How to ensure technology assists care and doesn’t impede it
Health technology is in its awkward teenage years, creating a mercurial patient experience that fragments information and doesn’t optimize processes.
Healthcare technology is evolving at light-speed. So many of the most arduous and analog facets of care delivery have been digitized, automated and virtualized in the past few years. It’s a transformation that’s long overdue.
But now, digital health is in its awkward teenage years, and it’s challenging for everyone involved. Many technologies used to ensure every visit is as efficient and convenient as possible are still adjacent to essential healthcare infrastructure rather than integrated with it. Those disconnects, left unreconciled, are tarnishing the patient’s experience.
Patients obviously don’t like it. But neither do clinicians.
A personal experience
A few weeks ago, I scheduled a visit with my ENT. Two days before the appointment, I filled out all my intake paperwork on the digital patient portal. When I arrived at the office, I signed in on a tablet affixed to a kiosk – only to be prompted to fill out the same intake forms. The front desk called me up shortly after I signed in and asked me to download an app. The app prompted me with the same questions. But wait – there’s more.
Later, on the exam table, my ENT rattled off the questions again. How was it possible none of my information made it to him before he knocked on the exam room door?
The quick answer is that none of the data captured by any of the three intake touchpoints I had was integrated into the EHR, the central nervous system of the entire operation. The long answer is that providers – and, importantly, their patients – have been inundated with modular technologies designed to improve specific functions within the clinical workflow.
Applying point solutions
The explosion of AI-enabled point solutions during the past few years promises to transform clinical workflow in the near future, although recent research suggests they still have a ways to go in helping clinicians save time and improve patient care.
Whether they automate notes, manage patient communications, or simplify compliance tasks, every one of these technologies is nascent. They’re still evolving to meet the needs of health systems.
Currently, health systems are looking for consolidated technologies, which means many of these tools are rolling out overlapping features and functionalities. None of them talk to each other, and the data they capture or generate gets tangled up before it makes it to the clinicians who need it.
Broadening the approach
It’s a one-size-fits-all approach to mending and streamlining clinical workflow. However, what this approach gains in market appeal it proportionally loses in practicality. The patient-physician relationship has so much nuance, and the variances in necessary details only multiply after patients venture outside of primary care.
For example, a patient-facing solution designed for primary care may not be best for cardiologists – or ENTs, for that matter – within the same health system. With a one-size-fits-all approach, that solution will deploy to specialties, leaving many of the subtleties important to those specialties undigitized. As a result, patients and clinicians will wind up performing the same tasks twice – or more.
These are natural growing pains in the lifecycle of transformative technologies, and they’ll work themselves out in time. Right now, however, many technologies designed to ensure every patient gets the most out of their visit have reverted to doing nothing. If digital health solutions and health systems want to provide a seamless patient experience today, they must amplify their attention to user experience and user interface, and focus on workflow integration.
Recognizing the users
So much healthcare technology has been designed and engineered by digital natives and is, in turn, most usable by digital natives. However, the highest utilizers of healthcare are of Medicare age – patients who were raised with and expected to have a singular healthcare experience. And while many have become digitally literate, a stitched-together stack of patient-facing digital solutions can be overwhelming and seemingly untrustworthy.
Some patients are asked to schedule appointments with one solution, receive pre-visit questionnaires from another, and engage with a third for post-visit follow-up. They’re lucky if any are integrated with the patient portal they’ve just grown accustomed to using.
Healthcare providers can begin shifting their digital stack from its awkward teenage years into a more mature state by first assessing how well new tools are able to integrate with existing systems and technologies. This should be the first principle of new tech adoption, and it opens the door for the next two principles – ensuring that new technologies streamline workflow for clinicians, and making certain patient-facing tools simplify engagement. Neither clinicians nor patients should be prompted to complete the same task twice.
Any patient, regardless of their age, condition or digital literacy level, just wants to make the most of their 20-minute appointment with a physician they can trust. This stage of care – the pre-visit – is where technology is poised to make the most impact on both patients and clinicians.
For patients, the days and hours leading up to that moment are like a journey to visit the all-knowing Oz. Healthcare providers want them to be as prepared and comfortable as possible by the time they reach medical offices. Technology is currently failing to help them do that, and patient experience suffers because of it.
Healthcare technologies, especially AI-enabled solutions, are bound to mature out of their awkward teenage years. The communication between systems will be reconciled, the patient-side interfaces will become more natural and easier to use, and redundancies between processes will be eliminated. In the interim, they should refrain from adopting the one-size-fits-all approaches to functionality that perpetuate these pitfalls. Instead, we need an industry-wide attunement, a shift in focus toward providing a seamless patient experience.
Joshua Reischer, MD, is CEO of Health Note.