Readers Write: Healthcare Knows Everything About Patients, But Can’t Keep Them Engaged

Healthcare Knows Everything About Patients, But Can’t Keep Them Engaged
By Carrie Kozlowski

Carrie Kozlowski, OT, MBA, is co-founder and COO of Upfront Healthcare.

Part of what I love about leading a growth-stage health tech company is the chance to jump between worlds. From big-picture “how might we” brainstorming with innovators to in-the-trenches problem-solving with the health system leaders responsible for delivering patient care — I get to see healthcare from both sides.

The problem is, they often remain siloed. While there’s no shortage of ideas about how to solve healthcare’s biggest problems, teams on the ground are barely staying afloat in managing the day to day, let alone implementing big fixes. The industry as a whole gets stuck operating the same way it did 20 years ago.

That’s the paradox that has been on my mind since I spoke at South by Southwest earlier this year, when I addressed an audience of innovators about the future of data-driven care. That is an area of healthcare where the disparity between what we could do and what we do is striking. My co-presenter and I explored why 97% of all data produced by hospitals each year goes unused, even at the expense of transforming healthcare for the better.

Think about how much healthcare providers know about us. Our doctors know our kids’ names, when they were born, what we do for a living, when our schedule is usually free for appointments, and the likelihood that we’ll cancel last-minute. With this much information, healthcare should be creating incredibly personalized patient experiences, but is falling behind.

Healthcare leaders have an incredible amount of data at their fingertips. As an industry, it’s uniquely positioned to understand who consumers are, how they behave, and what services they still need.

I use the word “consumer” intentionally. No matter how healthcare is perceived, patients are consumers and healthcare enterprises are competing for their business. Patients are making consumer decisions, and these decisions hinge on factors like marketing, convenience, and personalization.

If healthcare made the most of its data, health systems could be running tailored engagement programs that are capable of predicting patients’ actions, speaking directly to their needs, and driving better outcomes across the entire healthcare industry to deliver on the promise of patient-centered care. That’s what’s at risk when it comes to data-driven care. Not just efficiency, but long-term success for patients and enterprises alike.

The average hospital produces 25 trillion pages of data each year. Healthcare’s data collection is growing at a staggering annual rate of 36%. That’s 11% faster than media and entertainment.

Not only is the data vast, it’s also accessible. Health systems already have patient information, collected safely and stored securely with no new data collection processes needed. They know about patients’ jobs, families, and modes of transportation. They know if they need translation services and if they have a history of canceling appointments at the last minute. In other words, they have the exact kind of consumer data to make healthcare more convenient, accessible, and effective.

While Netflix and TikTok use their consumer insights to engage viewers for hours each day, healthcare has so far failed to capitalize on patient data. The industry is sitting on a treasure trove of consumer insights, but they’re going unused. As a result, only 8% of patients complete all the screenings they need in a given year. Ignoring healthcare data isn’t just inefficient, it’s reckless.

It’s easy to point to the healthcare industry’s resistance to change as the problem, but we can be more specific. Let’s look at the challenges one by one.

• Privacy concerns. The words “patient data” often carry with them the fear that a health system will somehow violate a patient’s privacy. Patients might worry that their data will be used against them, preventing them from getting insurance, causing issues with their employer, or otherwise introducing bias into their care. The truth is that HIPAA already forbids this kind of unethical data use. When I talk about leveraging patient data, what I mean is taking the information patients have already willingly handed over and using it to improve their experience dynamically and securely.
• Fear of litigation. We’ve all heard healthcare described as a risk-averse industry. This makes it sound like individual healthcare leaders aren’t open to new ideas. What it really means is that healthcare lives and dies by compliance, sometimes to a fault. It’s worth a conversation about the difference between reasonable precautions and completely overblown fears. The concept of leveraging patient data might feel new, but the data itself is not. It’s already been collected and is being stored securely by health systems. The next step is as simple as using what’s already known about patients to make more practical decisions.
• Deficient tools. Patient data is available now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to access or interpret. Health systems are burning money and human capital on often redundant or cumbersome software platforms. If these platforms don’t play well together, there’s no guarantee that they will produce useful insights on demand.

In many cases, these tools could be stripped back and replaced by one or two patient engagement solutions that integrate with the rest of a robust software suite. We don’t need a separate platform for every point of data collection. Instead, look to HIPAA-compliant engagement tools that speak directly to market-leading EHRs, which allow a bidirectional flow of patient data to empower truly personalized outreach.

Healthcare already has the ingredients to change how patients access and experience care. The challenge is actually making that happen, with data at the forefront. In an industry that is understandably reluctant to change, healthcare pioneers will be looked toward to lead adoption. Once processes are built around patients instead of bureaucratic restrictions, the foundation will be laid for a whole new era of healthcare, one in which care is personalized, patients are engaged, and data leads the way.