For many Americans, seeing the doctor goes something like this: You wake up with a headache or a pain that won’t go away. You look up your symptoms online — and decide it’s time to consult a doctor.
Next you search again, this time for a health care provider. You want to book an appointment, but you have to call to schedule. You navigate through a long phone tree to talk to a real person. Once you reach them, you can’t see the schedule and you have to pick from the limited appointment times they offer you. Then, once you have your appointment, you need to contact your insurance company to make sure the visit you think you need is covered.
After rearranging your schedule to trek to the visit itself (15, maybe 20 minutes with a provider who may not know a whole lot about you), you might leave with a prescription, which requires more legwork. Where will it be filled? Are you really getting the best price? And on it goes — a process so complex that if you didn’t have a headache before, you certainly do now.
“The consumer experience in health care today is incredibly disjointed,” said John Lock, Chief Digital Transformation Officer with MedStar Health, the leading health-care provider in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region. MedStar Health has more than 300 locations, including physician offices, urgent care centers, physical therapy clinics, and 10 hospitals.
“You’re not sure where to turn,” Lock says.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Newly emerging virtual health care platforms, like MedStar Health’s digital health management solution, are empowering patients to proactively manage their own well-being. These web or app-based technologies remove hassles to give consumers an experience that’s not only more convenient, but much more personal.
“It’s about: How can we use the best of personal care and technology to replicate and even make better the experience that people used to have of the neighborhood doctor who lives down the street who would help you manage everything from sore throats to more serious conditions?” Lock said.
A transformational moment arrives during COVID-19 with telehealth
Few trends have promised to transform modern health care like telehealth, which actually sprang up long before the rise of computers and electronic medical records. But for all of the excitement around the potential of e-health at the start of the 21st century, millions of American patients remained attached to the idea of 100% in-office visits. Likewise, there were many barriers for providers in fully embracing the potential of telehealth.
Then came COVID-19 and, in an instant, it transformed how and where care was delivered. In March 2020, the month the World Health Organization first recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic, the United States saw a 154% jump in telehealth visits compared to the same period a year before. Telehealth visits increased more than 50-fold during the first phase of the pandemic.
“It changed like a light switch one year ago,” said Dr. Joe Kvedar, a professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and chair of the American Telemedicine Association, a non-profit that champions the adoption of telehealth. “We all pivoted overnight to this methodology.”
That pivot was certainly a big adjustment for many — but in the months since, millions of patients and providers have both had their eyes opened to how technology—in this case telehealth—can alleviate some of the most stubborn pain points in consumer health care, like how much of a challenge it can be to simply have a timely appointment.
So now, experts like Kvedar believe we are in another transformational moment: many more patients and providers now “have their sea legs” when it comes to telehealth, and they’re primed to embrace a more technology-centric approach to health care overall.
Transforming care to keep patients first
For telehealth leaders like MedStar Health, COVID-19 certainly offered a massive test of its ability to provide virtual care at scale. The health system delivered more than 772,000 telehealth video sessions during the first 12 months of the pandemic.
But MedStar Health had its sights set on transforming care pre-pandemic and will remain committed to that pursuit long after our current global health crisis is in the rearview mirror.
MedStar Health’s new digital health management solution will similarly benefit patients in helping them to be increasingly connected and proactive with their care. The solution is creating one place to book your appointments, access your medical records, and compare prescription prices. The platform also helps enrich the patient-clinician relationship. The goal is that when patients show up to an appointment — whether a video visit, or in the office — the provider will have their personalized information, including previous questions or symptoms they may have asked about, right there at their fingertips.
“A lot of people had the experience where you go to one provider, and they tell you that you need to go to five other places to get various tests, X-rays and CAT scans. Then you need to make an appointment with a specialist, then that specialist refers you to somebody else. By the time you’re done with that, you’re six months into something you’re really worried about,” Lock said. “That’s not what we’re after here. We want to work together to get you to the right care, at the right time, for the right cost and in the right modality!”
MedStar Health is working to create a platform that frees data from complex systems (medical records, billing departments, scheduling platforms, and so on) and makes it accessible to consumers.
“My MedStar Health experience had easy-to-follow steps and no excess information,” said Pat El-Hinnawy, a resident of Rockaway, Maryland, who discovered MedStar Health’s digital platform when searching for COVID-19 vaccine appointments in late January. “As an added bonus, MedStar Health sent short, direct, bi-weekly emails checking on my vaccination status with simple buttons for responding.”
By contrast, the two other online registration sites she found were confusing, El Hinnawy said. “In one case, the terms used did not match the meanings I was familiar with. At the other, I inadvertently made wrong choices (again, confusing options, to me) and ended up in a frustrating loop.”
El Hinnawy’s experience captures the challenge — as well as the promise — of technology-enabled modern medicine. When done well, it truly puts consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to their health care, so they don’t have to spend hours searching for answers, searching for appointments, and trying to piece together a complex system of care.
“It’s the magic triad of access, quality, and convenience and everyone, both the doctor and the patient, feel really good about it,” said Kvedar, describing the power of effective digital care. “It’s something that happens where the patients go, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ And you feel good about it, because you’re delivering quality care on terms that are good for them.”
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