Healthcare leaders spend a lot of time talking about reimagining access, often discussing ways to make patients’ healthcare journeys more seamless and experience-driven.
When having these conversations, it’s essential to remember that there is a difference between making healthcare more accessible and simply increasing patients’ access to appointments, pointed out Lee Schwamm, chief digital health officer at Yale New Haven Health System, during an interview last month at the Reuters Digital Health conference in San Diego.
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Increasing the availability of appointments isn’t the sole answer to alleviating patients’ frustrations about accessing healthcare — especially at a time like now, when the demand for care is high and the supply of providers is decreasing, Schwamm noted.
He thinks providers should be figuring out ways to leverage large language models that can triage patients remotely.
“These can let patients do what they do in the doctor’s office — describe what the problem is. But then at the end, there will be a provider search match on the front end that says, ‘Oh, you probably have a stomach problem and that sounds like something that should be seen by a gastroenterologist. Here’s a list of gastroenterologists who see people with these kinds of problems, and here are the availability of some other specialists you might need,’” Schwamm explained.
This type of tool will not just increase patients’ access to appointments — it will increase their access to clinically appropriate appointments, which means there is less wasted time for both patients and clinicians.
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Try to make healthcare more predictable
Patients often feel like their healthcare experiences lack consistency and predictability, Schwamm pointed out.
“The experience can be sawtoothed — you have a great experience then you have a terrible experience, and there’s no relationship between them,” he remarked.
Providers may have to think about what standards they have to enact to maintain a “mid-level, consistent, reliable experience,” Schwamm suggested. This could be better than feeling like a ping pong ball bouncing between exceptional and subpar healthcare experiences, he explained.
Some patients will abandon their care journey altogether after being discouraged by a poor or confusing healthcare experience, Schwamm noted.
Don’t neglect the digital front door
For many hospitals, the EHR and the digital front door are pretty much the same, and patients’ main digital interactions with the hospital are to check their medical records, Schwamm pointed out.
Health systems should think about how to extend beyond that, as well as how to connect the interface of their digital front door to the EHR, he added.
“How do you either create an EHR wrapper around your digital front door, or embed more content in it? Or if you’re really ambitious, you could build your own entirely self-designed front door by using a software development kit from Epic or Cerner so patients can access to your EHR and you’re fully in control on the front end,” Schwamm said.
Photo: Mario Arango, Getty Images
