
Providence St. Joseph Health is transforming legacy approaches to health
care by becoming ever more patient-focused and personalized through the
use of technology.
Aaron Martin, Providence St. Joseph Health’s chief digital officer, previously
spent nearly 10 years as a leader at Amazon, and now he’s applying
his consumer obsession lens of the world to health care. In this Q&A,
Martin talks about the “10x better online health care experience”
bet his Digital Innovation team is making to disrupt a staid industry
and bring lower prices, greater choice and more convenience to consumers.
Q: Everyone is talking about disruptive innovation and the digital customer
experience. Given your background with Amazon's model of personalized online experience,
how does that retail model translate to health care? And in what ways
does health care require a different approach?
A: First, let me explain Providence St. Joseph Health’s culture of
innovation and this notion of innovation disruption, which essentially
means that if we don’t try something new, someone else will. At
our core, we believe caring for our patients’ health has to be simpler,
especially for those who are poor and vulnerable. We’re committed
to harnessing the power of digital technologies to better meet consumer
health care needs wherever, however and whenever they want us to.
We know that consumers are paying more out of their pocket for health care
through high-deductible coverage plans. So that naturally drives them
to make health care decisions based not only on quality and reliability,
but largely based on cost. From Amazon’s model, we’ve learned
there are two things we need to build to create a personalized online
experience with our patients:
First, we need to provide
a transaction experience that’s 10X
better online.
We know we’ve got to make our digital transaction experience about
10 times better than the offline experience to entice our patients to
interact with us online. It’s hard to change human behavior, especially
if it’s only a marginally better experience. That means the digital
experience has to be an order of magnitude better than offline to convince
the typical person to try something new. Big innovations in the marketplace,
like Lyft, Amazon or Google, created digital experiences that are orders
of magnitude better versus the offline experience. Think about how you
used to search for information before the internet and Google—it
was labor intensive and you often had to go to a library and physically
search through card catalogues. Google made it simpler. We’ve seen
the same transformations with Lyft and Uber vs. hailing a cab. These innovative
companies have all created a much better online transaction experience,
and health care organizations must do the same.
Second, we needa compelling way to engage the customer, or in our case, our patients. Think of Starbucks … they have figured out ways to regularly engage
me as a customer offline because I buy a coffee from them every single
day. Their challenge is to make the mobile transaction experience even
better, so now Starbucks entices me with ordering ahead to avoid lines.
The problem we have in health care is we don’t currently have a
“natural” daily engagement model since we typically only see
a healthy patient two-and-a-half times per year and only when “something
is wrong.” So, the second phase is creating a compelling reason
for them to engage with us on an ongoing basis through a personalized
health platform between episodes of care.
Q: Knowing those two areas are key, how has Providence St. Joseph Health
begun to transform the online health care experience and build a dynamic
online relationship with its patients?
A: An example of how we’re making the online experience 10 times
better is the Express Care suite of services, which delivers care when,
where, and how patients want it for non-emergency, low-acuity care. It
provides easy-to-schedule drop-in clinics for low-level illnesses like
fevers or urinary tract infections. Patients can also schedule a telehealth/virtual
visit with a nurse from their smartphone, tablet or desktop, or can even
digitally summon someone to their house, sort of like Lyft for health care.
A mix of Express Care services is available across our markets, and last
year we had over 100,000 visits across the suite of services, with over
10,000 coming in as virtual visits. Net promoter scores, an indicator
of customer satisfaction, for Express Care are in the high 60s for overall
experience and in the high 80s for telehealth experience, putting the
Express Care experience in the same league as major technology companies
like Apple and Amazon.
This year we are upping the ante on simple as it relates to Express Care
services. Taking learnings from the last year, we’ve got a team
focused on improving the integration across our Express Care Retail, Virtual
and At Home services. Previously, users had to sign-up for each individual
service, and this is a clunky user experience. The integration investments
we’re making will manifest in an easy-to-use mobile application
that will use a single sign-in for users, thus making it simple for them
to navigate across different convenience care options.
In terms of engaging with our patients between episodes of care, Providence
St. Joseph Health has taken steps toward more frequent patient engagement
across two platforms:
Circle and
Xealth.
Xealth is a company incubated within our digital team and spun out of Providence
in June. Xealth allows clinicians to recommend anything non-pharmaceutical
to a patient within their EMR workflow. Think digital content, articles
and services. For example, there’s a health system in Wisconsin
that’s prescribing Lyft rides using the platform for Medicaid patients
to make sure they can make their appointments. Xealth is integrated to
allow providers to easily prescribe through the electronic medical record
(EMR), and to allow patients to easily access the information through
their patient portal app.
Circle by Providence is our personalized pregnancy and parenting app that delivers relevant
content, products, and services for women to help them manage their health
and the health of their families. Circle focuses on building what is known
as “the daily habit,” with women, who are often the “chief
medical officer” of the family. We know women make 90 percent of
health care decisions for the household, so we want to create a trusted
relationship during pregnancy, throughout delivery and into the first
few years of a child’s life. The app provides content, trackers,
and to-do lists, while also offering an array of resources, including
listings for classes and groups in our hospitals.
Q: How will Medicaid patients and other vulnerable populations benefit
from the power of personalized care?
A: Helping those most in need has been at the forefront of our mind as
we go through this digital transformation. A key area to think about is
inconvenience in health care. The way that many health systems are set
up today is inconvenient, and this inconvenience hurts the poor and vulnerable
way more than those in middle or upper income.
Think about the single mom who has two young children and works an hourly
job. If she or her child get sick and need to see a clinician, she has
to take off work for a half a day, maybe find childcare, and either might
not receive pay or could be putting her employment at risk completely.
Receiving health care services has a huge impact on her economically in
terms of lost wages, childcare costs, transportation, and the actual visit.
With this in mind, my team is taking a lot of the same convenience offerings
we built from a digital standpoint and thinking about how we modify and
retool them to make easier for our Medicaid patients to use.
For instance, we know some communities where Medicaid patients use emergency
rooms as their primary point of care. It makes sense if someone works
during the day and can’t afford to take time off to see a primary
care physician. They’re doing the perfectly rational thing.
We want to create a better health service offering for people in these
circumstances, so we’re investigating and piloting programs focused
on educating patients about how they can make an appointment online or
schedule a home visit or an in-clinic visit close to their neighborhood.
We’re also looking at where we can position some of these Express
Care locations in Medicaid “hotspots” to make them more accessible
to those most vulnerable.
The future of health care is ripe for disruption, and Martin’s Digital
Innovation team is laser focused on being at the forefront of ushering
in Health 2.0 where holistic solutions and convenience are central to
the consumer experience.