How 8 Digital Health Leaders are Breaking Through Barriers

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“Most organizations are in the phase where their EHR is stabilized and relatively optimized, have the basics of a patient engagement portal, but now how can we really leverage the patient to be part of the care team and bring in the technologies that we are carrying around in our pockets. How do we bring the patient in but change the care model to some degree?” shared Dr. Becket Mahnke, Chief Medical Information Officer at Confluence Health, during our recent conversation.

It’s not new that the state of the healthcare industry is rapidly evolving as consumers demand more from providers and providers become more and more entrenched in learning how to deliver a virtually connected care world, the advancements in healthcare technology, the effects across patient populations, and how it can improve clinical outcomes, and the overall consumer experience.

“Even a neurologist or Parkinson’s disease doctor like myself that takes care of an aging patient population really appreciates the opportunity to meet patients where they are. To think differently particularly with older patients or patients who are not as mobile as some of the younger patients might be to try to find ways to reach them and use technology to augment and compliment that,” explains David Houghton Medical Director, Digital Medicine & Chief, Division of Movement and Memory Disorders, Department of Neurology at Ochsner Health.

As Mike Sherry, CEO and Co-founder, Xealth puts it, ”automate where you can to reduce clinician burnout and repetitive tasks.”

To hear more insights from eight digital healthcare leaders who are breaking through digital transformation barriers to learn how AI, voice recognition, social determinants, virtual care, and the adoption of technology is impacting the delivery of healthcare tune in to recent episodes of  “The Digital Patient”, Listen during your workout, while at work or during your commute on audio streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube.

1. Impact of Social Determinants of Health on Digital Health Adoption, Elevating Employee Satisfaction to Improve Patient Experience & Transitioning from Clinician to Hospital Executive

This episode features Dr. David H. Berger, Chief Executive Officer at University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. Dr. Berger discusses the advantages of leveraging the EHR to better serve patients and providers using new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Voice Recognition to improve provider efficiency and reduce the burden currently on clinician administrative work. He also:

• Believes digital transformation over the long term will reduce disparities but is concerned about the short term as the majority of organizations currently involved with digital transformation are well-resourced and may not deal with the social issues that prevent patient access to “safety net” community health systems; and

• Is focused on elevating the employee experience as it directly impacts the patient experience.

Tune into the episode to gain more insight on these topics and more!

2. Implementing Digital Coaches for Patients, Using AI-based Voice Technology to Reduce Physician Burnout & Why Listening is the Most Important Skill for a Digital Leader

In this episode, Dr. Michael Radtke, Associate Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Intermountain Healthcare shares why he believes personalization is the next frontier for AI, and delves into how technology can streamline physician-specific workflows and improve accuracy and reliability. Listen to the episode to hear Dr. Radtke discuss the importance of:

• Identifying champions and “front line builders” in each department who can act as trusted messengers for the organization is hugely important for implementing any innovation successfully; and
• Properly stratifying patient data when determining the impact of a solution as innovation is rarely one-size fits all (e.g. Older patients often prefer virtual or face-to-face visits whereas younger often patients prefer text);

3. Using Digital Health to Deliver a Better Consumer Experience than Amazon, Achieve Parity of Care and Reach Vulnerable Populations

Hear how Dr. David Houghton, Medical Director, Digital Medicine & Chief, Division of Movement and Memory Disorders, Department of Neurology at Ochsner Health believes virtual care actually improves physician empathy with their patients; the technology enables the physician to be invited into the patient’s home on their time as opposed to forcing a patient to visit the traditionally sterile environment at the clinic. Tune into the episode to also learn about how Dr. Houghton prioritizes new digital health initiatives through a framework he calls the five As, which was taught to him by Dr. Brian McCarthy while working at the CDC on new health initiatives.

4. Physician Tech Entrepreneur-Turned Chief Digital Officer and What Healthcare Leaders Can Learn from Musical Orchestra

This episode features Dr. Patrick A. Woodard, Chief Digital Officer at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, where he offers an interesting perspective on why he believes orchestras operate similarly to health systems. This is because in both scenarios, you have individual commitments (in orchestra: play well enough to not be noticeable among the 20 or so other violinists vs. in healthcare: commit to doing X amount of interoperability or have a 99.999% uptime) and collective commitments (in orchestra: play cohesively and bow in the same direction vs. in healthcare: play nice in the sandbox with interoperability, share learnings, etc.). Check out the rest of the episode to learn more about why Dr. Woodard also believes that:

• Interoperability sounds like the opposite of defensibility for a health tech vendor, but is actually an advantage for solutions that operate well and are embedded into current workflows (as change management is incredibly difficult);
• EHRs in the future will be akin to data repositories in which users get access to information depending on their role and the specific context (e.g. 3rd party billing vs. a neurologist generating research reports) and how there are myriad challenges to overcome along the way such as configuring the correct way to parse this information so that it is useful;

5. Spinning a Digital Health Company out of a Health System and Building the Operating System for Prescribing Digital Health Apps

In this episode Mike McSherry, Co-founder & CEO of Xealth discusses his passion for technology, and its ability to reduce friction in healthcare around logistics such as appointment scheduling and remote patient monitoring - which drastically enhances the consumer experience for patients. Tune into the episode to learn more about his company “Xealth” and why Mr. McSherry believes it is indispensable for its ability to aggregate digital health tools, streamline integration, patient segmentation, and analytics to drive behavioral change and adoption of technology.

6. Using Technology to Re-humanize the Patient Experience, the Problem with Funding Healthcare Innovation with Research Grants & Being Mission-oriented vs. Compliance-oriented

Hear how Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation at The Mount Sinai Health System believes the central piece to successfully integrating technology in healthcare is to focus on increasing the humanity of care delivery as opposed to saving dollars. Tune into this episode for more insights on how:

• Successful patient-facing technology leverages community co-design to support the experience that patients want, for example an experience that focuses on relationship-building and connection between patients and/or patient-to-provider, which in turn significantly improves patient adoption and adherence
• Dr. Putrino advocates for health system leadership to find innovators who are mission-oriented and empowers them to innovate by relaxing certain compliance for the sake of the mission, and how this process was evident and proven during COVID-19

7. Shifting from CMIO 2.0 to 3.0, Creating "Invisible" Technology for Patients, and Pioneering Digital Health for the Army

Dr. Becket Mahnke, Chief Medical Information Officer at Confluence Health is the featured guest on this episode. He shares his thoughts on how the role of a CMIO has transitioned from CMIO 1.0. to CMIO 2.0. Specifically, the transition from the “CMIO 1.0.” being responsible for implementation and meaningful use of technologies such as the EHR to the “CMIO 2.0” being focused on optimizing the EHR and implementing basic digital patient engagement. Check out this episode to learn more about the transition to CMIO 3.0, the role, responsibilities, and focus. ‍‍

8. From Editor-in-Chief of UpToDate to Ochsner Health's Chief Digital Officer, Re-building Consumer Trust Following COVID-19 & Generating Meaningful Patient Insights from Data to Disrupt Inefficient Workflows

Featured guest Dr. Denise Basow, Chief Digital Officer at Ochsner Health, shares her insights on how developing meaningful insights from data is the next step for health systems on their digital transformation journey. Dr. Basow talks about:

• How data can be used to transform every aspect of healthcare and why extracting meaningful insights from data is the next step for health systems on their digital transformation journeys
• Three key principles for building healthcare products that she learned while developing UpToDate. Tune into the episode to learn more about these principles and more.

“The broader opportunity in virtual care is really in reimagining the workflow, whether that's synchronous, in-person, or a Telehealth visit that can be part of our tool chest - or asynchronous processes of at-home monitoring data collection, and then interpretation and taking action on that data.  I think we really have to broaden the aperture from what we've experienced with telemedicine the last two years and move it to a true virtual care strategy if we want to to improve quality.” – Dr. Denise Basow, Chief Digital Officer, Ochsner Health

Click here to gain access to these episodes - and more! “The Digital Patient” is rated one of the top 30 Best Digital Health Podcasts by FeedSpot and takes an “edu-taining” approach to all things digital patient care. On the show, hosts Dr. Joshua Liu and Alan Sardana talk with digital health leaders, tech-savvy physicians, and forward-thinking C-suite executives to discuss the rapidly evolving nature of digital patient engagement, virtual care management, innovation trends, and digital healthcare as a whole.

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