The ‘Digital Empathy’ Factor in Patient Tech at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Hey, it’s Jessica DaMassa, with WTF Health, what’s the future of health? I’m talking to the who’s who of health tech and healthcare innovation and today I’m doing it from Artera’s first ever customer event called Heartbeat. I’m checking in on what’s going on with patient experience and the changing thinking around technology and the patient journey so here to help us get smart on this we’ve got Omkar Kulkarni, Chief Transformation & Digital Officer at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Good to have you here.

Nice to be here. Thank you.

I love checking in with you. It’s been a while and I update on Peds X here in a little while Kids x. So we’ll find out what’s going on with that soon. But um, I want to ask you right off the bat, what are the challenges it seems like when it comes to patient journey is just simply integrating technology into the process at all. Do you think that that’s starting to change where we’re at today?

It is, I think we’ve been on this journey for about seven or eight years now. And I think we’re finally figuring out the technologies it picked up to the point where they’re, they’re automating a lot of the things that used to be, you know, done manually. We’re finding ways to think about what the workflow is right at the beginning of any kind of project or any kind of initiative we launch and the data, the data we’re capturing around workflow and efficiency and how we can actually ensure that these things are not adding time and actually, in most cases, reducing time that our staff are spending on different operational workflows. It’s changed so much over the last I’d say three or four years. Today, we can show that a lot of digital technologies are making things faster, easier, does take less time for our doctors or nurses or staff all these different people. So it has changed quite a bit, but there’s still a challenge. It’s just it’s getting a lot better.

What’s the challenge that right now? Like what’s the big deal if it’s if it’s, you know, getting better in terms of demonstrating the value of it? Is it uptake? Is it integration is it like, you know, blending things together to create a seamless experience? What’s the big challenge right now for you?

Well, I think there’s still there’s a couple of challenges. So one is and we do talked about it here at the Arterra conference. One is there still a lot of vendors that are engaged that we’re engaging with his health systems to deliver experiences for end users, whether it’s patients and families or with providers, and putting all those different vendor technology solutions together is really important so that it’s less clicks, less messages and whatever else that they’re talking about. And we talked about it at the Artera conference, we talked about some solutions they’ve got, you know, coming out soon that are going to be able to bring a lot of that together. And it’s a great example of how I think we’re going to be able to see more harmonization in a sense of these different vendor solutions that are out there. Yeah, I think the stat I saw was it was like on average, there’s elevn different not phone numbers texting a patient at any given one time from a health system. That’s crazy. So I mean, talk to me about like your experience at LA Children’s and one of the things I want to really just kind of dig into is the fact that your patient is a child. So you have to consider the caregiver that is with them, right. I mean, they’re making the decisions, they need the communication and it’s like, there’s a communication between mom and dad and the child and you know, there’s a lot to consider there. I’m wondering what you feel like, you know, more general health care organizations can learn, from how you guys are designing patient experience to be inclusive of the caregiver, when maybe they don’t often think of the caregiver, you know, when they’re designing their own patient experience. Just being so singularly focused on the patient themselves.

So I’ll add even one more, right so there’s actually often two caregivers there’s sometimes mom and dad or you know, two parents or two caregivers, whatever else. So you think about a text messaging technology, right? You send a text message reminder to a patient and adult help system. That’s one message to one end user a patient, as you pointed out, but in Peds you’re sending it to the patient. If they’re let’s say they’re 14 years old, you may send it to one parent, the other parent needs to be engaged too. Sometimes those parents, you know, live together and compare. I mean, there’s so many different situations right? And we’ve got to as a help system, we can’t have a customized thing for every individual kind of use case. We have to think broadly about how we can engage patients and families, whether they you know, with lots of different end users. So some of the things to think about are what are the demographics. So what are the demographics and what are the considerations for the patients. In our case, they’re under 80. And they’re part of a specific, digitally engaged generation. And then you’ve got caregivers who can be of various generations various access to digital, various comfort zone with digital, and that’s different, and then they’re also not experiencing the healthcare themselves, right. They’re experiencing on behalf of somebody else. So now think about remote patient monitoring, think about patient reported outcomes, things were in the patient. You know, when there’s just a health system communicating with the patient. The patient knows what’s going on. They know their symptoms. For example, if I try to ask, you know, a parent to rate their child’s pain, for example, right. How do you do that? Like, you know, I’ve got I’ve got an eight year old, how do I ask my eight year old what’s her pain and how do I know that’s going to resonate with whatever the doctor needs to know? It’s hard, it’s challenging, we’ve got to figure out how to do that.

I love though that you you’re mindful of trying to speak in a language that the patient understands and one of the great you know, points to made you were on a panel talking about digital empathy and a love to even just thinking about, you know, being mindful of the people who are using the technology that you’re choosing to implement. So talk a little bit about that, like how do you make choices about which technologies to put in place and which ones to pass by, and where to put them in the process? Yeah, we use something called The Love Metric. I think it’s all about figuring it out. I’ve borrowed from other great leaders in the in the space. So the idea is about customer benefit, right? What are the things that our patients and families are ultimately going to love when we bring to them? What are the features? What are the tools that are going to add value to their llives to the way they engage with us? And at the end of the day, it’s all about making choices about what are they going to love the most? What are what needs are we going to ultimately deliver on most, where they’re gonna tell their friends about it, they’re gonna say, Hey, listen at Children’s LA, we’ve got this great feature. Go check it out. Those are the kinds of things we strive for. Because I think that’s what’s going to create adoption. It’s going to create value for us, for them. And that’s how we really prioritize different options that we have.

When it comes to the folks making the ultimate decision about technology. I thought you also did great point about how you have to kind of put yourself in the patient’s place as far as what’s accessible. So say a little bit about that, because you heard a great point about socio economic class, you know, data plans and those kinds of things that maybe you know, when you’re working in a, in a hospital system, you have a different different health plan, different data plan than the patients that you’re serving.

Totally. Yeah. So when we’re, when we’re thinking about the different solutions we want to bring. We often are in a room with people who are thinking about well, it’d be I would love to use this. It’d be great for my kids. This would be great for my experience. But we have to remind ach other including myself that we’re to your point we don’t often represent the patients that are walking through our doors, right? We’ve got a very diverse patient population. Many of whom have different insurance different access to digital technology, different access to data, so many things that are different from us, right. So if we build solutions based on what we think as leaders and healthcare are great. We’re only going to be building solutions for ourselves, which isn’t really representative of the population that we’re trying to build for. So what we do, is we deeply engage with patients and families. We work with our patient family advisory councils, which are these as a focus groups of patients and families that actually want to provide feedback on product. We do surveys, we look at patient experience data, we get a holistic kind of data set to figure out what our patients and families ultimately will love, you know, in terms of the products we bring.

All right, I have to ask about this because I feel like this is a big over overarching theme and patient experience lately. You know, the expanding of the care delivery market into like retail health or virtual care clinics, and I know Peds is not immune from you know, the pressure of that. I mean, there are things somebody was telling me the other day about, you know, a pediatric service they could sign up for and just get virtual care, you know, on demand 24/7. So how are you looking at patient experience and maybe these increased consumer demands for top quality, frictionless experiences in terms of how that’s now guiding the way you’re putting together a digital strategy at LA Children’s.

It’s a key driver of our strategy, right? So a pushes us to to push the kind of boundaries of what we want to do. The reason is this. Our patients and families are exposed to the same digital experiences when they shop for medication, or when they get their medications when they shop for retail, purchases whatever else and so those are the same people that are coming to us and they have some expectation that interacting with us is going to be just as easy it is to buy something on Amazon or buy something at CVS or whatever the case may be. So we’re using those experiences as inspiration for us to think about how we can creatively do things. An example is in the pandemic. We stood up, and so did many others. Look at drive through vaccine clinics, right? That idea came from so many other places that were offering drive up solutions, right? So it’s just one of those things where you see what’s out there you see what customers in other parts of the industry are like relating to what they’re driving to, what they love. And we then kind of try to emulate some of those things. As we think about it. We’re thinking about food delivery for example, How do we how do we think about for our patients who specifically may have food scarcity food insecurity, and they identify that through various social determinants of health screeners that we have? How can we think about delivering, you know, food to them or having food available to them at our hospital, but thinking about all these different things, and it goes back to think looking at other industries to see how they’re doing it and is getting inspiration from that.

All right, that’s awesome. Okay, last thing for you, Kids X. Yeah. Okay, so for those who don’t know, Omcar founded and invented this accelerator that specifically focused on bringing more technology and more innovation into the pediatric world. So what’s hot right now through coming through Kids X? I mean you’ve got your your finger on the pulse, the frontline, you know, emerging startups that are bringing new technology and like what’s hot right now? What are they focused on? You know, solving with technologies.

I’m guessing your audience knows that pediatric mental health is a incredibly important, underserved and growing problem in this country. I think there are more and more kids, especially through pandemic, who need pediatric mental health care services. And what’s great is digital is playing a great role there. So there are so many startups that we’re seeing really promising ones that are using everything from virtual care to now even generative AI to think about how to engage with kids and mostly adolescents teenagers as it relates to mental health, and I think there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity as we think about how those startup companies engage with pediatric health systems and health plans to bring these solutions to the to the national market.

That’s awesome. Well, Omkar thank you so much for letting me pick your brain. It’s been a pleasure. All right, everybody. That’s Omkar Kulkarni, he is the Chief Digital Officer at LA Children’s Hospital founder of Kids X too, can’t forget that. Thank you so much for letting me pick your brain about the patient experience here at our Artera’s Heatbeat event. For those of you who are looking for the rest of these thought leader interviews, check them out over at my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/wtfhealth, we’ll talk to you guys real soon. Thanks so much. Bye