will put tremendous additional strain on those systems. Tens of thousands of concerned people could start flooding urgent care facilities for treatment, and technology will play a key role. Social distancing to keep staff healthy through remote telehealth screenings is one solution, but it doesn’t address the massive influx of volume that must be handled.

In this episode, Greg Kefer and Justin Mardjuki discuss the early stage situation of the Coronavirus outbreak (March 2020) and what’s really needed to accomodate an unprecedented spike in demand. Hiring and training thousands of new employees is not a solution. But conversational technology can bridge the workforce gap, handling routine workflows such as screening, FAQ, and intake through mobile chatbots.

Healthcare communications to patients have always been a challenge. As a patient navigates a care plan, they encounter frustrating disconnects in the information they get from providers, labs, facilities, pharmacies, and payers. Frequently, a communication is delivered to the patient and then dates change, locations shift, new instructions arise, or new authorizations are required. Sometimes, the information in the original information goes obsolete before the patient even sees it.  

Jacob Heitler sat down with Greg Kefer to discuss the ongoing challenge of static information in healthcare and how advances in mobile technology have matured. Static notifications can be enhanced with dynamic data, which in turn ensures patients only see the latest, most up-to-date information when they interact with the solution. This single version of the truth information model gives conversational technology exceptional power.

Patients and providers utilize medical information desks to get answers to common questions about prescription medicines and report potential adverse events. Typically, these inquiries have been handled through call centers or websites with dense, hard-to-navigate Q&A grids. Current approaches are also expensive and ineffective due to tight content controls and regulations. At the same time, consumer expectations have changed, which is challenging the old med info desk model.

In this episode, Greg Kefer and Justin Mardjuki discuss alternatives to the “traditional” med info desk approach. Technology that is conversational, on-demand, always available, and connected to robust engagement analytics are maturing and offer the pharma industry a new and better way to share and collect information about their drugs.

The concept of liquid expectations is based on the natural comparisons consumers make between great and weak experiences. As consumers ratchet up their use of advanced digital tech to shop, travel, and do their banking, the comparisons to healthcare are increasingly common. The hospital digital front door is the closest thing healthcare has to an ecommerce site and consumers want booking appointments to be as easy as buying shoes. But it’s not. 

In this episode, Justin Mardjuki and Greg Kefer discuss the challenges and opportunities healthcare providers face in delivering a seamless appointment request experience. While the industry may be years behind Marriott or Open Table, there may be a perfect storm opportunity for hospitals to leap ahead to the next consumer technology curve, leverage all the learnings from the first two waves of e-commerce, and deliver a mobile, conversational experience that helps patients navigate from a website front door to scheduled appointments, through referrals, prescriptions, and beyond. That’s what consumers expect and it’s worth millions of dollars in incremental revenue.

Emergency departments inside the urban core of America’s biggest cities face an enormous challenge. The acute healthcare “grids” are operating in a state of resource constraint, while the flow of patients keeps increasing. The physicians and clinical teams in the ED must deal with the supply and demand mismatch every day.

In this episode, Greg Johnsen sat down with Scott Campbell, Attending Emergency Physician at Kaiser San Francisco, and President of San Francisco Emergency Physicians Association, to discuss some of the issues that exist at the intersection of public policy and public health.

Scott also shares his opinions on the role of technology when it comes to getting the right person to the right bed with the right care every time — something that cannot be solved with just a bricks and mortar solution. 

When it comes to next-gen innovation, discussions typically tend to be academic and conceptual. Sometimes, it’s insightful to hear from the client managers who run the implementations and are responsible for ensuring the cool new technology works. This kind of real-world, feet-on-the-street perspective, based on actual experiences, is often eye opening.

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Kefer was joined by Kelly How, who shared a dose of interesting chatbot reality with us. Kelly is a client services manager who leads conversational technology projects at several large hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.  As part of the discussion, we touched on a few topics:

• Conversational chatbots vs. traditional technology project dynamics
• A new class of A/B testing for optimizing patient engagement
• Conversation-level behavioral insights and their impact on ROI and NPS

Conversational technology promises to deliver a next level step towards simplicity and engagement for healthcare patients. On the surface, the conversational interfaces perform as simple, smart interfaces between machines and humans. Seamless, intuitive interactions that deliver results are powered by large technology platforms behind the scenes.

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Kefer sat down with Gabe Hamilton, a platform engineer, to discuss some of the requirements to power millions of conversations with patients in the complex, regulated healthcare industry. Overall, there could be billions of total conversations, but that number will be made up of countless ‘small’ and specific interactions between providers and patients, and that requires a unique technology stack.

It’s a known fact that most IT projects will deliver ROI if implemented properly. Typically cost savings through automation and operational efficiency are a big part of any IT value story. As a new class of conversational technology matures, the healthcare industry value prize is moving beyond the traditional back office and into the patient experience, and that translates into a number of interesting new opportunities.

Justin Mardjuki joined Greg Kefer in the Digital Conversations studio to talk about chatbot value.  In what is developing into a win-win-win scenario for healthcare providers, conversational bots are beginning to deliver across a number of promising value areas. From call center optimization, to adherence, to hospital patient experiences, this podcast will describe some of the ways chatbots are expanding the scope of value generation in unexpected new dimensions.

A Digital Conversations podcast discussion with Steve Lindsey from Banner Innovation Group

In healthcare, high complexity combined with an extreme amount of regulatory red tape frequently hinder innovation and progress. Despite significant investments in technology, the industry continues to struggle implementing solutions that patients will understand and embrace.   

At the same time, more than 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 each day and that is adding tremendous strains on Medicare and Medicaid programs. Innovation will be key, but there are big hurdles in getting elderly patients to engage with modern technology.  

Grandmother-friendly IT?

How many times have we heard something like this: “It has to be simple and intuitive in order to work. If my grandmother can’t understand it, it will never work.” If the goal is to engage Medicare patients with technology, grandmother MUST be able to figure it out.

Banner Health sought to find a solution that its population of medicare seniors could embrace as part of their annual wellness visit -- a CMS program designed to keep patients engaged with their physicians on a regular basis. As part of the program, patients are required to fill out daunting questionnaires about their health. The process is cumbersome, frequently resulting in  high dissatisfaction rates, missed appointments and frustrated clinical teams.

The Banner Innovation Group (BIG) had experienced success with LifeLink-powered patient engagement chatbots in their Emergency Departments. They were mobile, simple and intuitive. Would seniors embrace an advanced solution like a conversational chatbot to help streamline the annual wellness visit experience? 

Breakthrough Operational Value and Engagement with Medicare Seniors

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Kefer was joined by Steve Lindsey, Program Director of Operations at Banner Innovation Group, to discuss how they transitioned their medicare annual wellness visit patients from clunky paper forms to conversational chatbots. Patients interacted with a conversational bot to complete their Health Risk Assessment prior to their annual annual wellness visit. The results were significant.   

• 51% of patients interacted with the bot after cold outreach, with no advanced warning
• The completion rate was nearly 100% … if they started, they completed the process
• • Providers could enter/review HRA data before appointment
• Among the patients that used the bot to complete their HRAs, Banner saw a 70% decrease in appointment cancellation rates
• • They were also cancelling appointments less often
  • If they did cancel, they did it 5 days earlier so the slots could be filled
• Banner is now rolling the HRA bot across more 30,000 medicare patients

Steve also describes the Banner Innovation Group vision of anticipating future needs, designing solutions that create that model of healthcare, and how mobile chatbots fit into that picture.

When dealing with any kind of cardiac procedure, personal physician-patient interactions and relationships are key. But even in the cardiovascular medicine domain, there are opportunities to augment patient communications with modern technology. 

Ahmad Sheikh, one of the country’s premiere cardiac surgeons, sat down with Greg Kefer to provide a physician perspective on patient engagement technology. While the deep, important conversations about treatment are not suitable for automation, there is potential for technology to handle many of the routine “logistics” interactions related to a surgical procedure. In what could be the ultimate win-win-win scenario, time for in-person interactions can be increased while simultaneously delivering process efficiency and higher satisfaction. And, it doesn’t need to be as complex as heart surgery because chatbots use simple conversational messaging that resembles the natural, effortless encounters that patients have every day on their mobile phones with friends and family.