Before the pandemic, many health systems had started to devote more resources to digital health. In the last year alone, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente hired their first ever chief digital officers.
Since the first Covid-19 cases were reported in the U.S., that role has undoubtedly changed. Technology became an integral part of many health systems’ response to the pandemic – and served as a lifeline to continue to see patients.
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At MedCity INVEST, four healthcare executives shared how they responded to Covid-19, and what they see as the future of digital health.
The panelists included:
- Prat Vemana, Kaiser Permanente’s first chief digital officer
- Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s chief innovation officer
- Eric Spaulding, director of digital customer experience at Highmark Health
- Aaron Martin, chief digital and innovation officer for Providence St. Joseph Health and managing general partner of Providence Ventures
Innovaccer’s CTO Mike Sutten and MedCity News Editor-In-Chief Arundhati Parmar moderated the panel. Here are some highlights from the discussion:
Q: What were some of your learnings from your response to the pandemic?
Vemana: Both how consumers adapted to telehealth and virtual care accelerated quite a bit. Earlier, we used to promote telehealth, it was an initiative. Now, it’s here. But the other side is also important from a care team perspective — how they were able to embrace it and adapt.
… The second piece I would say Covid-19 has accelerated is collaboration among different parties. Every conversation required a steering committee and a discussion and whatnot. When I think about what Covid-19 has done, people are learning more toward speed and execution and the ability to have progress over perfection.
Schwartz: I remember in the room we gathered all of our folks who were involved in the Center for Innovation, as well as our IT partners. I just put it out on the table and said, “Tell us every technology that we have that can be turned toward Covid.”
What we realized was all of the ingredients we had sitting out there could pivot just a little bit to help us with the crisis that we had.
… I think what all of us didn’t realize was how quickly adoption could happen. How quickly you could go from 5% to 80% (of visits) on telemedicine. The question that all of us have is when that dust settles, what is the level that’s here to stay for good? What has fundamentally shifted in a period of eight weeks?
Q: Aaron, (Providence) already had a pretty strong digital presence, so what’s next?
Martin: A few things. One is, I don’t things can stick or accelerate without health systems moving to risk. … We’re on track to do probably 5 million virtual visits this year. That’s a massive number. The problem is, it’s still loaded with friction for both the patient and the provider. So that’s one block of work we’ve got to do.
… We did some math and we said these providers are going to have to do anywhere between three or four video visits an hour to just maintain their income on a fee-for-service RPU basis. And that is just inhuman. We should not have primary care physicians doing fee-for-service work and we’ve got to get to capitation very quickly.
I think that’s actually the core issue. You’ll see us be very aggressive in that space. And also in taking all of the friction out of the process for online scheduling and virtual visits.
Q: What are your thoughts on how to deal with patient privacy at this time when there’s so much collaboration happening?
Spaulding: A lot of it from the customer side is making sure we’re incredibly explicit in what they’re signing up for, whether it’s a bot, making sure every single point of digital interaction they know how to revoke consent, that’s a huge part of it.
The other thing is really working and partnering with our legal and privacy team to look at legislation that’s coming out… being able to do the due diligence to say when do we reasonably expect that this is something that will affect us, and let’s get started now.
Sutten: I think there’s was lot of talk about how the regulation on interoperability will kind of open security (breaches), but in fact, it reduces them. The move to APIs is inherently more secure than batch ASCII files, rarely which even have password protection on them. I think the cloud is inherently more secure, if you think about the amount of people — whether it’s Microsoft, Google or Amazon — that are protecting the perimeter and protecting the services within it.
By the way, we’re now asking members and patients if they would like their data shared, and we’ve never gone to that level before.
These interviews have been edited for content and clarity.
Photo credit: Andrey Suslov, Getty Images
