Healthcare has long been chasing digital innovation with multiple platforms, targeted tasks and now AI-powered everything.
And yet, despite the years and billions spent, health systems are still wrestling with how to work with point solutions — and more troubling, some are asking if they should even work with them at all.
It’s a fair question given how many health systems have deployed dozens of solutions across such areas as marketing, access and care delivery. But instead of creating something that cohesively evolves, those investments have resulted in siloed data and user experiences that feel like isolated tasks when they should feel interconnected.
Individual point solutions, by design, can’t always solve this on their own as they can be under competitive pressures, clients’ contractual limitations and ever-evolving technology changes.
At Accrete Health Partners, these realizations have led us to a different operating model. As Bon Secours Mercy Health’s digital investing and innovation arm, Accrete starts with health system workflows and incentives, then codevelops solutions with operators before scaling them across the enterprise. That’s why our question isn’t whether we layer-in point solutions with our core platforms. The question is how to align them for more seamless user experiences and compounding wins for our patients and providers.
As we model this, for inspiration and levity, I turn to my favorite reference source.
‘Seinfeld’ (and its synergistic storylines)
My favorite “Seinfeld” episodes (that’s a misnomer as they were all great) always began with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer each having their own storyline, seemingly unrelated. But by the end of the episode, the storylines always converged — each one unexpectedly intersecting with the others in a way that felt surprising, while also inevitable.
That’s what I believe has been missing in healthcare’s approach to point solutions. It’s time for them to no longer be stuck in disconnected storylines — each solving an important problem but doing so in isolation.
Accrete’s model is changing that by instead of accepting point solutions as individual endpoints, we are pushing them to collaborate as connected chapters in a broader story of our system — designed to hand off seamlessly, reinforce one another and create more success for the patient, provider and, yes, the respective solutions themselves.
Example: BSMH’s Digital Consumer Funnel
That vision is coming to life in our Digital Consumer Funnel. Developed in partnership with Marketing and Information & Technology at Bon Secours Mercy Health, the funnel aligns marketing, access, scheduling and clinical follow‑up tools around a single patient journey — rather than optimizing each in isolation.
For those who have worked in other industries, this concept will feel familiar. Leading consumer companies invest heavily in well-connected funnels that help consumers discover their brand, form lifetime loyalty and then refer to others. The goal is to guide and optimize each step so more prospects move smoothly through the funnel, reducing drop-off and increasing overall sales.
Healthcare providers, however, have long struggled to replicate this model. Fragmented patient experiences, siloed data and regulatory barriers to one-to-one attribution have always stymied health systems from such analytics.
At a time of declining reimbursement and rising consumer expectations, creating frictionless interactions is no longer optional; it’s a responsibility owed to the communities we serve.
To solve for this, we have added to our criteria when evaluating point solutions, and we prioritize those that can both solve a specific need while also enabling handoffs from and to our other point solutions that are comprised by our Consumer Funnel’s Stages of: Awareness → Engage →Triage → Schedule → Pre-Care → Care → Post-Care → Loyalty → Net Promoter Scores.
“More than a marketing construct, our funnel is becoming an operating system,” says Sandra Mackey, chief marketing officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health. “We’re transforming fragmented tasks into a continuous, orchestrated experience.”
The final scene
In “Seinfeld,” the brilliance wasn’t just in the characters — it was in how their stories came together.
To that end, in pursuing this orchestrated Digital Consumer Funnel, we bring together three pillars:
- Core platforms: Maximizing the services of Epic and Microsoft.
- Accrete solutions: Filling the white spaces with innovators such as Brado AI, Hatchleaf, Trek Health, Hyro, Axuall, Hellocare, Qualtrics and Atalan — and many more to come.
- IT services and analytics: Nordic working with BSMH’s Information & Technology and AI teams to aggregate data from all platforms for end-to-end analysis and funnel improvement.
“The magic is in the convergence of the different players in these pillars,” says Joe Gage, chief administrative officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health. “It’s truly an opportunity for one plus one to equal three.”
Accrete’s work with Bon Secours Mercy Health reflects a broader shift toward codevelopment models that treat integration, scale and clinical reality as first‑order design requirements.
So, I’ll end with a declaration of my love of healthy tension and a challenge to all stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem to come to the table with the expectation of collaborating with others (even competitors) to improve the bigger story for all health systems and their patients — otherwise, we’ll have to say, “No soup for you!”
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