Patient or ‘Tech Guru’? Simplifying Patient Engagement Technologies at UNC Health

Hey, it’s Jessica DaMassa, what’s the future health? I’m talking to the who’s who of health tech and healthcare innovation and I’m doing it here at Artera’s first ever customer event, Heartbeat. And joining me right now I have Dan Dodson. He’s the System Director for Digital Health and Innovation at UNC Health. Dan, it’s great to have you here.

Hey, it’s great to be here, I appreciate it.

Alright, I have got to pick your brain about all things tech integration and patient experience, so talk to me a little bit about how consumer technology is really setting a different benchmark for those of us here in healthcare. What are you seeing in terms of our expectations as consumers, trickle into how we act as patients in the health system.

I think that really over the last three years with the pandemic, that paradigm has changed so much. People are now used to mobile apps and services.They can order their food. They can go to their vet, their dry cleaner. Healthcare needs to be a parody with that. So it’s just a total mindset shifting from a consumer mindset versus just a patient because we are all consumers as well as patients.

Alright, so where do you decide to put tech? How do you decide what gets some sort of digital innovation or digitization in the patient experience? How are you mindfully deciding what places to put the stuff?

Yeah, it really depends on trying to make it a simpler process for the patient. It’s about that patient experience. So we want to help the clinical side. We want to help our frontline providers, but the key thing is really just to make it easier. And sort of behind the scenes if it feels like you have to go download an extra thing, do another thing, and it creates work, then then we’re not doing our job. Our job is really to just make that seamless process much easier.

Alright, where are you seeing good examples of tech integration in the patient experience process? In a big health system like UNC health, what’s working?

Yeah, we find that our one-stop shop. So we try to create the UNC health mobile app, which is really an umbrella app that brings a lot of services under one application. It’s really hard to get people to download an app. It’s really hard to get people to use the nav, so if you can put services that are relevant for them and sort of a great call to action that adds value, then we see a lot of value there. But it’s really that patient engagement and just trying to bring information and self-service. People don’t want to have to call somebody and schedule. They don’t want to have to go through a lot of different IVRs and decision trees or you know, phone things. They just want to get on their phone and be able to send a text and get something done.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people don’t even know they’re being “decision tree’d” when it’s happening to them. That’s when it works, right? Give me a good example. I want to kind of dig in on this a little bit. When you said you want to make sure that the app is there and it’s something that people will go to, get value out of and that’s enticing for them, what’s been the thing that has hooked people into the UNC health app?

Well, we’ve incorporated wayfinding for one. In wayfinding, if you’re familiar with it, that’s sort of like inside Google Maps. Inside the hospital. And when we have a large complex, with a lot of hospitals that were started in 1954, it’s a very messy type of thing. And so those really help, but access to My Chart, virtual care, schedule an appointment, find Urgent Cares, wait times. So it’s really all of those types of things that bring it. What may be important to you, may not be what drives me to that app

No that’s cool though, but it is very experience based it sounds like, especially the whole wait time, wayfinding thing. It’s you know, the on-site experience improved. Tell me where you think tech is failing healthcare right now? Is there anything that’s going on that you guys have implemented in effort to really improve the patient experience, and now you’re like okay, this actually added more of an issue.

Well, no tech fails you know. It’s all for improvement. We all have improvements. You know, remote patient monitoring is an area that we’ve actually done pilots and we found that it’s a very fine line because there’s a lot of technology. You’re in the home. If somebody doesn’t have the right connection. If they’re not doing it correctly. If there’s anything that sort of breaks, you don’t have somebody right next to you to help solve it. Now we’ve tried to really mitigate that and there’s some companies out there and partners who have really tried to streamline that process, but that’s an area where you have to really get it right, because it’s important. You want to monitor that, but you don’t want to put the burden onto that patient to really have to be the tech guru as well.

I love that. And it’s really frustrating. If you’re trying to take care of your health and you can’t get the tech to work, what’s the level of you sticking with that and adhering to your care plan that involves that.

And adherence is really what’s important, right? And so, if I get frustrated and put it on the shelf after day one, then it really didn’t do what it needed to do.

Alright, I wanted to ask you a little bit about governance and what’s going on because this is one of the things that has been a hot topic here at Heartbeat. It’s talking about who’s in charge of the patient experience and how do you integrate technology in? So it sounds like there’s a lot of players involved. So the experience design part of it might be owned by one group, like strategy or consumer engagement, but the actual IT implementation is owned by another group. And then you’ve got somebody like you, Digital Health and Innovation just throwing out ideas right? So how do you guys handle that at UNC Health? What’s been your approach to managing the patient experience?

Yeah, it’s definitely a collaborative effort. There are so many different players and you do have a lot of governance groups. Depending upon the product, you may have to focus on clinical governance or technical governance or funding or whatever it is, but as we come together, that’s sort of the goal. To make that a process where we can get everybody on the same page. It’s getting that mindshare. Getting people together within our organization. We really want to focus too on that underlying infrastructure. So not only governance, but how do we make sure our data is clean? How do we make sure we can get data from point A to point B – all the behind the scenes? Plumbing that that you don’t really see, but unless it’s there, nothing else works. So that’s what’s important.

Alright, cool. So talk to me about the future. I need to know from you how big of a deal do you think generative AI is going to be? How far away are we from this really? Give us a reality check. In a big healthcare system that is really leading edge, we love to talk about these cool new technologies coming down the pike, but really where are we at? I mean we’re talking about texting. That’s good, but really how far are we and what kind of a leap is that from texting to the whole generative AI thing?

Yeah, so depending on who you read it’s going to save the world or destroy the world, right? So one of those two is somewhere in between. We’re interested in it. I mean there’s guard rails you certainly need to put up. We’re not going to send any patient data up to the massive chat GPT world, but we just announced that we are the next healthcare system to work with Microsoft and Epic on their integration with My Chart. So, it’s really to help the provider you know facilitate answers back and things like that. So we’re starting with a small controlled scale and then we’ll grow from there, but it is a powerful platform. I mean everybody’s talked about it for the last six months. It is the only thing you can talk about anymore, so yeah it’s important.

Alright, the last thing for you. I have a big audience of startups that watch me and you are the Digital Health guy at UNC Hall, so you get pitched all the time. What’s the one thing that you wish that these health tech startups knew that would make your job infinitely easier and get them to a yes a little bit faster?

They need to realize that many times the patient experience could be a 20-step process and if you come in with a great point solution for step three, that doesn’t really help me in the overall experience. And also, show the true value. So you can tell me that you know it’s the greatest thing in healthcare, but it’s really great if you can validate that. We’re looking for the value, especially with the economic headwinds that we’ve all been facing, to be able to prove something out really helps us as we go through all those governance groups we just talked about. We have to prove it out as well as sell it internally.

Okay, so I have to ask the follow-up on that. So what is the value that you’re looking for? Is it necessarily ROI, or is it engagement? How slippery are these metrics? Prove the value? Okay.

I get it, a lot of times it’s tough to show a hard ROI versus a soft ROI. A lot of things can make the patient experience better, but you really want to try to find some metrics. Some KPI. Something that sort of helps show that what we were doing before is now better. And so you know and it doesn’t necessarily have to you know show a 800% return, but it just needs to show that you are improving the experience.

Awesome, well Dan thank you so much for stopping by and letting me pick your brain about the patient experience. Thank you so much. So Dan’s joining me here at Artera’s Heartbeat event. I’m talking to the who’s who of health tech about everything that’s changing in healthcare innovation and we’re doing this special series on patient engagement which you can catch on my YouTube channel, so head on over to youtube.com/WTFhealth. Dan Dodson, from UNC Health, thank you again for joining me. I’m Jessica DaMassa, thanks so much for joining us. Bye.