Robbie Hughes, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Lumeon

Written by: Robbie Hughes, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Lumeon

When you think of one industry in particular that has mastered the creation of a seamless, digitally integrated experience for the customer journey – with automated coordination across all stakeholders and touchpoints – what comes to mind?

Despite the criticism that it receives, the airline industry can be considered a success when it comes to its ability to orchestrate the customer’s journey and improve customer experience. Gone are the days when a passenger would call a travel agent to book or manage their itinerary. We now research, book and manage flights digitally though a website or app. This allows us to check-in, upgrade and receive loyalty benefits, and keeps us up-to-date with real-time flight status, from check-in times to delays, all the way through to compensation, rebooking and satisfaction surveys. In other words, airlines are seamlessly connecting what could otherwise be a highly fragmented journey for their traveller – from exploring flight options, to completing a journey, and everything in between.

Online services now provide consumers with a simple, elegant experience, while the true sophistication happens seamlessly in the background by automating and orchestrating the engagement, with business processes and fluid data exchange. This sort of seamless and automatic, digital experience is exactly what consumers have come to expect from everything they touch in their daily lives.

Healthcare is no exception. The industry is in the midst of a movement toward the consumerization of the industry, largely driven by Millennials and Generation Z who are accustomed to our new world of always-on, instant service.

drchrono, a industry leading Electronic Health Record (EHR), practice management, medical billing and healthcare API platform that focuses on iPad, iPhone and web, today announced its new Kiosk that equips provider offices for patient self check-in and new Patient Education functionality on iPad enabling providers to share their materials with patients. 

drchrono has had mobility in its core technology from the beginning, being the first EHR company to build its platform on iOS and launched the first EHR app on the iPad the day that iPad was released. Since then, the company expanded its product offering to iPhone and Apple Watch. drchrono, the only company with a fully functional EHR platform on iPhone, which maximizes mobile capabilities of medical practices, is now an Apple mobility partner and continues to transform how physicians provide health care through their iOS app. With drchrono, medical doctors can now provide healthcare on demand by the patient’s side as long as they have an iOS device with an internet connection. They can even electronically order labs or imaging and receive the results and prescribe controlled substances for their patients anytime, anywhere on their mobile devices.

West Monroe Partners’, a full-service North American business and technology consultancy, latest study, No More Waiting Room: The Future of the Healthcare Customer Experience, reveals how consumers and healthcare insurance executives look at how technology is changing the healthcare customer experience. Eighty percent of consumers who have communicated real-time with their healthcare provider via a mobile app prefer this method over a traditional office visit, according to new research.

The study highlights how consumer preferences are shifting away from traditional office visits, toward more digital, mobile interactions. These changing habits are especially apparent among younger, tech-native consumers who view their healthcare experience as more than an annual checkup, but rather an ongoing, digitally connected relationship with their providers. However, healthcare providers and insurers are not prepared to meet these evolving needs.

“Healthcare providers realize the impact of digital communication channels and are beginning to adapt,” said Will Hinde, senior director at West Monroe Partners and leader of the firm’s Healthcare practice. “We’re starting to see more providers incorporate the digital experience with their office visit, by shifting to more online scheduling of appointments, paperless office interactions, following up via email, portals, and mobile apps, and taking steps towards greater cost and quality transparency.”

Wolters Kluwer Health announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Emmi Solutions (Emmi), one of the leading U.S. providers of patient engagement solutions, for $170 million in cash.

Founded in 2002, Emmi is a leading provider of comprehensive and interactive patient engagement solutions supporting healthcare providers and insurance carriers in delivering effective healthcare.  Patient engagement solutions encourage patients to more actively participate in their healthcare, thereby improving outcomes and potentially reducing healthcare costs. Emmi’s offerings are a natural extension to our existing Clinical Solutions portfolio, in particular to UpToDate in decision support and Lexicomp and Medi-Span in drug information.

Emmi offers an enterprise-wide, integrated, and multi-media patient engagement platform with high quality, peer-reviewed content and personalized communications that span the spectrum of care from prevention, to treatment, to patient follow-up.  The company’s solutions are highly rated for ease of integration with electronic medical records (EMR) systems, technical capabilities, and overall user experience.

Navicure, a provider of cloud-based healthcare claims management, patient payment and data analytics solutions, announced key findings from its recent survey on how healthcare organizations are responding to patient engagement and consumerism. Deployed in August 2016 in conjunction with Porter Research, 63 percent of survey participants reported healthcare consumerism is affecting their patients and organizations, specifically with patients proactively asking about their cost of care and becoming more involved in deciding their medical treatment.

A large percentage of survey participants were healthcare executives (37 percent), practice administrators (34 percent) and billing managers (28 percent). Respondents represented a broad range of specialties and sizes: 33 percent from organizations with one to 10 providers; 34 percent with 11 to 50 providers; 12 percent with 51 to 100 providers; and 21 percent with more than 100 providers.

Tetraplegia patients can now take new steps toward independence while in the hospital. By implementing a specially designed cart inspired by the new GCX Patient Engagement Table, Virginia Commonwealth University Health System has enabled long-term ICU patients to use mobile devices to connect to support systems and engage in their recovery.

The unique patient engagement system supports a laptop directly overhead of immobile patients and uses eye-gazing technology that allows the eye to operate like a mouse to access websites, social media and other computer- and web-based data. This enables patients to learn about their condition, research equipment they’ll need once back at home, and participate in other activities that help them feel engaged in their care and connected to the world outside.

Travelers who have time to spare before their flight departs can learn Hands-Only CPR in about five minutes at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), where a new interactive kiosk at Gate B7 will teach this effective bystander CPR skill. BWI Airport is one of five U.S. locations where a Hands-Only CPR training kiosk will reside, courtesy of the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Amerigroup Foundation.

The introduction of BWI’s kiosk will coincide with National CPR & AED Awareness Week (June 1-7, 2016), which educates Americans about CPR and AED training in order to increase the chance of survival from cardiac arrest. Every year, more than 350,000 cardiac arrests occur outside of the hospital and more than 20 percent occur in public places like airports, casinos and sporting facilities. The Hands-Only CPR education available at each kiosk helps users understand how they can immediately help a person who experiences a cardiac emergency outside of a hospital.

Zillion today announced the broad availability of its digital health technology platform, which specializes in live video consultation. Turning content, people-based services and programs into scalable digital products, Zillion enables companies to realize the true potential of mobile engagement and empower consumers to take control of their health.

Zillion’s platform features face-to-face live video conferencing – including one-to-one, group and webcast scheduled or on-demand – coupled with dynamic content delivery.  Additional platform capabilities include interactive messaging, curriculum scheduling, alerts and reminders, digital workforce management and data analytics and goal tracking.

“Our goal is to empower healthcare innovators to focus on transforming care delivery while we provide the technology to make that happen. Whether that’s easy integration with old legacy systems and processes or the necessary flexibility to serve the evolving needs of today’s consumers, Zillion can help bring those innovations to market,” said Bill Van Wyck, founder and president at Zillion.

Scientists are teaching computers to figure out why people accept or decline invitations to participate in clinical trials. Recruiting sufficient numbers of participants is a current challenge in medical research that can compromise results or stop some studies altogether.

Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center report April 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association they are using so-called “machine learning” technologies to predict whether patients will participate.

“Challenges with patient recruitment for clinical trials are a major barrier to timely and efficient translational research,” said Yizhao Ni, PhD, lead author and a researcher in the Division of Biomedical Informatics at Cincinnati Children’s. “The ultimate goal of our research is to impact patient recruitment strategies to increase participation in clinical trials, and to help ensure that studies can be completed and the data are meaningful.”