Digital Strategies for Improving Specialty Care and Reducing Provider Burnout

Sonia Singh, vice president, AVIA’s Center for Consumerism, discusses digital strategies being implemented by health care providers to improve specialty care, as well as the impact of work force automation on reducing administrative burden and costs.  

Read the full transcript:

I'm Sonia Singh. I'm a vice president at AVIA, leading the Center for Consumerism. If you don't know AVIA, AVIA's a digital transformation partner to a network of about 45 health systems, where we help them accelerate their strategic digital efforts.

Now, we offer these services both as membership and consulting services, and the Center for Consumerism, which I lead, is a team that develops research and thought leadership on all digital consumerism opportunities as it relates to health systems.

We look at the entire consumer or patient experience, from when a consumer or patient is searching for care, they're navigating the health system, to actually experiencing the episode of care. So all the things that come around that, registration, billing, education, communication, etc.

Also, developing that long-term relationship with consumers. We look at all of this from the viewpoint of how digital can enhance these experiences. I've been with AVIA for about three years, and my background is doing management and strategy consulting for a number of different health systems and health plans over the last 15 years.

What is needed to transform specialty care following the pandemic? How can virtual care and telehealth help?

Health systems have traditionally competed locally for specialty care cases. It tends to be a key driver of profitability and a source of competitive advantage. They are now faced with threats that seek to disrupt those referral patterns and drive down prices.

Consumers are demanding increasingly shoppable, nonemergent specialty services that are transparent about prices. Employees and payers alike are pushing for value-based payment models. There's innovative and nimble competitors who are unbundling components of specialty service offerings and offering carve-out options.

That's a little bit of how the ecosystem is changing. You need to think differently about what you need to do for specialty care. The acceleration of digital adoption during COVID, we have all seen that. We talked about this a little bit before.

It creates an opportunity to double down on specialty care by really redesigning specialty practices with digital at its center. How do you produce the right care faster, at a lower cost? This could look like concierge-level specialty care, involving the patient, the specialist, the referring provider, and the broader care team, all orchestrated through digital.

How do you do this? In order to execute on this move, we believe health systems should really work off a baseline information data layer. I talked about data a little bit already, but really understanding the patient from a consumer standpoint, a clinical standpoint, a social behavioral perspective, and then leverage that information to orchestrate these expedited workflows and care paths in these less-acute settings.

Critical here is also consistent and open communication and engagement between the referring provider and the care team through a closed-loop process. We are also seeing many systems really start in the area of surgical care, so thinking about surgical care orchestration, or a broader surgical concierge, if you will, works very well with bundled arrangements.

Tools that guide patients end-to-end on that care journey, from pre-op to post-op, reducing readmissions. It helps reduce no shows, same-day cancellations, etc. Through all of these, virtual is such a big driver. We see health systems shift their focus to how care can increasingly be delivered in the home.

Whether that's virtual care or whether that's remote monitoring, or even hospital-at-home solutions for many acute episodes. We're seeing most of our network in AVIA's network right now really focus on virtual as a key driver on rethinking the new normal.

I will say the impact of this, so the health systems that really execute on this well, will ultimately improve access. You're going to optimize your assets and your footprint, and I will say, ultimately build the service line in the future, enabling you to be that value player with employers and payers alike.

Following the pandemic, why is automating the work force, reducing administrative burden for providers and costs for the system, so important?

I would say the problem of burnout has just been completely exacerbated as clinicians continue to be at the frontline through this long, drawn-out pandemic. To quote one of my clients—he's a physician executive at a health system where we were discussing this topic—and his comment was that "We have gone far beyond the issue of burnout. We are just completely fried."

This is a top concern at any health system. At AVIA, we have put together a perspective on the provider experience, ranging from basic personal needs, such as mental and physical health in the workplace, to digitally supporting needs around the delivery of care, and ultimately culminating with organizational needs around reducing administrative burden or ensuring practice sustainability.

We believe all of this can be accomplished through advances in things like automation, from RPA to AI to natural language processing, to be able to really perform manually-intensive tasks or conduct work that a human possibly couldn't do before. To your question about costs, again, we talked about automation.

Digital solutions now have inherent automation that can improve the entire infrastructure and backbone of the health system to think about how this can be used to ultimately make the delivery of care more cost-effective, capable of driving more revenue, or capturing revenue that's rightfully yours.

Such as denial write-off rates, improving clinical outcomes, optimizing the resources that you have inside of human capital, but also, being inclusive is transforming the provider experience. They're really burnt-out providers that we have, so how do you address that issue, with a heavy focus on reducing that administrative burden and elimination of errors in the process as well?

We have seen health systems in our network really take on automation at the enterprise level. To do this well, there needs to be this clear commitment at leadership, at an enterprise level.

An effective automation strategy should involve the assessment of current shared functions, so looking at end-to-end clinical asset management, looking at revenue cycle, looking at workforce staffing, IT operations, etc.

What we also see these leading organizations do is comparing and benchmarking these functions not just to other health systems, but to what defines world-class operational performance in other industries, such as big tech, retail, or finance.

Now, these industries have already taken the steps to automate for many years, and they have derisked the adoption curve for health care. Health systems who are focused on this have a core strategy around automation that complements humans with advances in automation.

Ultimately, exponentially shifts costs out of the system, particularly in things like labor-intensive, error-prone tasks, such as clinical staffing. All in all, we really believe this has the opportunity to create sustainable advantage, competitive advantage, allowing systems to win on margin, by really reengineering the operating chassis or the backbone and the cost structure of the health system.

Is there anything else you would like to add to this conversation?

The one thing I would say is, as we have talked to so many health systems about some of these big moves, what we really believe is that, when made together, these moves can create a really radically different economic engine for health systems.

Based on context and market, some health systems will choose to prioritize some over the others, but whatever move you prioritize or pursue, we truly believe, to do this well, it will require an inside-out, really a DNA-level transformation.

At the heart of each of these moves is a commitment to digital transformation that goes beyond just buying and installing point solutions, and instead focuses on the hard work of redesigning and redefining operating and business models.

We have been using the phrase a lot that health systems have been accustomed to doing digital. We believe the time has come to be digital.

Watch part 1 where Sonia Singh discusses COVID-19 recovery strategies and how to win the consumer using data.