Constructing a Continuum of Trust in Healthcare IT

Having spent the last three years firmly entrenched in the healthcare technology marketing sector, I’ve learned how important the word “continuum” is in patient care. Most often used in the context of “continuum of care” the term refers to the need to assure the patient experience is seamless regardless of where the care is being dispensed.

The continuum of care can only work if there is a continuum of trust throughout the patient experience.

The impact of an evolving healthcare technology ecosystem:

Technology has moved care from the hospital or doctor’s office to the recliner in the patient’s living room or at their workplace. While it was difficult enough to assure continuity within the confines of the healthcare institution, the fact that care is now distributed creates massive challenges for medical establishment.  Add to this that some of this care is becoming “self service,” with the patient taking much greater control, and you have a snowball effect of rapid and disorienting changes

Needless to say, this also increases the burden of responsibility of the patient, since they are now a critical, albeit unwitting link in quality assurance. There is the inevitable push-pull of patients wanting to avoid long waits in the doctor’s office or emergency department while also wanting the technological benefits of those facilities for remote treatment.

How does healthcare create a reliable continuum of care as they lose control of their direct involvement with the “customer-patient?” 

In my regular conversations with executives at innovative and world-leading healthcare institutions, I hear it time and time again:  compelling communications strategies are the bedrock of continuum of care, within or without a facility alike.

In fact, most executives feel that healthcare technology vendors are as much an integral part of developing provider communications strategies as the providers themselves. Their sense is that the continuum of trust must span all levels, but begins with an assurance that the technology purchased will fulfill its promise. The vendor’s communications strategy is built on trust and commitment – the relationship won’t end after the sale is made – and the synergy can extend from there

One of the most commonly shared wishes I’ve encountered is that such communications capabilities actually get baked into the technologies being sold, even if the technology is not meant as a patient-facing marketing communications tool. 

For example, given the growing importance of “customer-patient” acquisition, what if enormous EHR deployments were able to take data that was aggregated and easily transform it into insights for content marketing messages to be sent out to current and prospective patients? This could leverage the “nudge theory” to have chatbots or automated communications initiate useful communications or provide timely reminders for patients. Scaleable population health advisory communications could also be executed – e.g. “there’s an uptick in flu diagnoses in your area, it may be wise to get a flu shot.”

In this model the healthcare communications directors serve as the unenviable bridge between vendor and patient. As such their strategy is to amplify how cutting edge technologies reliably create powerful patient outcomes. In that continuum Vendor trust, leads to provider trust, which leads to patient satisfaction, loyalty, and most important, advocacy.

From healthcare technology perspectives to the patient’s point of view:

Nevertheless, continuity of care has become incredibly dispersed. Because of this the patient becomes an inseparable link in the chain of communicating that trust.

If care is dispensed in the home or on a mobile device, vendors and providers have the enormous challenge of assuring the reliability of patient-driven content and communications in that link of the continuum. Just like in a traditional healthcare setting, how sure are the providers that the patient is following doctor’s orders and not engaging in false reporting just to satisfy the weekly or daily deadlines?

Most providers (and payers for that matter) are facing the enormous challenge of developing a totally new digital relationship with the patient or consumer. Most are amazed at how much confidential data patients are willing share when they trust the system and get value greater than their personal information in return.

As population health and precision medicine strategies continue their meteoric rise, the healthcare industry will rely on such patient-supplied data as the basis for value-based care.

Only by studying that continuum of trust and care can this data be leveraged for reliable outcomes.