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- Hi, this is Kate Cruz at Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm with Sara Vay.
Uh, to get us started, Sara,
can you share a little bit about yourself
and your role at your organization?
Sure. Uh, well, it's great to be here today.
I, um, am the Chief Digital Officer
and the Chief Strategy Officer at Providence.
Uh, Providence is a large, uh,
health system based in the Western United States.
We have 51 hospitals, over a thousand clinics,
and we're vertically and horizontally integrated, of course.
Um, so we cover seven states, um, from Alaska, Washington,
Oregon, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Montana.
And, um, in my role, I especially, um,
from a chief digital officer perspective,
I'm really responsible for that front end,
that digitally enabled front end of the organization, um, so
that we can be discoverable by the folks in our communities.
We can get them into our system when they need care.
We can establish long-term relationships with them and, uh,
and sort of build that, um, build that, um,
consumer grade experience that we're so used to in other,
um, in other facets of our lives.
So I have responsibility for marketing, digital experience,
and a product development group
where we build technology to help do that.
You sound very busy, . Yes.
Well, thank you for sharing. When you think
of digital innovation in healthcare right now,
what excites you the most and why?
There are actually a lot of things that excite me, um,
in digital, and it's been, you know, I've been
with Providence for almost eight years,
and we've gone through ups and downs.
, I would say, uh, in terms of digital enablement
and digital health, uh, in, in healthcare.
Um, whether it be care delivery related
or sort of around care delivery.
Um, but we've gone through some ups and downs
and I think we're, um, coming out of 2022 where there was
a lot of pressure on health systems, uh, financially,
you know, coming out of, uh,
or the continuation of two plus years of covid
and sort of the knock on effects.
So, um, you know, last year was a difficult time this year,
health systems are continuing to work on kind
of the core improvement,
but how digital supports that is, um, is really exciting.
So some, a couple of the things
that I'm very excited about are just sort of this notion
of like platforms that support consumer grade experiences.
Uh, for many years we were more in the,
I would say like point solution land
where there were these lots of solutions cropping up,
but no systematic way to put them, you know, to surface them
to users and, um,
and to create that really great consumer grade experience.
So those types of platforms
that are emerging, I'm very excited about them.
Uh, no technology conversation these days would be complete
without talking about generative AI
and large language models, um, in particular.
And we've started to use them
to support our personalization efforts to support
how we navigate patients
and consumers throughout our system.
Um, in particular by understanding their intent at like a
really deep level and then connecting
'em with the things that they need.
So, uh, those are two really big areas
and I think, you know, it's kind of easy to say, hard to do,
and we're still at the very early stages,
but it's, um, it's a really exciting time.
It's been really interesting to hear organizations
and their different approaches to generative ai.
Um, 'cause like you said, everyone's talking about it,
but everyone has a different perspective use for it.
Um, so thanks for sharing that.
Um, at your organization,
what are your top priorities for technology?
What are big issues that you're trying to solve?
Uh, absolutely.
You know, I'll, I'll give you a couple different, uh,
lenses, um, to apply to this problem.
Uh, uh, or rather like just how you do tech enablement.
We have a whole host of work
that our chief information officer,
um, owns within the system.
And that's primarily around sort of core infrastructure.
Think about how we partner with Microsoft around cloud,
for instance, or our platform partners from an EMR
or from an ERP, um,
enterprise resource planning perspective.
So that's a lot of work that his team does, um,
separate from what the chief, you know, my, uh,
digital role is focused on.
Um, they also focus on caregiver facing.
We call all of our employees caregivers.
So they focus on, you know, um,
supporting our caregivers in, uh, with technology
to reduce burnout or to support care model redesign or, um,
or, you know, support our core operations from a talent
acquisition and retention standpoint.
So there's a lot of activity happening there.
It to modernize, um, uh, kind of
get single platforms
or more coherent inter um, enterprise infrastructure,
like technical infrastructure to, um, to make our ability
to innovate on those, um, populations like our caregivers,
much more rapid, much more effective.
Then the work that my team owns is really focused on,
again, our consumers.
So, um, so from a technical perspective, we're focused on,
actually, let me back up and say
what we're focused on from a business
or from a enablement perspective,
we're focused on, um, discovery.
So, and in service to driving, um, new customers,
new patients, new consumers who need care into our system.
So, you know, uh, sort of the crude way
of saying it is new customer acquisition.
We're focused a lot on engagement
and, uh, we're focused, uh, on kind of establishing
that relationship once you've got,
once you've earned the right,
and that helps to drive things like, um, uh,
long-term value capture and things like that.
So from a, so again, we're, we're doing things like around
identity driven engagement, which means know your user
and then surface up, um,
and serve up the contextually relevant
personalized things to them.
Um, do so in a frictionless way
or reducing as much friction as possible.
And then, um, use that to drive kind
of ongoing relationships, um,
that may not exclusively be in the, I would say,
clinical transaction domain,
but it helped to establish that relationship.
Yes. So very important stuff.
Um, what is one piece of advice you'd give
to healthcare leaders today regarding digital innovation?
Well, uh, , uh, as I mentioned,
the 2022 was a really difficult year.
And, um, I think it was also positive in that it reinforced
the need to be focused
and to really know what you're trying to solve for.
Um, we, we had, um, you know, digital was a bit
of a hot, you know, area,
but not necessarily, um, hadn't really demonstrated value.
And, um, we were many systems across the country
and ourselves included, we were kind
of dabbling in some places.
Yep. And, um, what I learned last year,
most importantly was focus on the core thing
that's gonna help the core of the system survive.
Mm-Hmm. . And, um, that's a recipe for success.
Um, so focus, don't dabble
and then do so in partnership with others.
Tech enablement is, uh, very resource intensive.
So, uh, we couldn't do, uh, a lot of the work
that we've done without our cloud partnerships, our, um,
our other sort of infrastructure partnerships
that then allow us to build technology on top
of them in a more scalable way.
Yeah, great advice and some great points. Thank you.
Um, could you provide examples of specific instances
where there, where the integration
of informatic solutions led to improved patient outcomes
or enhanced patient provider communication?
Uh, I have a great example on this one.
Um, and I'll again kind of, uh, anchor it on the problem
that we've faced, which is that over the course
of the last almost four years now since Covid started, one
of the things that we, um, as an industry did was
to support getting our patients online with us.
And, um, what that meant was we trained a lot of folks
to use things like telehealth to message
with their providers.
Now, that's a good thing in some ways and in another,
and there were unintended consequences.
One of the unintended consequences was that we, um, uh,
saw a huge explosion of messages being sent
to providers in their in basket.
The, and for folks that may not know the in provider in
basket is like their inbox, right?
Yeah. Um, and those messages were being generated
by patients in the EMR.
They would go into, in our case, MyChart,
and they would send their provider message
about all sorts of things.
Some of them are clinical things, some of them are like,
I need to reset my passwords.
Some of them are, um, I need to,
but check on my medication refill.
I need to book an appointment.
You know, all sorts of different things.
And, um, and so, uh, what that amounted
to was this explosion of in basket messages.
Um, and it became very
unsustainable for our providers, right?
They've gotta deliver c clinical care, like then adding this
to their plate is, um, really challenging.
So, uh, we've viewed the problem in a couple different ways.
Our how to tackle the problem in one way,
you can actually support a patient in getting their question
answered or their task completed, um,
without them having to send a message.
And, um, we call that message deflection.
And what we did was we put a chat bot in front of, in,
in MyChart, in front of our experience,
and, um, enabled our patients if they were thinking about
sending a message to instead converse with the chat bot.
And the accuracy of these chat bots has gotten even better
with LL, with LLMs, which are large language models.
Um, and we have been able to satisfy, um, a lot
of their requests
or their needs without them ever having
to send their provider a message.
That's awesome. So that's like one
of the things I'm most excited about.
We've got some early results, for instance, over 20%
of administrative messages were handled via
this, via this mechanism.
So, uh, so that's pretty cool. Yeah.
And it's a really measurable benefit to the, uh,
to our clinicians or their care team
so they don't have to do it themselves.
Yeah, absolutely. I can't think of anything that would
speed up burnout much quicker than 300 plus emails a day.
Exactly. , um, five years from now,
what do you think will be the most significant change in
healthcare delivery and operations,
and how can leaders prepare?
Um, you know, I think that, uh, the realities
of the last couple years have sort of started to set in, in
that, um, the importance of, uh, partnerships
and connected ecosystems of care.
Now those are like, that's kind of a lot of jargon,
but really what that means is we're going to fully start
to realize that patients
and consumers don't just go to one place.
We've been talking about it for a long time,
but, um, I think we're like the, you know, um,
we're fully actually experiencing it now and,
and realizing its implications.
Um, and like one of the things that we've realized is that,
uh, consumers use about five different healthcare brands a
year for a variety of different things.
And they're often doing that on their own, right?
They have to navigate it on their own.
And so, um, engaging systematically in partnerships
that allow all of these different brands to, um,
benefit from working with one another in service
to a better patient experience, I think is
what we're gonna start seeing more and more of.
Um, like there are a lot of other, of course, systemic
structural challenges in the healthcare system.
Like, for instance, how care is financed, right?
Like that's a, that's a very difficult
in potentially intractable problem,
but connecting the dots, I think for patients, um,
around common frameworks like, uh, like consumer engagement
that's supported by single sign-on, for instance.
Like, I think we're gonna start seeing that.
Um, I know we are working on it actively.
We actually just announced, um,
our fourth incubated technology that's working on that, um,
that notion of identity driven engagement.
And so I think that's the biggest single biggest change
that we'll see in the next five years.
Yeah. That will be huge.
Well, Sarah, Sarah, thank you
for spending some time with me today.
Is there anything else our listeners should know?
I think it is a, um, we're at a time, you know,
there's like ebbs and flows in terms of change
and, um, movement in, um, in every industry.
And I think we're coming up on a time where there's going
to be a lot of change and, um, that can be both exciting
and scary and it's really up to us to, um, uh,
drive it in a way that's beneficial to our communities.
So I'm really looking forward to that.
And I think, um, you know,
from a delivery system standpoint,
from a technology underpinning standpoint,
we can collectively do that.
Awesome. Well, thank you again for all of your time,
your insights, your advice.
Really enjoyed it. And thank you so much. Thank you.
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