Cleveland Clinic: Leveraging Technology to Transform the Patient and the Clinician Experience
If Cleveland Clinic’s ambitious five-year technology roadmap works as planned, 50 percent of outpatient visits will be virtual and 25 percent of inpatient days will instead be spent at home. By then, the $8 billion global medical system also hopes to be caring for twice as many patients.
The renowned health system will meet its numbers by remotely treating and monitoring more patients at home. Clinicians will adopt administration-saving solutions that free up more time for caregiving. These improved experiences will rely on robust technologies and IT networks that provide the kind of online, mobile and virtual experiences consumers now expect and experience in other facets of their lives.
“Patient expectations are very high these days,” said Edward Marx, Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Information Officer. “You can do so much via voice or mobile now elsewhere that, frankly, it’s embarrassing that healthcare is not able to do some of the things other industries can.”
Cleveland Clinic has for years been at the vanguard of patient-centric technologies, from providing an online patient portal, now with more than one million active users, to kiosks (and, soon, a mobile app) for easier patient check-ins. It also was an early partner with Apple, so patients could view health records on their personal devices.
Such digital offerings, however, are rapidly becoming baseline. Technology vendors now can provide health organizations more modality options and better ways to leverage mobile and voice solutions, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and other products that can improve both the patient and the clinical experience – providing more ways to connect and manage a patient’s care at any time and from any place.
“I think the consumer is going to get to the point, insurer or payer notwithstanding, that they will make choices based on their ability to engage directly with a provider organization. For most of us, if we have a choice, we want the most convenient way to interact with a provider,” Marx said. “We need to be driving that higher level of convenience.”
Creating more patient opportunities, less clinician burdens
Though there now are more ways to communicate effectively with patients and care teams, these tools will never displace the human touch. Instead, they are hoped to provide more options for patients to partake in their own care plans without adding to clinicians’ workloads. “The Industry is struggling with caregiver burnout, of which technology plays a big part,” Marx noted.
Cleveland Clinic recently finished what Marx calls a “reset” at its Women’s Health Institute in which it worked collaboratively with more than 100 clinicians to improve their workflows. Staff deployed technology to analyze how each clinician used electronic health records and then trained everyone on how to interact more efficiently with the system. Early results are promising: retrained caregivers, on average, now spend 26 fewer minutes daily on EHR work. “That’s pretty significant,” he said.
Marx believes voice will soon be as popular as mobile is now in healthcare, providing another outlet to access information anytime and from anywhere. Voice enabled software, he said, will revolutionize patient care and help alleviate caregiver burnout.
Taking calculated risks and making wise investments
To turn lofty goals into reality, however, requires wise investments in upgrading hospitals’ IT backbones to carry heavier loads of data and usage. “If you don’t keep up, consumers and payers will make a choice and you’ll be acquired or become less relevant to your community, and no one wants to see that happen,” he said. “So, it’s an imperative that all provider organizations start down this path if they haven’t already.”
He also believes a health system’s leadership must take calculated risks and get past common barriers: privacy and security concerns or budget. “We’ve become so risk adverse that we’re stifling innovation,” Marx said.
For those with low tolerance for risk, Marx suggests partnering with other providers or vendors and sharing both the risks and the rewards. Healthcare leaders can also start small and do something in a safe way and partner with their clinicians to make them part of the solution.
The technology is the easy part, he pointed out. The bigger challenge is healthcare leaders stepping up to make things happen.
“If we don’t, who will? If we sit much longer, outside firms will come in. And, let me tell you, their motive isn’t empathetic patient care,” Marx said. “We are the best attuned and best placed to make an impact and ensure the transformation happens.”
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