Digital Conversations

Clayton Christensen’s great book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, describes disruptors and the challenges incumbent companies face in keeping up with the new entrant’s rate of improvement.  Even great companies struggle because they are good at the wrong things. Many don’t survive.

The healthcare industry is in the midst of massive change, fueled by new innovation, changing regulations, and millions of aging baby boomers. Successful consumer-centric companies such as Amazon, Uber, Apple and CVS have entered the market with proven customer engagement strategies powered by advanced mobile technology.

In this episode, Greg Johnsen and Greg Kefer discuss the challenges healthcare companies face today and how their innovation mindset must evolve to engage on consumer terms, not the providers’ terms. Today’s patients are consumers and they’re using advanced mobile technology to manage things like travel, transportation, and shopping and that influences their healthcare experience perception. If the industry is serious about engaging patients, it must evolve.

After decades of investment in digital systems of record, patients are beginning to navigate healthcare on their PCs and mobile devices. Providers have created great, consumer-grade technology for a better patient experience — a digital “superhighway” for healthcare. But patient adoption of these systems is still low. Healthcare is complex, there’s no way around that, but poor adoption rates indicate that leaders may have overestimated what consumers are willing to put up with. Technology adoption is never easy, but there may be hope.

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Johnsen and Greg Kefer discuss the rise of conversational technology that engages through language instead of menus and rigid workflows to deliver intuitive, consumer experiences at scale. Leveraging the patient digital information stored in EHR and CRM systems of record puts patients on a personalized, high-value path to high satisfaction and efficiency.

Since 1995, the annual Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys have been used to measure patient experiences in Healthcare. Results are also used to determine Medicare reimbursements for providers. With the surveys being administered as much as 90 days after a visit, utilizing manual approaches (mail, phone, email), survey response rates are on the decline. This has introduced an element of non-response bias, according to a study published in the journal Patient Experience. In addition to all of this, the consumer dimension is evolving rapidly in healthcare.  

Justin Mardjuki joined Greg Kefer in the Digital Conversations studio to discuss the shifting dynamics of surveys, specifically in the hospital environment, where HCAHPS scores can influence significant financial rewards or penalties. New mobile technology has the ability to measure sentiment in real time, as care is being delivered. Consumers are becoming fluent in providing peer reviews on platforms like Amazon, Uber, and Yelp, and maybe the time has come to rethink the CHAPS survey model.

Reaching out to patients to make sure they adhere to things like treatment plans and clinical trials is often the domain of the call center. Frequently, the outbound interaction is a heavily scripted, redundant workflow. What happens when a chunk of these outbound calls are shifted to a conversational chatbot that uses text messaging to interact, remind, and collect feedback?

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Kefer and Jacob Heitler talk about a different kind of call center — one that uses chatbots to engage patients in the medium they prefer — mobile texting. The combination of high scale and content precision is a win-win, driving call center efficiency while simultaneously delivering a better patient experience.

Hospitals are investing heavily in marketing campaigns to attract new patients, yet every day countless “warm leads”  walk out of the front door, never to be heard from again. At the same time, huge investments are being made to improve the patient experience through better communications and engagement. This is why referral management represents a massive value opportunity.

Jacob Heitler joined Greg Kefer in the Digital Conversations studio to discuss how innovators are addressing Referral Management. Conversational chatbots that start the engagement process before a patient leaves the building are helping them follow through on their discharge instructions and get proper care. This in turn reduces readmissions and builds a tight, long-term patient-provider relationship.

Call centers are at the center of patient engagement strategies for providers of all shapes and sizes. Investments are focused on driving efficiency into an operation that is constrained by human agent capacity. This Digital Conversations episode gets into the challenges of traditional call centers and how emerging innovations can flip the model upside down to something that has unlimited scale, 24x7x365.

We like to talk to people in commercial roles, who spend their days traveling and talking about patient engagement strategies with the teams responsible for change at the country’s biggest hospitals. Blakely Atherton joined Greg Kefer on Digital Conversations to share some field stories about what is being discussed, the challenges, and what internal teams are leading the charge.

It’s no secret that a focus on patient experience leads to value and ROI. Technology investments require a strong ROI case in order to get funded, but as the industry shifts from systems of record (EHR) to systems of engagement, new dimensions of value arise that add up to 7- or 8-figure numbers for the bigger medical centers.

Justin Mardjuki sat down in the Digital Conversations studio to discuss some of the value areas that are being explored as hospitals look to invest in new, patient-centric mobile technology.  There are a range of potential investment opportunities, but the strategy of starting in the high value and high volume areas of the hospital has the potential to pay off quickly.

In 2018, the average cost of developing a new drug and bringing it to market topped $2.1 billion—up $362 million from 2017 according to a Deloitte survey. One of the challenges pharmaceutical companies face is attrition and non-adherence during patient trials. Traditional methods, focused on call centers, complex documentation and feedback limitations, lack the ability to collect enough real-world evidence to get the full patient experience picture.

In this episode, Justin Mardjuki and Greg Kefer talk about the challenges the industry faces and how chatbots can be a viable option to improve the research process, during both trial and in-market phases across large patient populations.

How do you design a chatbot that’s personalized, compassionate and smart — something capable of interacting with patients who could be in stressful, miserable healthcare situations? Jenn Berry, a Conversational UX Engineer from LifeLink, sat down with us and described how modern conversational chatbot design must consider the moment and then deliver a patient experience that’s human-like, compassionate and informative, but also not a human imitation. It’s a very fine line...an art.