6 Ways to Get Your Health System Peers Bought-in to Digital Health

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Posted By: Industry Expert August 28, 2024

Joshua Liu, MD

Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD
LinkedIn: Joshua Liu
X: @joshuapliu
Co-host: The Digital Patient Podcast
Musings and Insights

You might be bought-in at your health system, but Digital Health transformation is a team effort.

You still have to convince your leadership team, IT folks, admin partners and clinicians to get on-board with a very different approach to engaging patients.

And if even one group says “No”… you’re dead in the water.

So how do you get them on-board?

Based on 12+ years of success and failure, here are 6 ways we’ve seen work with internal champions to get buy-in across their hospital or health system:

1️⃣ “Show me the money” 💰

Money talks.

Even if your C-suite believes in your innovation, they need to document a business case that makes sense.

So you need a compelling possible ROI they can point to.

Ideally financially (increased revenue, lower costs) with contributing metrics to support the financial ROI (e.g. more patient volume = more revenue, lower length of stay = lower costs).

2️⃣ “Show me others who’ve succeeded” 🏆

To make the ROI model grounded in reality, show that it’s based on results the solution has achieved with similar institutions.

And be conservative… because your team certainly will be.

If other institutions have used the solution to achieve 20% to 40% reduction in readmissions, put 20% into your model.

3️⃣ “Show me the clinical outcomes” 📈

Most of your clinician colleagues won’t care about whether the solution improves the health system’s bottom line.

But they ALL care about improving patient outcomes.

Show them clinical evidence of how the innovation has helped other institutions reduce complications, readmissions etc and align on opportunities to improve patient care.

4️⃣ “Show me: Why us? Why now?” 📅

You’ll get more momentum if your innovation connects to an existing org priority.

Because if it checks off a box your org is supposed to be working on, then no one will view it as a distraction from their main work.

E.g. health systems have tied SeamlessMD to many different priorities:
→ Increasing same day surgery
→ Hospital to home
→ Digital front door
→ Cutting surgery backlogs
→ Enhanced recovery after surgery

But you do need to do your homework to understand what matters right now.

5️⃣ “Show me how clicks will be minimized” 🖥️

Everyone is afraid of more clicks, more logins, more passwords.

If you have a vendor partner who has truly integrated with your EHR vendor at other health systems before – with workflows that directly embed the solution in the EHR and makes it easy for clinicians to engage – that’s a win-win for clinicians and IT.

6️⃣ “Show me an implementation playbook that’s been battle tested” 📓

Every stakeholder has been part of a failed initiative.

And has learned that success is 1% idea + 99% execution.

So your vendor must have a proven, repeatable process that works.

Because if your team isn’t confident in what they’re hearing, they’ll have zero confidence in the vendor partner.

And no one wants to deal with yet another failed initiative.

What would you add?

The Digital Patient

The Digital Patient takes an “edu-taining” approach to all things digital patient care. On this show hosts Dr. Joshua Liu, and Alan Sardana talk with healthcare, technology, and innovation leaders about the latest advancements in digital health, trends in digital transformation, and strategies for optimizing the patient experience.