On October 15, 2020, Silverline presented a webinar for Becker’s Hospital Review entitled “Post-Pandemic Decisions Accelerate Pace of Patient Access, Engagement, and Digital Experience Outreach.” During the presentation, I spoke about the steps to take when applying a prescriptive approach to value-based care, and the tools that can help you get there faster. Afterwards, there was a panel that also featured insights from:
- David Bradshaw, Senior Vice President, Consumer & Employer Solutions at Cerner
- Geeta Nayyar, Executive Medical Director at Salesforce
- Olivia Goh Kidder, Director, Customer Relationship Management at Indiana University Health
The complete webinar can be accessed here, or you can read below for a recap of the presentation.
Post-Pandemic Decisions Accelerate Pace of Patient Access, Engagement, and Digital Experience Outreach
In today’s rapidly changing healthcare environment, organizations are looking beyond their typical source of patient information, the EHR, in order to meet the needs and expectations of their patients — especially in the midst of a global pandemic.
Transitioning to value-based care
When moving beyond transactional care and into a more human-centric standard, providers must take into account new and unique factors. From population health to social determinants to AI and segmentation, there are unexplored areas of innovation.
All of these incredibly compelling terms often don’t have well-defined answers to help determine where to focus and at what time. What makes it all the more overwhelming is the fact that for every one of these particular areas, new, specific technologies pop up around it.
At Silverline, we know that in order to make the right decision for your healthcare institution, it’s important to understand the bigger picture of how solutions work together.
Digital Front Door
When we say digital front door, what we’re talking about is the digital access point to services for patients and providers. A strategy like this leverages digital technologies, including mobile, telehealth, and more to expand the tools that patients can use to access desired services and interact with providers across the care continuum.
The key question to ask yourself is: How do we take all of the various services, activities, and content that patients or providers might use and give them a much stronger and more engaging digital experience?
Patient Access
When we talk about access, we’re focusing on how to give patients and caregivers the right information at the right time, in the right way, and via the right channels. We’re not only thinking about what we share, but how it is most often retrieved. When we understand how patients and caregivers consume information, we can leverage that data to inform and improve their experience.
From there, you move into the ability to do greater care coordination, as well as the ability to close gaps in care.
Care Coordination / Closing Gaps in Care
Closing gaps in care involves providers leveraging enriched and holistic data about patients, including social determinants and environment, to better navigate the patient before, during, and after care — as well as proactively addressing potential actions through targeted communications and interactions across multiple channels.
It’s important to focus on harnessing your data, and layering additional data on top of that, in a way that improves how patients navigate through their journey in care before, during, and after a clinical episode.
Patient Engagement
Patients want to be involved in their healthcare journey. Create lasting relationships with patients by building loyalty and trust. To do that, you have to interact with them.
Driving patient engagement involves developing strategies that not only create lasting relationships with patients, and build loyalty and trust — but also focuses on improving their overall satisfaction and continuous interaction throughout their healthcare journey.
Driving a prescriptive approach
There are two key areas that Silverline focuses on heavily in our approach: user experience and project clarity.
First, we make sure that everything we do from a solution perspective is much more focused on the experience. With this model, we lean into experience design where we think about individuals and how they access the system. So, as a patient — what is the experience that patients should have? We build out the journeys, the steps, and the interactions that a person would have so we’re sure that when we implement the technology, it produces the desired results. And then we do the whole exercise again for a provider or a payer, a therapist, or a call center agent.
When you’re much more focused on the experience side of the house, as opposed to pure play requirements, you ultimately get the result you’re looking for, and it’s a much more effective way to drive the outcomes to suit your needs, too.
The second way that we drive outcomes to meet requirements is to make sure that we, as a consulting organization are providing clarity into what amount of effort an engagement will take. We’ve built out bundles specific to common use cases — and we take our data and experience from past engagements and we can answer for defined timelines, cost, and headcount. We can provide a realistic understanding that many of these initiatives are not multi-year initiatives like they once were. These implementations are actually only months at a time. And that is a fundamental shift that we’re seeing in healthcare — the ability to elicit significant change and beneficial impacts in a shorter period of time.
Working through those two areas of focus gives us a great idea of how to build out an engaging, and efficient strategy. But what is the ideal state that we want to achieve? To understand that, you need to understand your data.
Expanding Data Sources
All of your data is incredibly powerful — but it isn’t all that useful unless you train that data and push it to the right systems and allow it to inform your workflow. You need to identify all of your data sources, from claims, pharmacies, social media, labs, and hospital visits, etc. There’s no shortage of data you can collect.
But once you have it, you must clean it up, and keep it clean.
Data cleansing
Once you identify all of your possible data sources, you need to take that data and now cleanse it — remove duplicates, amend misspellings, and correct inaccuracies, etc. There’s certainly some complexity associated with it, but again, it is paramount that you can consolidate that information into a singular location so all members of your organization can access it. And once accessible, that data must be validated, endorsed, and put to work.
Patient and Provider 360
With that data in action, we can accomplish a holistic understanding of the patient across all the channels and interactions that they have with your particular health system, organization, and services.
The sooner that is done, the sooner you can interact with that patient in a different, more tailored way.
Everything that you’re tracking about the patient is also relevant information about their providers. Ultimately, these data sets play off each other and help drive impactful experiences.
Adding CRM
Now it’s time to incorporate CRM. Using a solution like Salesforce, helps your team to achieve four additional key benefits that drive the outcome and an experience:
First is social determinants data. This is information that has not typically been tracked in the past but it’s incredibly important to the way in which you provide proper care.
Next, you can build some significant workflows. Historically, in healthcare, workflows meant you weren’t patient-focused enough, but that’s not true at all. Workflow means we’re allowed to actually drive efficiency and effectiveness into the process.
A third bucket is analytics. Now that you have all this data in one place, you can start to drive business decisions based on insights gained from your collected, real-world information.
Lastly, Salesforce gives you the power of Artificial Intelligence. Now, this isn’t to say your CRM replaces human effort. But it can help analyze information and provide valid suggestions for Next Best Actions. It can tell you what you should be doing and why based on what you know.
Adding value to your value-based care
The healthcare landscape is constantly evolving, with providers, payers, life sciences, and medical devices companies moving toward more personalized care, valuable internal and external collaboration, data-driven business decisions, and the elimination of paper processes.
As a Salesforce Platinum Partner, we leverage best practices acquired through more than a thousand Salesforce implementations, with a core Healthcare team led by professionals with deep, varying experience in consulting, clinical, and technical roles.
Silverline is poised and ready to help strengthen your digital transformation strategy and implement tailored solutions to help your healthcare organization thrive. Reach out today.