May 3, 2024
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Digital innovations have accelerated in healthcare in recent years, and according to a 2023 study, the digital health market is projected to reach $38 billion by 2025. This includes considerable developments in remote monitoring platforms, patient engagement, telehealth, and more.
However, technology is only a part of the equation. For a sustainable, scalable digital transformation, Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) at innovative health systems are always looking to balance the implementation of new technology with the strategic improvement of patient experience and patient outcomes, create better digital experiences that attract and retain patients by meeting their consumer expectations, platforms that add or enhance their digital front door strategy, features or services that get the healthcare teams excited, and align it with the healthcare systems overarching goals and strategy.
Digital patient engagement solutions like Digital Care Journey platforms are increasingly playing a key role as part of these digital patient-centered strategies at healthcare organizations. Patients can access these app-based platforms on their own everyday devices to get condition-specific interactive education, follow protocols, and stay connected to their care team throughout their episode of care. Meanwhile care teams can remotely monitor patient health status and updates via alerts and dashboards, as well as send automated patient reminders, to-do-lists and health status checks, collect survey responses and patient-reported outcomes (PROs), and more.
The adoption of digital care journey platforms, digital patient engagement tools, and remote monitoring solutions has accelerated over the past few years, as market forces such as the pandemic, healthcare consumerism, value-based care, and staffing shortages set in motion the need for more scalable ways for providers to engage and stay connected with patients before and after hospitalization.
A holistic platform can help healthcare providers ensure that the healthcare journey, inside and outside the walls of the hospital, are empowering and efficient for both patients and their care teams, while achieving key goals for the organization. This includes improving outcomes like discharging patients sooner, reducing readmissions, phone calls, and workforce burden, lowering costs per patient, increasing surgical throughput, enhancing user adoption of new technologies and more.
With a myriad of solutions in the marketplace and new ones entering the market, what are the factors to consider when evaluating digital patient engagement solutions? Here are the top 6 considerations both CDOs, and healthcare informatics teams, need to make when selecting a digital patient engagement platform for long term success.
One of the ongoing needs for innovation in healthcare is consumer-centric, easily-accessible solutions that deliver on patient expectations for better, personalized digital experience while aligning with the patient engagement strategy of a health system. According to a McKinsey survey, 70-80% of respondents preferred digital solutions to carry out activities across their healthcare journeys.
Digital care journey platforms’ standardized approach to care has a significant impact on the patient experience and continuity of care. It ensures that all patients receive the right education at the right time, get timely recommendations that help avoid phone calls, share feedback, and have consistent access to their care teams - without putting a strain on resources and staff. Meanwhile, care teams are able to monitor through dashboards all relevant protocols and health status for the entire patient population and are able to intervene sooner and more efficiently for patients at risk.
For instance, University hospitals saw a 59% reduction in phone calls; and at Multicare - which implemented Digital Care Journeys enterprise-wide in more than five clinical areas, a patient shared, “I think this was a brilliant idea. When you've had major surgery, you don't really know what you should be feeling from day to day and it’s comforting to feel like you're touching base with your care team without feeling like a nuisance by calling too often.”
When patients and providers learn that the patient will be well-supported throughout their recovery and there is adequate patient access to education as well as the care teams, both parties feel more confident about discharging the patient sooner, which frees up inpatient bed capacity and the care team’s ability to extend care beyond the hospital setting as well as decreases patient anxiety as they feel connected to their provider. At UAB Medicine, for instance, 93% of patients said that the Digital Care Journey platform helped them feel more confident post procedure.
Additionally, a holistic digital health platform that provides accessible care across populations – be it differing ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender minorities; those experiencing physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities; or patients in rural populations or with varying socioeconomic statuses – through easy-to-understand language, visual aids, multiplatform access, caregiver enrolment and engagement, UI/UX and more, is better poised to enhance the overall patient satisfaction and experience.
As the scope of digital solutions expands – often impacting multiple stakeholders – clinician and care team stakeholder buy-in is critical as it becomes increasingly important in driving change management, including the successful implementation of a Digital Care Journey platform.
For a CDO or CDIO, having determined the goals of both the overall organization and the individual stakeholders, a platform that is flexible to different clinical workflows, does not add to the existing workload, supports daily decision-making, and helps address the key pain points for the frontline staff is important.
As Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, KeyCare’s CEO, points out - user (in this case, clinicians) adoption of health tech can be enhanced only when the tech is aligned with the people who use it and answer the questions: “Who uses your technology? Who benefits from it - clinically, financially, etc.? Who pays for it? And how are those things aligned?”
This is especially true in the face of continuing staffing shortages and a provider-focused platform can help organizations do more with less. For example, digital care journey platforms can:
Finding a technology that reduces potentially avoidable tasks for the care teams and empowers them with more time to work on what they love - prioritizing care delivery for their patients - is key to having that buy-in from the clinical team from the very beginning.
Additionally, as with any technology, when key stakeholders are left out of the evaluation and decision-making process when buying a platform, it is likely to lead to lower user adoption. In this case, it could mean clinicians refrain from utilizing the platform to its full potential.
And since it is usually the physicians and front line staff that communicates the what, why, and how of a Digital Care Journey platform to the patients, the lack of support and enthusiasm from clinicians early in the implementation can negatively affect patient activation and adoption rates as well.
According to a recent AMA study, adoption of digital tools has grown significantly among all physicians from 2.2 in 2016 to 3.8 in 2022, with the largest growth in adoption being of digital health tools that help with remote care. In this growing, and open market, finding a Digital Care Journey platform that can be implemented and launched successfully within shortened timelines is highly beneficial.
A robust platform will offer out-of-the-box, pre-built care plans for different care pathways across surgical and chronic care (e.g. joint surgeries, orthopedic, colorectal, bariatric, open heart surgery, oncology, maternity care, COPD etc.) that can be either launched as is or customized to match any differences in your protocols and workflows.
When building care plans in-house, the building of a team and time required from staff can be a big ask, considering the already strained resources and staff, which in turn can slow down the building and implementation process. A flexible platform means it will require less time from your frontline teams to create the content from scratch, and customizable care plan templates allow the platform to be deployed in as little as 60-90 days.
Additionally, ready-to-use care plans that are evidence-based, i.e. developed by healthcare professionals including nutritionists, dieticians, adult education pros, etc., are based on the medical literature, meet guidelines for health literacy, accessibility and other requirements, and have at least 10 clinical studies and customer evaluations showing improvements across a wide range of specialties and outcome metrics (e.g. LOS, readmissions, ER visits, costs) offer an effective and quicker path to successful implementation and adoption.
Finally, it is key to find a partner vendor that has a proven track record of deployment and strategies for successful deployment and user adoption. This includes comprehensive training on how to educate patients about the platform and overall initiative (including talking scripts that can be personalized), how to enroll a patient on the platform backend, how to manage alerts and monitor patient status on dashboards (as needed), etc.
An experienced partner with a committed support services team would also be able to support your healthcare system with on-going services after program launch - such as monthly and quarterly program reviews, best practice sharing from other hospitals, data reporting support and so on.
As staff shortages, physician burnout, and strain on resources continue to spike, a faster set-up process with an experienced partner that can offer an efficient implementation playbook will help maximize the success of your Digital Patient Engagement platform as well as help reduce workforce burden.
Considering the vast amount of patient data across an organization, when systems don’t speak to each other, it poses a big challenge for optimal digital transformation. In a 2021 report, healthcare leaders cited difficulties with data management (44%) and lack of interoperability and data standards (37%) as the biggest barriers to adoption of digital health technology in their hospital or healthcare facility.
A patient engagement platform that directly embeds into your proprietary digital front door patient portal or an existing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) or Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is highly recommended for not just a connected healthcare platform but also a cohesive digital front door strategy.
As Dr. Heather Evans, Vice Chair of Clinical Research and Applied Informatics at MUSC, shares, “If you were going to ask me where the rubber meets the road and where we're going with all of this stuff, it's that integration is everything. The less that you're going to do something that's going to get in the way of a person delivering care to somebody else … the more successful it's going to be.”
An interoperable digital care journey platform that speaks to, aka integrates into, an existing patient-facing portal and/or EHR is key as it allows for a streamlined workflow for both patients and providers – it accelerates patient enrollment as patients can quickly and easily access the app within their chart or the patient portal, makes it easier for staff to receive alerts, collect data, and review dashboards without leaving the EHR or signing into a different system, and offers a more seamless experience.
Health care providers do need to consider that there are a number of factors involved to assess whether or not a digital patient engagement platform can effectively integrate into your EHR/EMR system in its current state, such as the costs, existence of turn-key integrations and the amount of prior experience.
However, even if you choose not to integrate the platform with your EHR immediately, it is still important to ensure that the platform aligns with your long term EHR strategy. As such, consider looking at Digital Care Journey platforms that are already listed as validated integration partners for leading EHRs such as the platforms listed on Epic's Connection Hub and Oracle Cerner’s CODE program.
Finding a solution that grows as your organization does is another key consideration. If you select an enterprise-class, scalable solution that can be used across multiple service lines, it creates a more interconnected digital experience while reducing the total cost of ownership – through repeatable processes and learnings, consistency of care across patient populations in the health system, reducing the amount of staff training required (aka less strain on time and resources) and increased familiarity with the platform for patients and providers alike as they move through the health system.
Additionally, working with a single vendor that has experience across multiple service lines/care plans not only facilitates better collaboration and insights-gathering between different service lines, but also leads to a more seamless implementation process where the provider has to deal with a single vendor versus multiple vendors.
In a recent survey, nearly 75% of patients expressed concern about protecting their personal health data and an IBM report estimated the average breach in healthcare cost to $10.10 million in 2022. Based on this, the severity of data protection and security within the healthcare sector is critical.
According to the American Medical Association, compliance is one of the most important considerations to ensure the security and protection of information. Any digital patient tool that stores patient information should be compliant with local healthcare data privacy laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), to name a few.
Finding a digital patient engagement platform that complies with the above and other privacy legislation is important. For instance, solutions that maintain security frameworks such as SOC 2 Type II compliance and HIPAA/PIPEDA/PHIPA compliance, including annual security and privacy training for staff, audit loggings system, internal assessments (risk assessments on NIST-800-88 standard), external assessments (3rd party penetration testing by a certified CISSP and SOC 2) and more. All data collected is encrypted and stored on secure privacy-compliant servers with our hosting provider, who are ISO 27001 compliant and HITRUST certified.
An enterprise platform that is comprehensive and enables a privacy-compliant view of a patient’s care pathways is therefore a foremost consideration for all healthcare informatics and chief digital officers. The big advantage of a security-compliant patient engagement platform is that it extends the sphere of care outside the four walls of a hospital, enabling a seamless transition from hospital to home, while meeting corporate compliance and privacy standards for end-to-end data security.
Launching any system-wide technology has its own sets of challenges. For a Chief Digital Officer, identifying a vendor that has a proven track record of successful deployments, improved patient education and adoption while offering a platform that can scale across multiple patient populations is key to selecting a digital patient engagement solution. Look to find platforms that deliver on desired outcomes, enhance patient experience, improve patient outcomes, increase patient engagement, reduce total cost of ownership, and future proof your patient engagement and digital front door strategies.
For more insights on how implementing platforms like Digital Care Journeys as part of an overall front door strategy or other digital initiatives can enhance patient acquisition and retention, improve staff satisfaction, and better align with the overall goals of an health system, download our eBook The Role of Digital Care Journeys in a Health System’s Front Door Strategy, or book a demo here.
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Digital innovations have accelerated in healthcare in recent years, and according to a 2023 study, the digital health market is projected to reach $38 billion by 2025. This includes considerable developments in remote monitoring platforms, patient engagement, telehealth, and more.
However, technology is only a part of the equation. For a sustainable, scalable digital transformation, Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) at innovative health systems are always looking to balance the implementation of new technology with the strategic improvement of patient experience and patient outcomes, create better digital experiences that attract and retain patients by meeting their consumer expectations, platforms that add or enhance their digital front door strategy, features or services that get the healthcare teams excited, and align it with the healthcare systems overarching goals and strategy.
Digital patient engagement solutions like Digital Care Journey platforms are increasingly playing a key role as part of these digital patient-centered strategies at healthcare organizations. Patients can access these app-based platforms on their own everyday devices to get condition-specific interactive education, follow protocols, and stay connected to their care team throughout their episode of care. Meanwhile care teams can remotely monitor patient health status and updates via alerts and dashboards, as well as send automated patient reminders, to-do-lists and health status checks, collect survey responses and patient-reported outcomes (PROs), and more.
The adoption of digital care journey platforms, digital patient engagement tools, and remote monitoring solutions has accelerated over the past few years, as market forces such as the pandemic, healthcare consumerism, value-based care, and staffing shortages set in motion the need for more scalable ways for providers to engage and stay connected with patients before and after hospitalization.
A holistic platform can help healthcare providers ensure that the healthcare journey, inside and outside the walls of the hospital, are empowering and efficient for both patients and their care teams, while achieving key goals for the organization. This includes improving outcomes like discharging patients sooner, reducing readmissions, phone calls, and workforce burden, lowering costs per patient, increasing surgical throughput, enhancing user adoption of new technologies and more.
With a myriad of solutions in the marketplace and new ones entering the market, what are the factors to consider when evaluating digital patient engagement solutions? Here are the top 6 considerations both CDOs, and healthcare informatics teams, need to make when selecting a digital patient engagement platform for long term success.
One of the ongoing needs for innovation in healthcare is consumer-centric, easily-accessible solutions that deliver on patient expectations for better, personalized digital experience while aligning with the patient engagement strategy of a health system. According to a McKinsey survey, 70-80% of respondents preferred digital solutions to carry out activities across their healthcare journeys.
Digital care journey platforms’ standardized approach to care has a significant impact on the patient experience and continuity of care. It ensures that all patients receive the right education at the right time, get timely recommendations that help avoid phone calls, share feedback, and have consistent access to their care teams - without putting a strain on resources and staff. Meanwhile, care teams are able to monitor through dashboards all relevant protocols and health status for the entire patient population and are able to intervene sooner and more efficiently for patients at risk.
For instance, University hospitals saw a 59% reduction in phone calls; and at Multicare - which implemented Digital Care Journeys enterprise-wide in more than five clinical areas, a patient shared, “I think this was a brilliant idea. When you've had major surgery, you don't really know what you should be feeling from day to day and it’s comforting to feel like you're touching base with your care team without feeling like a nuisance by calling too often.”
When patients and providers learn that the patient will be well-supported throughout their recovery and there is adequate patient access to education as well as the care teams, both parties feel more confident about discharging the patient sooner, which frees up inpatient bed capacity and the care team’s ability to extend care beyond the hospital setting as well as decreases patient anxiety as they feel connected to their provider. At UAB Medicine, for instance, 93% of patients said that the Digital Care Journey platform helped them feel more confident post procedure.
Additionally, a holistic digital health platform that provides accessible care across populations – be it differing ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender minorities; those experiencing physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities; or patients in rural populations or with varying socioeconomic statuses – through easy-to-understand language, visual aids, multiplatform access, caregiver enrolment and engagement, UI/UX and more, is better poised to enhance the overall patient satisfaction and experience.
As the scope of digital solutions expands – often impacting multiple stakeholders – clinician and care team stakeholder buy-in is critical as it becomes increasingly important in driving change management, including the successful implementation of a Digital Care Journey platform.
For a CDO or CDIO, having determined the goals of both the overall organization and the individual stakeholders, a platform that is flexible to different clinical workflows, does not add to the existing workload, supports daily decision-making, and helps address the key pain points for the frontline staff is important.
As Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, KeyCare’s CEO, points out - user (in this case, clinicians) adoption of health tech can be enhanced only when the tech is aligned with the people who use it and answer the questions: “Who uses your technology? Who benefits from it - clinically, financially, etc.? Who pays for it? And how are those things aligned?”
This is especially true in the face of continuing staffing shortages and a provider-focused platform can help organizations do more with less. For example, digital care journey platforms can:
Finding a technology that reduces potentially avoidable tasks for the care teams and empowers them with more time to work on what they love - prioritizing care delivery for their patients - is key to having that buy-in from the clinical team from the very beginning.
Additionally, as with any technology, when key stakeholders are left out of the evaluation and decision-making process when buying a platform, it is likely to lead to lower user adoption. In this case, it could mean clinicians refrain from utilizing the platform to its full potential.
And since it is usually the physicians and front line staff that communicates the what, why, and how of a Digital Care Journey platform to the patients, the lack of support and enthusiasm from clinicians early in the implementation can negatively affect patient activation and adoption rates as well.
According to a recent AMA study, adoption of digital tools has grown significantly among all physicians from 2.2 in 2016 to 3.8 in 2022, with the largest growth in adoption being of digital health tools that help with remote care. In this growing, and open market, finding a Digital Care Journey platform that can be implemented and launched successfully within shortened timelines is highly beneficial.
A robust platform will offer out-of-the-box, pre-built care plans for different care pathways across surgical and chronic care (e.g. joint surgeries, orthopedic, colorectal, bariatric, open heart surgery, oncology, maternity care, COPD etc.) that can be either launched as is or customized to match any differences in your protocols and workflows.
When building care plans in-house, the building of a team and time required from staff can be a big ask, considering the already strained resources and staff, which in turn can slow down the building and implementation process. A flexible platform means it will require less time from your frontline teams to create the content from scratch, and customizable care plan templates allow the platform to be deployed in as little as 60-90 days.
Additionally, ready-to-use care plans that are evidence-based, i.e. developed by healthcare professionals including nutritionists, dieticians, adult education pros, etc., are based on the medical literature, meet guidelines for health literacy, accessibility and other requirements, and have at least 10 clinical studies and customer evaluations showing improvements across a wide range of specialties and outcome metrics (e.g. LOS, readmissions, ER visits, costs) offer an effective and quicker path to successful implementation and adoption.
Finally, it is key to find a partner vendor that has a proven track record of deployment and strategies for successful deployment and user adoption. This includes comprehensive training on how to educate patients about the platform and overall initiative (including talking scripts that can be personalized), how to enroll a patient on the platform backend, how to manage alerts and monitor patient status on dashboards (as needed), etc.
An experienced partner with a committed support services team would also be able to support your healthcare system with on-going services after program launch - such as monthly and quarterly program reviews, best practice sharing from other hospitals, data reporting support and so on.
As staff shortages, physician burnout, and strain on resources continue to spike, a faster set-up process with an experienced partner that can offer an efficient implementation playbook will help maximize the success of your Digital Patient Engagement platform as well as help reduce workforce burden.
Considering the vast amount of patient data across an organization, when systems don’t speak to each other, it poses a big challenge for optimal digital transformation. In a 2021 report, healthcare leaders cited difficulties with data management (44%) and lack of interoperability and data standards (37%) as the biggest barriers to adoption of digital health technology in their hospital or healthcare facility.
A patient engagement platform that directly embeds into your proprietary digital front door patient portal or an existing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) or Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is highly recommended for not just a connected healthcare platform but also a cohesive digital front door strategy.
As Dr. Heather Evans, Vice Chair of Clinical Research and Applied Informatics at MUSC, shares, “If you were going to ask me where the rubber meets the road and where we're going with all of this stuff, it's that integration is everything. The less that you're going to do something that's going to get in the way of a person delivering care to somebody else … the more successful it's going to be.”
An interoperable digital care journey platform that speaks to, aka integrates into, an existing patient-facing portal and/or EHR is key as it allows for a streamlined workflow for both patients and providers – it accelerates patient enrollment as patients can quickly and easily access the app within their chart or the patient portal, makes it easier for staff to receive alerts, collect data, and review dashboards without leaving the EHR or signing into a different system, and offers a more seamless experience.
Health care providers do need to consider that there are a number of factors involved to assess whether or not a digital patient engagement platform can effectively integrate into your EHR/EMR system in its current state, such as the costs, existence of turn-key integrations and the amount of prior experience.
However, even if you choose not to integrate the platform with your EHR immediately, it is still important to ensure that the platform aligns with your long term EHR strategy. As such, consider looking at Digital Care Journey platforms that are already listed as validated integration partners for leading EHRs such as the platforms listed on Epic's Connection Hub and Oracle Cerner’s CODE program.
Finding a solution that grows as your organization does is another key consideration. If you select an enterprise-class, scalable solution that can be used across multiple service lines, it creates a more interconnected digital experience while reducing the total cost of ownership – through repeatable processes and learnings, consistency of care across patient populations in the health system, reducing the amount of staff training required (aka less strain on time and resources) and increased familiarity with the platform for patients and providers alike as they move through the health system.
Additionally, working with a single vendor that has experience across multiple service lines/care plans not only facilitates better collaboration and insights-gathering between different service lines, but also leads to a more seamless implementation process where the provider has to deal with a single vendor versus multiple vendors.
In a recent survey, nearly 75% of patients expressed concern about protecting their personal health data and an IBM report estimated the average breach in healthcare cost to $10.10 million in 2022. Based on this, the severity of data protection and security within the healthcare sector is critical.
According to the American Medical Association, compliance is one of the most important considerations to ensure the security and protection of information. Any digital patient tool that stores patient information should be compliant with local healthcare data privacy laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), to name a few.
Finding a digital patient engagement platform that complies with the above and other privacy legislation is important. For instance, solutions that maintain security frameworks such as SOC 2 Type II compliance and HIPAA/PIPEDA/PHIPA compliance, including annual security and privacy training for staff, audit loggings system, internal assessments (risk assessments on NIST-800-88 standard), external assessments (3rd party penetration testing by a certified CISSP and SOC 2) and more. All data collected is encrypted and stored on secure privacy-compliant servers with our hosting provider, who are ISO 27001 compliant and HITRUST certified.
An enterprise platform that is comprehensive and enables a privacy-compliant view of a patient’s care pathways is therefore a foremost consideration for all healthcare informatics and chief digital officers. The big advantage of a security-compliant patient engagement platform is that it extends the sphere of care outside the four walls of a hospital, enabling a seamless transition from hospital to home, while meeting corporate compliance and privacy standards for end-to-end data security.
Launching any system-wide technology has its own sets of challenges. For a Chief Digital Officer, identifying a vendor that has a proven track record of successful deployments, improved patient education and adoption while offering a platform that can scale across multiple patient populations is key to selecting a digital patient engagement solution. Look to find platforms that deliver on desired outcomes, enhance patient experience, improve patient outcomes, increase patient engagement, reduce total cost of ownership, and future proof your patient engagement and digital front door strategies.
For more insights on how implementing platforms like Digital Care Journeys as part of an overall front door strategy or other digital initiatives can enhance patient acquisition and retention, improve staff satisfaction, and better align with the overall goals of an health system, download our eBook The Role of Digital Care Journeys in a Health System’s Front Door Strategy, or book a demo here.
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