ViVE 2024 – What Patient Experience Technology is Moving the Needle the Most Right Now? | Healthcare IT Today

The world of healthcare is constantly growing and evolving. We are constantly coming up with new ideas and developing new technologies all in the spirit of making things better, not only for our own staff but for our patients as well. In a field as personal and as important as healthcare, it is vital that we are giving our patients the best experience possible. But with how often healthcare changes, it can be tricky to stay up to date and know what to focus on. In order to help we stopped our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community members at this year’s ViVE to ask them – what patient experience technology is moving the needle the most right now? The video below is a compilation of their answers!

Frank McGillin, CEO at The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic
We think telehealth has a huge opportunity to help people who are dealing with complex conditions access specialists. If you look at the gap, 80% of rural residents don’t have access to specialty care. We found that people who have dealt with complex medical conditions, based on our survey, that less than half of them have take advantage of a virtual second opinion. We found that time, costs, and other variables are getting in the way, so we’re trying to make sure that we reduce that gap and provide better access to the expertise that people need.

Art Nicholas, Chief Commercial Officer at Interlace Health
It may seem somewhat surprising that I’m going to say this, but it’s really alerts and reminders coming from SMS and other secure messaging. Those things have been around for a long time, but I think we’ve hit a groundswell where the majority of the patient population feels comfortable being alerted to those things. So if they’re missing paperwork related to a visit, if they need reminders about their discharge instructions or taking their medication, if they get alerted that somebody canceled an appointment and now they can move up their dermatology appointment a couple of weeks because an opening has been made available, all those things are happening and it’s definitely getting to be a tool that patients are appreciating.

Bryon Cipriani, CEO at Aranscia
For us, and this is the reason why we acquired YouScript, was really to enhance the vertical integration of the clinical decision support tools that YouScript brings to the table, to be able to bring that to the point of care for the clinician and where we are today, and better to serve the needs in solving the PGx technologies.

Steve Vlok, Founder and CEO at Celo
One thing that really resonates with us and a lot of discussion here at ViVE has been around how do we free up the clinician to spend more time with the patient, which ultimately means they have a better experience as a patient. We think about how do we give them tools that make the doctors spend less time in administration – good communication tool is a good example of that, and that means ultimately the patient has a better experience because they spend a lot more time with the clinician face-to-face.

Adam DeRocher, VP of Sales at Lincata
What we noticed with Lincata is that organizations from a digital front door perspective are focused both before the visit as well as after the visit, but they’re really missing that in-room connection. 65% of patients are visual learners and in that in-room, which is really just a billboard that’s available for them from a marketing perspective as well as building loyalty. Patients spend about 85% of their waking hours looking at the TV, so that’s really a captive audience that they can use to educate the patient to improve outcomes, but then also utilize that as a marketing opportunity to showcase their vertical services and really win them over from a loyalty perspective.

Tony Little, VP of Solutions Architecture at Prescryptive
The days of paper prescriptions are mostly gone, there’s e-prescribing today. That’s great because it lets you say I’m going to send the prescription to a pharmacy and you go show up, but what happened is you remove all control from the patient at that point. You discover everything at the pharmacy – it’s a huge problem for you and it’s a huge burden for pharmacists. So what we’ve done is create the digital prescription. It lands within seconds of the doctor writing a prescription electronically on your phone. We search all pharmacies around, we bring benefit price, cash price, we bring coupons, we know if there’s a PA, and give you all the information so you can have a value conversation with your doctor right then. You don’t discover $200 worth of medications are needed the first time you get type two diabetes at the pharmacy; you discover it at the doctor’s office so you can say ‘hey doc, this is $200, remind me again why I need to take this?’ Maybe there’s an alternative that’s cheaper, we can give that information together with the doctor and it creates a different experience for patients.

Aashish Mody, Chief Commercial Officer at Spire Health
The most important, especially in our populations, is to not change behavior at all. How we do that is through this device right here. This is a device that measures respiratory rate, heart rate, and activity continuously, thousands of breaths per day. It actually adheres to the inside of a patient’s undergarments (underwear/bra), it has about a one year shelf life so you do not need to do any recharging, it gets put in the undergarments and it can be put through the washer and the dryer so that the patient sets it and forgets it. What we wanted to do is make it as easy as possible – there’s no charging, there’s no putting it by the bedside and putting it on and off. You get a set of eight of these, you put them on your undergarments, and you forget it. It’s continuously monitoring your heart rate and your respiration rate and helping to identify whether you’re going to have an exacerbation and be hospitalized.

Gary Lynch, Global Practice Lead & CTO Insurance and Life Sciences at Verizon Business
How can we better extended access and not just access into patient’s home and within the service centers for the hospitals, but what about non-traditional settings – banks, grocery stores. How can we get virtual kiosks if you will. Just any avenue to extend access and get patients more engaged you know from passive engagement to active patient monitoring – I think all of those are some really exciting areas.

Rishi S. Sarna, MD, Chief Clinical Officer at Backline
In my opinion, I do believe it’s telehealth. Telehealth obviously gained a lot of attraction in 2020 after the pandemic and probably up until 2022/2023, but now that we’ve actually seen patients buying into it more, especially in the rural communities where is you do have a routine examination or routine follow up with a doctor, you don’t need to drive the 50-60 miles, you can actually just get on video. Now with that there are going to be some challenges with that. I sometimes think that we forget that on the patient side, we’re not providing enough resources for the patient. We always assume that everyone’s got unlimited data, they have a smart phone, so I think it’s our duty as healthcare leaders to make sure that our patients have those resources for them. So even though telehealth kind of went away the last couple years, I think it’s going to go back up in 2024.

Huge thank you to Frank McGillin, CEO at The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic, Art Nicholas, Chief Commercial Officer at Interlace Health, Bryon Cipriani, CEO at Aranscia, Steve Vlok, Founder and CEO at Celo, Adam DeRocher, VP of Sales at Lincata, Tony Little, VP of Solutions Architecture at Prescryptive, Aashish Mody, Chief Commercial Officer at Spire Health, Gary Lynch, Global Practice Lead & CTO Insurance and Life Sciences at Verizon Business, and Rishi S. Sarna, MD, Chief Clinical Officer at Backline for taking the time to speak with us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time to read this article and watch this video! We could not do this without all of your support. What patient experience technology do you think is moving the needle the most right now? Let us know either in the comments down below or over on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!