At HIMSS17 in Orlando, Patient Engagement was a topic of keen interest, for a number of reasons. I sat down with Dr. Robert Dudzinski, Executive Vice President, Healthcare Practice for West Corporation. Dr. Dudzinski shares his insights on the intersection of patient engagement and value-based care. He also talks about how the advent of Smartphones and automation are driving changes in healthcare communications and delivery. You can listen to the podcast of the interview below.
HIMSS17 Highlights – Dr. Robert Dudzinski
As a long time attendee of HIMSS, what are some of the topics that you’re talking to people about or getting feedback from this year?
I think the prevailing theme, at least we feel, has been around patient engagement. So obviously, over the years, there’s been multiple themes inside of HIMSS and sometimes they come and surface to the top, population health management a couple of years ago. But I think we’re seeing a renewed emphasis on patient engagement and how that kind of connects with consumerism and some of those challenges. So that’s probably where most of our conversations have been at HIMSS today.
It all ties into value-based care and this issue of quality versus quantity, right?
Probably more important now than ever. The macro coming to the forefront, you know, 99490 billing being kind of the predecessor to that. And then a recognition about the importance of patient engagement, and even transcending into the customer experience. And I use the term “customer” because, again, this renewed emphasis on consumerism in healthcare. And that’s what we’re also seeing is a lot of organizations moving to that vernacular and actually even looking outside of healthcare for some of those strategies around engagement that have come from, again, outside of healthcare.
So I’m curious if you could maybe talk a little bit about today’s world of smartphones. We talk about the consumerism of healthcare, the patient experience, patient engagement. What do you think the patient expects to get from technology in their healthcare experience?
I think it starts with the notion that we have all recognized the influence of consumerism inside of healthcare. And so specifically, what that means is that there’s going to be a continued expectation of the patient to have the same experience that they had with, let’s say Amazon, or Google, or Facebook, and the ability to connect to the channel of choice and to make sure that those connections are personal and they’re empathetic. So, I think that’s what we’re going to see from a consumer when it comes to technology, particularly around communications. So no longer will a hospital, or health system, or payer, or pharmacy not have to worry about brand representation. They will need to have strategies around the customer experience and what they want their brand to be in the marketplace because the consumers will continue to have a choice and they’ll need transparency. And that is really where industries outside of healthcare have gone, and so I think there’s gonna be an expectation of that experience being driven back into healthcare.
And we’re also seeing healthcare recognizing that. We see more and more organizations hiring from outside of healthcare because there’s an understanding of how to leverage technology to drive that brand experience. And I think we’ll see more and more of that. And that experience can’t simply be delivered in a point solution. And what I mean by “point solution” is a single channel. There’s gotta be a recognition that an organization needs to deliver a unified communication environment to get to the experience that they’re expecting to have. What we promote in the marketplace is this need for an organization to recognize where they’re at from the state of communications, what that lifecycle should look like, how do they move from a disconnected environment to a prescriptive environment so that they get the expected experience that the customer, consumer, member, patient is looking for. And also, in the same breath, how do they continue to lower cost to things that scale and drive revenue? And so all of that gets encompassed in a comprehensive strategy around delivering a customer experience.
I think we’re gonna see more and more of that happening in healthcare, the whole notion of being connected, and what’s happening in between visits or appointments and how do they stay connected in that environment. Exciting times, we think, particularly for communication. Obviously, we have a bias towards that. We think it’s the next blockbuster. So more to come from West.
You talk about scalability and cost. Just one last question, where does automation fit into that? That’s gotta be part of that picture, I would think.
I’ll use the kind of the classic model when organizations look to manage population, and it gets back to the notion of “I’ve got a caregiver” irrespective of the setting that’s assigned a large number of patients. And historically what was done was, I’m gonna pick up the phone and I’m gonna try to connect with the patient and have a conversation. Well, the reality of that is you can’t scale that because the human capital costs are enormous, pressures around value-based care come into play there. And so, then the question becomes how do you do more with less? How do you take the caregivers that you have and allow them to work at the top of their license and then find ways to automate those tasks that can come from a communication platform? And hence, that’s where you start to drive scale and capacity. Can a caregiver not just handle 1,000 patients, but can they effectively handle maybe 3,000 patients even more effectively than they did if they had just 100? What are we trying to accomplish is we’re trying to keep connected, we’re trying to do it at a low cost, and we’re trying to continue to create that behavioral change that we’re looking for in order for the patient to either manage themselves to a given outcome or we help them manage to a given outcome. So that’s what we’re looking to do.