Using Data and Virtual Care to Establish Relationships With Consumers

Sonia Singh, vice president, AVIA’s Center for Consumerism, offers insight on the development and implementation of COVID-19 recovery strategies for providers and the importance of utilizing data and new technologies to meet the needs of consumers.

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. We offer these services both as membership and consulting services.

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 a patient is searching for care, they are navigating the health system, to experiencing the episode of care. 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 a viewpoint of how digital can enhance these experiences. I've been with AVIA for about three years. My main background is doing management and strategy consulting for a number of different health systems and health plans over the last 15 years.

What COVID recovery strategies for health systems and other provider organizations are currently being developed or implemented? What are the challenges of developing these strategies?

I would categorize these into both tactical and strategic recovery. There are tactical things that are being done to focus on revamping operations to deal with the here and now. Things like COVID vaccine distribution, so much effort around that. Then, things like bringing back electives or addressing call center volumes. Those are very here-and-now things that need to be addressed.

There are also strategic aspects, so as health systems look out at the horizon and work through scenarios of who they want to be in an ecosystem that looks quite different from when the pandemic first hit. They're going to need to double down on strategies to win the consumer and become a valued player for the long term.

The challenge right now is creating space and allocating resources for some of these strategic aspects when everyone in the system is still occupied with the firefighting and the here and now.

What I will say is encouraging, though, is we are seeing a number of members in AVIA's network now being able to find the space, allocate the energy and resources to do some longer-term strategy building. Building back up and thinking about what the future will be in this new ecosystem.

Why do health care executives need to work to attract consumers and provide them with the convenience they’re looking for with virtual-first service models following the pandemic?

Winning the consumer, I would say, is a key imperative for health systems. The consumer revolution in health care is here. It demands that health systems know the consumer deeply, orchestrate differentiated care experiences and create access to these experiences in a convenient and cost-effective manner.

During COVID, I would say there are two things that have happened as it relates to the health care consumer. One, in their day-to-day lives, they've gotten a lot more comfortable and dependent on digital.

To work remotely on Zoom, order groceries, get deliveries, see their friends and family, and even doctors online. There's been a social imprinting that has made these digital tools very much the fabric of daily life.

Second, I would say a number of third parties and new entrants to health care have made headway in providing digitally-oriented care options. Walmart is a great example of an unexpected avenue to access care, and they're doing it in a digitally forward, transparent, and accessible way.

You think about, how do you stay competitive in this environment? How do you enable a convenient access strategy that's going to be paramount, so a digital front door? AVIA's done a lot of work around helping our members in this area.

It's going to be a critical enabling strategy to enable community access. Easing the way for consumers who are searching for care or searching for symptoms to find options that are convenient, easy to book online, and transparent about things like price-quality, wait times, etc.

Secondly, there's also critical supply-demand problem right now, so load balancing, capacity optimization. We have pockets of perishable supply that are underutilized or unutilized because we cannot connect demand—consumers—to that supply in real-time.

What do I mean by that? It's currently a supply, or appointment slots, is organized by clinic location, physician preferences, and certain modalities, tends to be siloed and perishable.

It can seem like there's no supply when those wait times are long or patients can't get appointments, but often, the truth is that there are available appointments, maybe just at a different location or at a different modality.

The challenge to solve this next access issue is going to be about supply and demand matching. It's going to be about capacity optimization and load balancing to be able to optimize the resources we have.

I would say thirdly, the marketplace. This is largely going to look digital, and there are marketplaces we experience in other arenas. It needs to be digitally accessible from people's phones. You can call this virtual-first. It needs to be 24/7, it needs to be transparent, and it needs to meet consumers where they're at. I'd say this is how we win the consumer.

How can health systems create a hyper-personalized care experience by leveraging consumer data to improve continuity and establish long-lasting relationships?

The average health system, I would say, serviced most patients as if they are the same. You try to make the best medical and administrative decisions based on snippets of information. It is rare that we know and address the unique needs and preferences of an individual patient.

For example, does a patient prefer appointments at a specific time of the day or weekends? Do they have transportation challenges? Have they called the access center multiple times with the same issue? The idea of hyper-personal care, we think about in three key tenets.

One is know me. How do you know the patient or the consumer at an n-of-1 level? Do you have a detailed picture of the consumer's biopsychosocial needs, consumer preferences, decision-making patterns, perceptions about health care, in addition to the clinical history?

Secondly, how do you connect with the patient in a way that's relevant and meaningful, based on what you know about them? Finally, orchestrate my care. This is where the n-of-1 data empowers health systems to not only provide a convenient and personalized experience but also to orchestrate a broader, more comprehensive care plan.

This results in what we call an individualized, proactive care interventions that anticipate the needs of the consumer at that n-of-1 level. This requires a significant investment in the data strategy and building a data foundation to enable that n-of-1 view.

This requires a data architecture that delivers identity matching and continuous data integration across core systems. It consumes second and third-party data and integrates with the health system's first-party data and provides an intelligence layer to make sense of the signal and the noise of all the data that we have.

There's also an impact to workflow and operations to make this a reality. Employees, staff, clinicians all need to be armed with consumable data that's intuitive in a real-time fashion, with recommendations on the next best action to reduce any potential cognitive overload that this new data provides. That is how you get to this idea of a hyper-personal experience.

Watch part 2 where Sonia Singh discusses digital strategies to improve specialty care and the benefits of workforce automation.