David Nace, MD, Innovaccer’s Chief Medical Officer, talks about what happens when providers bring patients’ clinical and care episodes to the forefront of a tailored patient engagement journey.

Today’s healthcare consumers expect their care experiences to be highly personalized, similar to their interactions with companies like Netflix, Amazon and Uber. What are providers doing to personalize care?

The healthcare industry could be doing more. If you go back 30 years, healthcare was a more personalized experience. It was relationship-dependent, not driven by technology like it is today. We now have a fragmented array that consumers struggle to navigate. It’s become impersonal, and even though we have advanced technologies and lots of specialists, the core patient relationship gets lost.

All the companies you mentioned – Uber, Netflix, Amazon – offer convenience. And to some degree, they give consumers a personalized experience. None of that was provided in healthcare until the pandemic. I still have to take half a day off of work to visit my physician. I still fill out forms when I get there because they don’t remember who I am or the pertinent things to know about me.

If we learn from other industries, we can fix that. We’ve learned during the pandemic that we can connect virtually and deliver services. Today, we have the technology and the know-how from other industries. We just need to learn how to use them.

Isn’t healthcare consumerism bigger than “a retail shopping experience?” Isn’t that purely a transactional, sales-oriented approach? What’s missing from patient engagement today?

Healthcare is deeply personal and that’s a big difference. Healthcare is also continuous, not transactional. Hailing an Uber, ordering a Netflix movie, placing an Amazon order – none of those experiences are deeply personal. They might be “personalized,” but more from a transactional perspective. “Deeply personal” in healthcare is a contextual concept.

Contextual means people and the healthcare system understand me, my body, my mind, my social fabric, my community and the health journey I’m on. It’s deeply personal to me whether or not this thing I feel on my head is cancer, or that my back is hurting so much that I can’t sit, and therefore I can’t work.

As a patient, I need everyone working as a team throughout my journey, a deeply personal experience, and a true relationship with my provider. And yet, healthcare has become so fragmented and disorganized that no one really looks at me as a person. The same can be said for healthcare’s current approach to patient engagement: It’s fragmented, it’s transactional and it doesn’t know me as a person on a care journey.

How does Innovaccer’s approach to patient engagement differ from other organizations offering patient engagement and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions today?

Go back to what I just said: I’m a whole person. I’m not a liver, heart or lung. There’s a context in the way I lead my life – my family, my community and my beliefs. There’s a context in how I think and react, in how I interact with my environment. These are the things that make me “me.”

Bringing all of my information together provides context to the people I engage with and helps them guide me to improve my health and wellness. At Innovaccer, we recognized that basing patient engagement on a transactional “customer relationship model” will never provide the context that’s essential for holistic care delivery and a holistic patient experience. Instead, we focused on a model that provides and is built on a meaningful and complete longitudinal view of the patient – one that establishes a complete patient record to help engagement go beyond optimizing revenue to transform care delivery.

We do this by bringing together clinical data from EMRs, along with claims, pharmacy, laboratory, social determinants of health (SDoH), credit card and other data from myriad sources. We’ve done the hard work of aligning, or “normalizing,” that data, so that it’s trustworthy, accurate and meaningful. Once you’ve made sense of a patient’s data, you gain the ability to understand the whole person – body, mind, medical status – in context.

Fundamentally, deeply understanding healthcare data “writ large,” and making it useful and actionable for providers, has made the difference for our customers.

Speaking of making a difference, how does Innovaccer’s approach to patient relationship management change or add to the outcomes providers expect?

Healthcare is overwhelmingly driven by fee-for-service (FFS). In that model, providers want everything from the patient to be delivered within their system of care to maximize billing. With FFS, the provider’s interest, not the patient’s, is at the center.

That’s why traditional engagement solutions focus on bringing contact, engagement, purchase and service interaction data into a customer profile. They see the patient as a transaction, so they don’t include the patient’s clinical record.

Innovaccer’s solution parts ways with tradition and transactional thinking. We put the patient back at the center of healthcare by integrating clinical data with claims, pharmacy, laboratory, SDoH and other consumer information – including the CRM data – to establish a complete patient record that brings context to patient engagement.

This enables providers to streamline engagement across all touchpoints, including care episodes, journey-based campaigns, care coordination workflows and so on. The result is a single solution that providers can use to attract, engage and retain patients. At the same time, the solution helps coordinate care and give physicians point-of-care insights. Engagement with context is how we get to holistic care delivery and holistic patient experiences.

Get more information about Innovaccer’s new Patient Relationship Management solution here.

David Nace, MD, Innovaccer’s Chief Medical Officer