| | November 20198UTLOOK Healthcare Tech IN MY OPINIONIn the initial years of my career, I trained as a general internist. Since then; I have been in healthcare IT for 26 years now. I have been directly involved with EHR for the past 13 years and been the CMIO at Ochsner for the past three years. I would like to focus on three ways tech can improve patient engagement--consumerism as a strategy, digital engagement and precision medicine. Major Trends Set to Shape Patient Engagement As we move away from a fee-for-service toward a value-based healthcare, we focus more on outcomes and one of the most important factors in these outcomes is patient engagement. In the traditional model, the health system is a resource which the patient would come to for their healthcare needs. Now it's much more about having healthcare organizations come to the patient and engaging with them not just when you need us as a resource. It is shifting from "a healthcare system to a system that provides health."To be effective in, we need to remove the friction points for patients and prospectively reach out to patients to get them engaged earlier.From the technology point of view, this is about ensuring that all portals of entry and all points of communication are occurring using the digital tools that today's consumers are using to provide a seamless experience. For instance, in the traditional retail process, when you need something, you go to the store and buy it. Today, it's about the online experience; we can offer customers things that they might be interested in through data and predictive analytics. The same can be done in healthcare. We are creating a proactive and predictive Digital Transformation Drives Tailored Patient EngagementBy Todd Burstain, CMIO, Ochsner Health Systemapproach so that we can reach out to you in a prospective way. This process should be seamless; everything should be able to take place in one click, such as getting your appointment done, seeing lab results and talking to the doctor to convey a message. The consumer experience then becomes the center of the engagement strategy; it started with optimizing the patient portal, but now has expanded beyond that to population health and interactive education. Viewing our patients as consumers drives the system to remove friction and create a flawless experience.Key Elements of Digital Patient EngagementWe can provide improved outcomes and more cost-efficient care if we can understand all the ways patients engage with healthcare services. Unifying care then becomes very important, not just for us, but also for the patients well-being. Prior to consumerism, typically doctor-patient engagement occurred sometimes via phone or with physical contact during a clinic visit. Now, we now offer innovative technology and solutions to interact with patient when and where they want it with even better outcomes. Digital and virtual care are now mainstay methods of providing care. What digital medicine allows us to do is to re-engage patients in a digital platform in a way that's above and beyond what their experiences were from traditional encounters. For example, in Hypertension Digital Medicine Program, patients with uncontrolled blood pressure (BP) have access to a wireless; digital blood pressure cuff which is sends BP readings via a smartphone directly into their EHR. Whereas in the more traditional model, a patient with this condition would visit the doctor for a blood pressure check-up three or four times in a year, and those BP readings determined the assessment and suggested treatment. By receiving more frequent, digital blood pressure readings we can intervene more quickly allowing us to deliver better care and achieve better outcomes. The program is successful due to the technology that reviews those readings and uses predictive analysis to determine which readings represent a significant change from the patient's base line. If there is a change, a digital medicine pharmacist is notified, connects with the patient and decides on what treatment intervention is needed such as a drug adjustment. This improves outcomes not just because of a more rapid turn-around cycle, but also because of improved patient compliance from increased engagement. The digital platforms have become a crucial Todd Burstain
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