How Health Tech Providers Can Create an Exceptional Consumer and Provider Experience

Tools and strategies from Mark Hanson, CEO of Decoded Health

“In a digital world, you need to be thinking about your virtual experience.” So says Mark Hanson, CEO of Decoded Health, an Inflect Health portfolio company and the world’s first clinical hyper-automation platform. He could not be more on point: with the proliferation and integration of virtual technologies, digital transformation is on everyone’s mind in the healthcare industry.

Recently, Hanson hopped on the podcast Bright Spots in Healthcare with Eric Glazer, along with GYANT CEO and Cofounder Stefan Behrens, to discuss how technology companies can improve the healthcare delivery experience. Delivering value combines streamlining the patient journey without overburdening clinical staff.

That starts at the virtual front door, and doesn’t stop until patients get their questions answered and their concerns resolved. “What we’re seeing is not too dissimilar from what happened in banking and retail itself,” says Behrens. “It’s a digital-first experience but with physical infrastructure in place.”

As Hanson put it: The first step is “understanding the needs of the patient as expressed in their own words, in their natural language.” Being able to assess a patient’s intent and then direct them to a resource or line of service that optimally addresses their needs is critical to delivering a high-quality experience.

A crucial capability is an ability for a technology, or integrated suite of technologies, to be able to deliver clinical expertise before a patient walks into a clinic. This helps differentiate where to direct patients, between a hospital system, urgent care, or primary care.

As an example, Hanson points out: “If a patient is talking about chest pain, yes or no or choose your own adventure is not what they’re looking for. Sharp burning pain is much different than an elephant on their chest.”

Information Aggregation Improves Outcomes

Hanson says, “Longitudinal care has a lot to do with context. You have to take the entirety of that patient and bring all of that knowledge, whether it’s EHR or previous communication, and bring that knowledge into that experience.”

Decoded Health fulfills its hyper-automation mission as a force multiplier for physicians by leveraging machine learning to automate patient conversations and augment the clinical workflow. They do this while keeping humans in the loop at all times, to 4x a physician’s panel size without freezing out the sacred physician-patient relationship.

Unlike a “chat-bot,” their system enables patients to express their concerns and ask questions in fully natural language conversational dialog. Patients maintain confidence that they are truly being heard and providers save time by getting meaningful data from high-quality patient conversations. That value on both ends prevents the common hell consumers face when attempting to speak their concerns or instructions into an automated phone system, only to hear, “sorry, I didn’t get that,” and lose faith in the system itself.

This takes aggregating as much information as possible. It’s crucial for technologies to collect patient histories, present symptoms, patient-specific screenings, and ask clinically informed and highly differentiating medical questions … as well as follow up with patients to track their status.

“You want to make sure you’re providing data at the right time, at the highest level of impact,” says Hanson. “It’s about getting the right information into the EHR because that’s where clinicians take their notes.”

Giving providers the required information before they need it, in a patient’s natural language, helps conduct a myriad of clinical-caliber processes with minimal involvement of the clinical staff. The patient feels heard and can be escorted through the care delivery journey seamlessly.

If patients can start that journey virtually, and something in their natural language triggers telehealth or in-person clinical engagement, something as simple as scanning a QR code could give the physicians all the information they need to provide quality care when it’s needed, sometimes mere moments after a patient first presents.

Platform Integration Eases the Burden

Clinicians are busier now than they’ve ever been. “In many cases when clinics get busy, clinicians have a 5–10 minute window to make a decision,” says Behrens. “How do you close that loop in a way that’s efficient for the clinician’s time?” That’s a crucial question for improving the provider experience.

Physicians spend 35% of their total time in documentation including EHR, and the workloads of scribes are exploding, as well. “A lot of these tasks can be supported by technology,” says Behrens. If we can automate that work, as well as non-critical clinical work, we can lower the burden on providers. And that’s not all that goes into ensuring provider satisfaction. Platform integration must be addressed and the barrier to implementation must be lowered.

“We want to be able to optimize without driving a lot of up-front costs for the hospital system,” says Hanson. “You need those integrations out of the box. Integration into the EHR and all the systems the hospital systems [at the API level] use is important. Not every hospital is on the latest and greatest version of the EHR, so if you want to support those, you need to fill the gaps and make sure the platform you’re going to use is going to do that.”

So how do you tailor a solution for every provider, from primary care, to specialist care, to urgent care and the hospital floors? After all, each health system is a high-risk environment, and a lot of that risk is mitigated through the specific protocols and workflows that each system has implemented. Hanson says, “Our goal is to not disrupt that as much as possible. Don’t fix what’s not broken. If systems are working well, don’t take the users of that system out of that system.”

For Behrens, that means “We build our platform that’s 90% shared between deployments, and then some clever options for the 10% that’s different.” Retaining the core tech specs meant to work everywhere, while maintaining enough customizability to down into the specific needs of each local system and agree with their existing ways of doing things, eases the burden for providers.

“A lot of services and technologies come together in an experience for the patient,” says Hanson. “There really is no single-source solution when it comes to creating a great experience for the patient. Whether you use Zoom or Vonage or whatever else, we integrate it all into the clinical workflow.”

Seamless Delivery at Scale

Making health tech integration seamless ensures an optimal experience. This means giving both patients and providers less to learn and incorporating virtual technologies into the way we all currently seek and deliver care. Fewer apps to download, natural language as a true lingua franca, and an omnichannel experience that — when done right — means neither patient nor provider really knows the advanced levels of novel technologies happening behind the scenes. That’s a good thing. The best technologies are the ones you don’t really notice — they just work.

And, of course, always be optimizing. As Hanson states, “We use feedback loops based on final outcomes to sample cases, identify things we want to be reviewed by a panel of doctors and increase the accuracy of navigation and make sure patients end up in the right place every time.”

That is the north star. By allowing patients to advocate naturally and providers to protect their admin time that could be better spent delivering the highest caliber of care, technology improves the experience on both ends of the patient-provider axis. Everyone can feel more confident and stay committed to the ultimate goal: improved health outcomes without costing anyone extra time, money, or stress.