ViVE 2024 Health Tech Showcase: What is Patient Engagement | Part 6

Thing number 2, with all good highways, you need good onramps and off-ramps, right? I recently drove to Northern California from Southern California, and we had to make a lot of stops. My children needed to go to the bathroom. We needed to get some food. Your patients have a similar experience. You start with a primary care doctor, you get taken for a referral. You have to get your labs. You have to get on and off the highway. So you need a framework for letting those vendors and tools onto your system. In our analogy, we’re gonna call those onramps and off-ramps. And I like to describe this as a rich and vibrant marketplace.

You will not be able to deliver a seamless, orchestrated experience if your universe of technology tools does not play nicely together. This is an area that we’ve invested in. It’s an area that others have invested in and it is critical to making sure that your patients are taken down the right journey and don’t get too many calls to action.

Thing number 3: road signs. It’s not enough to have all these on ramps and off ramps if no one knows what’s at the end of that exit. So you have signs that tell you what to expect. In our universe of patient engagement, we call these rules. We believe that you need to make a strategic decision around governance. So what are the road signs that you permit on your highway?

What directions are you going to give to your patients to give you direct tactical examples in terms of communications? It’s how frequently you want your patients to be communicated with. When should you stop and abort all outreach attempts? What do you want to prioritize? If you have a patient that has multiple chronic conditions has an appointment coming up in a week, and is also going to an allergist and getting shots every week, you know, is sending them the results of their lab more important or less important than telling them to show up to their appointment? That should be your decision alone. And you need a governance system and a rule system to make that happen again. We’re not the only provider that can power this. You can also build it yourself on top of off-the-shelf tools. But governance is critical.