OhioHealth hospitals are among the first users of Epic’s MyChart Bedside to enable patients to view their health information, lab results, review videos, exchange messages with their medical team, and generally and plan for the day.

The nonprofit, faith-based family of hospital’s secret to jump-starting this process and increasing mobile and telehealth technologies role in healthcare settings: integrating the patient experience.

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That’s according to James Sturiano, a Mobile Device Engineer at OhioHealth, who brings a particular expertise to his job. He previously was a manager for Apple Retail, the retail division of a company noted for attention to customer experience.

Sturiano present the session, “Using Mobile Apps to Create Active Patient Engagement,” during HIMSS16 beginning in late February.  

“Even though a lot of the processes have been put in place to get the end results we are after with the technology it’s really about looking at the entire customer experience,” Sturiano said. “But industry-wide, we are far from understanding what that customer experience needs to look like.”

Current solutions with phones or tablets in hospital settings, for instance, are deployed without the functionality necessary for complex clinical tasks.

A particular struggle Sturiano faces is understanding how to harness consumer technologies, make them fit into OhioHealth’s enterprise in a fashion that safeguards protected health information and personally identifiable information, all the while ensuring that the devices and software running on them are compliant the policies and restrictions the healthcare industry is mandated to follow.

[Also: Apple injects health features into Watch.]

“A lot of what I did was try to understand and tweak customer experience to make sure we weren’t just looking at end results we wanted, but to see everything that happened from the time they walked in the store and the time they left,” Sturiano said. “And so, more than anything, healthcare organizations need to start thinking about their patients as customers, shifting gears from delivering a service and charging for service.”

“In the past, people came to hospital, they got fixed, they went away and we sent them a bill,” Sturiano said. “But if a device is in the hands of the patient, the clinician needs to participate in that experience as well. Now patients use iPads to view insights into their lab results, their schedule of test, their care team, and they can actually instant message their nurses.”

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A key component of the next implementation phase at OhioHealth will be meeting patient expectations.

“Nurses and doctors are now being asked questions that patients didn’t ask in the past because patients didn’t have access to information,” Sturiano said. “Part of the success of this entire movement is making sure the clinical side of the house is equipped to meet the expectations of the patients.”

The session “Using Mobile Apps to Create Active Patient Engagement,” is slated to take place March 1, 2016 from 11:30 to 12:30 p.m. in Lando 4201 at the Sands Expo Convention Center.

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