Here’s a Step-by-Step Approach to Addressing Healthcare’s Digital Transformation

For hospitals facing the challenge of meeting consumer demands and improving the efficiency of their care processes, digital transformation can seem like a daunting task. One way to approach the process is to think about it in stages, similar to how climbers map a challenging cliff. Professional climbers use a method called “chunking,” breaking up the journey into manageable steps or “chunks,” rather than planning all the unfathomable climbs at once. This practice is described in the documentary,”Dawn Wall,” Professional climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson planned and successfully climbed a seemingly impossible route—the 3,000-foot El Capitan in Yosemite, California.

Healthcare leaders need no reminder that investing in digital health has become a priority — with nursing staff exhausted by the pandemic, a looming national care shortage, and consumers increasingly expecting modern digital experiences in care settings. This environment offers many opportunities to improve care and the provider and patient experience, but it also presents some challenges. Like the climbing route pioneered by Tommy Caldwell in El Capitan, there is no template for changing the digital health experience. This is a new frontier in the industry and organizations need a structured approach. Breaking it down into steps can make this easier.

After talking with hospital leaders about their struggles with digital transformation, I realized that healthcare providers needed a step-by-step guide for planning their digital health strategy. I created a maturity model that aims to break down the process into seven stages, hoping to provide a template provider can adapt to their own:

1. The maturity model defines “patient engagement” as the fundamental first step in creating a digital patient experience. This often includes things like SMS messages or simple email outreach to influence certain actions, such as instructions for an appointment or an upcoming video call.
2. “Enhanced patient engagement” can make this more useful and actionable, using intelligent, responsive technology (such as chatbots) to allow for bidirectional operation. To date, such strategies have been widely adopted by the industry. But to make the experience seamless and avoid distracting patients’ perspectives with siloed outreach methods, providers need to…
3. The “Automated Care Journey” allows patients to experience a coherent, orderly progression. The next step in the process can come from a variety of sources—from the patient’s response to SMS outreach, or triggered by an EHR update by the provider. This relieves the care team of the many administrative tasks that need to be dealt with during the care process.
4. The Adaptive Care Journey provides a higher level of automation that can be flexibly tailored to a patient’s risk and preferences. This level of personalization creates a “sticky” experience that encourages more meaningful engagement with patients and increases the likelihood that they will complete it again.
5. The Coordinated Care Journey focuses on automatically assigning next steps to providers in a more efficient way so they can take action at the right time for each patient.
6. To further optimize how care teams use their time and skills, the Augmented Coordinated Care Journey deploys artificial intelligence algorithms to provide decision support tools that complement provider knowledge and deliver care team members exactly when they need them. correct relevant information.
7. Finally, the Fully Coordinated Care Journey leverages EHRs to proactively coordinate and automate care across the organization, across different care settings, and across different patient groups or conditions. With end-to-end automation, both providers and patients can experience a continuous, streamlined digital care experience.

In a recent survey my company conducted, 78% of the organizations we interviewed said they were only in the early stages of digital experience transformation (stages 0 to 2), with the majority in stage 1. However, the majority (67%) said they plan to make digital investments to reach Phases 3 to 6 within the next two years.

Faced with the challenges of the pandemic, many organizations have had to deploy ad hoc or temporary platforms to bring patients back to their clinics and continue operations. But going forward, competing in digital care will be more than just bespoke point solutions in silos. To truly transform the digital care experience and extend it to the entire care environment, providers should break down the process into achievable steps that support organizational goals.