Changing The Consumer Experience—The Tech Strategy Decisions

By Monica E. Oss, Chief Executive Officer, OPEN MINDS

Changing the consumer experience is the fundamental definition of digital transformation. That was the key message of my closing session, Technology Strategy For Sustainability—EHRs Are Just The Start, last week at The 2021 OPEN MINDS Technology & Analytics Institute.

But how do you change the consumer experience? That was the focus of the session, Consumer-Focused Technology For Better Consumer Experience & Engagement, featuring Anna Lindow, chief executive officer and co-founder of Brave Health, along with my two colleagues and OPEN MINDS Senior Associates, Paul Duck and Jason Lippman. There were two key takeaways from the session—there are some key technologies essential to changing consumer experience with heath care service delivery and executive teams need a clear strategy on how to acquire and integrate those technologies in a consumer-centric way.

First, the technologies. There are three tech functions required to remake the consumer health care experience. First, allowing consumers to get care in the location of choice. Second, providing communication with the consumer that is convenient, timely, and easy to understand. Lastly, facilitating consumer self-service and on-demand access to information. The first—getting care in the location of choice—requires a hybrid care delivery platform that accommodates digital care delivery (telehealth and telephone-based and text-based communication), along with in-clinic and in-home services. Convenient communication includes easy access, automated administrative text reminders, and health self-assessments and health management tools. And finally, on-demand, 24/7 self-service functionality is typically facilitated with a web-based consumer portal for clinical information, scheduling, health record access, billing, payment, and more.

The second issue—how to acquire and integrate those technologies in a consumer-centric way—is a more challenging issue for executive teams. We got a first-hand look at this from Ms. Lindow. Her organization, Brave Health, provides virtual only behavioral health services for Medicaid populations. The company launched in Florida in 2019 and has scaled to serve more than 65 million covered lives across 113 health plan contracts in 10 states, including North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Alabama. The Brave Health platform offers virtual therapy, psychiatry, case management, and medication-assisted treatment for mental health and substance use disorder. They also offer same-day assessments and work to increase consumer treatment engagement rates by providing a “concierge-like” wrap-around care team.

Her words of advice, provider organizations don’t need to become a tech company—but they do need a tech strategy. And her question was—if your organization’s current tech suite doesn’t support the functionality you need, how do you build and choose from a “tech acquisition list”? Ms. Lindow shared the Brave Health approach for making these decisions (borrowing from Jeff Bezos)—”build, borrow, buy.”

Investment in consumer engagement technologies, like all tech investments, should be driven by organizational strategy and performance (for more on performance metrics, check out. Ms. Lindow also encouraged executives to ask themselves three questions. Have you done your homework (what you need and what’s available)? Where do you invest your time and energy? Are you prepared to make decisions based on the data?

And she offered one final piece of advice for provider organization executives that have an eye toward increased engagement but are having difficulty in letting go of old tech—”Forgive yourself for the changes you need to make. Don’t die on the fax machine hill.”

Whether or not your organization should invest in consumer engagement technology comes down its importance in your strategy for sustainability—your services, your competition, and your customer expectations. And whatever is on the table, calculating the return-on-investment (ROI) will be key to the decisionmaking process.