
Health care organizations nationwide are focused on ways to enhance digital
health technology to allow consumers to take more effective control of
their care and to allow caregivers to deliver even better care. At St.
Joseph Heritage Healthcare, I lead an IT team that is passionate about
embracing innovative health care technologies that give our caregivers
better tools and better ways to live out the promise of continuing to
serve our communities and reach more people at their time of need.
Our Piloted Approach to New Technology
We take pride in ensuring we provide a useful, valuable health care experience
to people who have varying comfort levels with technology. We know that some things work for some people, and don’t for others.
For this reason, we do a lot of smaller trials and experiments, and then
readjust before rolling out a new technology to larger groups. In technology,
failing is part of learning and our objective is to fail forward and then
quickly readjust something to make it work better. It’s important
to do this because new technology allows us to better serve our community,
which is part of our overall mission at St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare
and our family of allied organizations that together form St. Joseph Hoag Health.
The advantages of our piloted, iterative approach to new technology were
made clear in the recent rollout of our telehealth solution, called
eVisit, which provides convenient access to on-demand primary care providers
in the comfort of your home via your mobile device or computer. The service
is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Through this new technology,
we learned very quickly that while we wanted to allow the patient to have
immediate, round-the-clock electronic
telehealth access to a physician, we also wanted to ensure the patient’s primary
care physician was engaged in this experience. While it was being piloted,
we were able to adjust the technology so that if a patient used eVisit,
their primary care physician would be able to see a summary of the visit
and follow up after to continue with care. This ensures a seamless experience
for the patient and an ongoing relationship with their primary care physician.
Now, we’re looking into a technology solution that will offer our
patients an opportunity to schedule same-day-visits online with a list
of physicians, and we’ll use the same experimental process to refine
and improve the technology before offering it to everyone else.
Employees Aren’t the Only Ones who will Benefit
Various studies show how electronic health care access can benefit employers.
A virtual care delivery model could potentially save American companies
$6 billion a year in health care costs, according to a recent
study by Towers Watson. Another
study conducted by Red Quill Consulting found that telehealth visits have the potential to save $126 per visit
when compared to traditional office visits. The same survey found that
telemedicine helps reduce reliance on urgent care or emergency rooms.
Of patients who used the virtual health care visits, 5.6 percent would
otherwise have gone to the ER and 45.8 percent would have used urgent
care. This study also found 83 percent of conditions were resolved by
the virtual doctors.

Aside from digital health offerings being what many of today’s employees
want, data gathered and analyzed through digital health offerings allows
everyone to keep costs down by providing the right treatment to the right
person. It enables us to look at data and make sure we’re addressing
those populations who need intervention the most.
For example, if we know there are certain patients who are diagnosed with
or have a higher risk of getting diabetes, there are a lot of different
ways we can provide outreach to those patients through digital health
technology. We’ve provided remote monitoring to track glucose levels,
weight and blood pressure, and then the data is collected and integrated
with our systems and monitored by an RN. We also have patients who might
be due for a colonoscopy or annual wellness exam. In the past, we would
mail out a letter to homes. Now we’re seeing that if we instead
send a text message to those who opt in for that communication, they’re
more likely to respond at their convenience to set those appointments
up. We’re seeing that if we adapt to the newer technological ways
people prefer to communicate, that leads to better outcomes and better
health and wellness for our patients.
Meeting Your Employees’ Health Technology Expectations
Digital health offerings are expanding at an accelerated pace, and businesses
need to understand their employees’ needs and expectations around
this. We know consumers are doing more and more things online and there’s
an expectation that they should be able to schedule a physician appointment,
pay bills and request prescription refills online—and those are
all things they can do now within our
patient portal.
We are finding more ways to outreach to our patients using text messages.
For example, if a patient has an appointment scheduled in the next few
days, and that physician has a cancellation that day, our system can send
a text message to 10 patients and say, “There’s been a cancellation
with your physician. If anyone would like this opening, be the first to
text back.” If they do text back, it automates the flow and that
patient gets bumped up in the scheduling system to that earlier date and
time, and then it will automatically set off a flow where it texts 10
additional patients about that new opening, and so on and so on. It’s
a benefit for patients because they can be seen earlier, and it’s
a benefit to our organization because it allows our caregivers to see
as many patients as possible on a given day.
Overall, we’re seeing that our patients prefer a lot more automation
and self-service technology offerings, chat features and online interaction
– many patients don’t necessarily want to pick up the phone,
call and sit and wait on hold to talk to someone anymore. With our patient
portal, we have about 24,000 new activations a month, and both our physicians
and patients are appreciating the instantaneous two-way communication
through the portal that is integrated with the patient’s electronic
medical record and email.
It’s not one thing, but it’s a lot of little things where we
as a society are moving more online. Health care has often lagged behind
other industries, but we’ve definitely seen a huge uptake in this
area in the past five years, a trend which we fully expect to continue
and which we as a health system are optimizing for the benefit of the
business communities and workforces we serve.
To learn more: Contact us at
foremployers@stjoe.org to learn more about our digital health technology offerings.