Focus on meeting a need, simplicity for technology success

BOSTON—Just because you have technology doesn’t mean you have a workforce willing to use it, said Jeffrey Benabio, MD, physician director of healthcare transformation for Kaiser Permanente, speaking at mHealth + Telehealth World.

That was a lesson learned when his organization bought their physicians iPhones to enable them to work better as a team. They had a lot of expense trying to train users on a secure texting app on the iPhone. They caught on after a few months, he said, and now send about 25,000 texts every months across 1,200 physicians.

“There’s more to this than reimbursement,” he said. “There’s more to this than just technology. It’s understanding how the technology changes how we behave and changes our relationship with the people we work with.”

“No patient wakes up and says ‘I want to view my lab results from last year.’ They want healthcare to be easier,” said Pamela DeSalvo Landis, assistant vice president of information services at Carolinas Healthcare System. Patients want their care to be personalized, relevant and have a transactional basis to it, she added.

Consumers also are becoming more focused on prevention because they are feeling more directly the costs of not taking care of themselves, said Gregory Weidner, MD, medical director of primary care innovation and proactive health at Carolinas Healthcare System. “It’s incumbent on us to provide value to delight and engage consumers.”

Carolinas had its technology partners at the table, Landis said, “so their product and what we need are aligned. We have to bring more expertise to the table.”

Healthcare can gain insights from other industries, said Weidman, but they don’t really understand the challenges of implementation and culture change. “That’s where collaboration comes in. We want to take the best and brightest in new technology, innovation, design thinking and merge that with a healthcare system that has an understanding of how that actually works on the front line.”

Weidman said Carolinas’ design lab has been very fruitful. “We are trying to focus on appropriate organizational challenges and get the mojo of the start-up culture into our environment. There’s value in bringing all the players together.”

He referred to someone else’s quote when he said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. “Design really is important.” He said when you think you have a solution, check with patients. “Our environment allows us to do that in an agile way.”

It’s important to remember that an enterprise problem isn’t the patient’s problem. But, a key to success is solving the problems patients have.