Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy’s new chief product officer, Lina Scroggins, is stepping into healthcare with a goal familiar to any Google user: Make complex systems feel simple.
After nearly two decades at Google, Ms. Scroggins joined Mercy this February to help streamline how patients find care, book appointments and navigate treatment — areas where healthcare experiences often remain fragmented and frustrating.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring the best of Google to healthcare for about 10 years,” she said.
At Google she worked on healthcare-focused initiatives, including data de-identification tools used in cloud healthcare systems and digital transformation projects with provider organizations. But she eventually realized improving healthcare technology from the outside had limits.
“One way to do that is by working at Google. But another way to do that is to work in healthcare,” she said.
Mercy, she said, offered a rare opportunity because much of the technical groundwork was already in place. The system adopted Epic two decades ago and recently unified multiple instances into a single platform across its enterprise. Mercy has also invested in data infrastructure and long-term partnerships with technology companies to support innovation.
That foundation, Ms. Scroggins said, allows her team to focus less on rebuilding systems and more on improving how patients actually experience them.
“My job is to come in and sort of take that foundation and then to build integrated, beautiful, effective experiences on top of that,” she said.
Many of the biggest frustrations for patients occur before care even begins, she said. Finding the right doctor, understanding whether Mercy can address a particular need and successfully securing an appointment remain common hurdles.
Healthcare systems often provide multiple ways to access care, but too many options can create confusion rather than convenience. “Making sure that those opportunities are available, easy to find and that there aren’t too many of them,” she said, is critical.
Another persistent pain point: patients repeatedly providing the same medical information across visits and providers. Streamlining internal data sharing could reduce that burden and make visits more efficient, she said.
Artificial intelligence will also play a growing role in improving both patient and provider experiences, though Ms. Scroggins emphasized the technology should play a supportive role for clinicians. “I don’t see it as replacing anybody,” she said. “I believe that the most effective AI is going to be the kind of AI that a human uses and a human continues to stay in the loop.”
AI tools can help reduce administrative workload, assist with documentation and imaging review, and help patients better understand care instructions or remember follow-up steps, she said.
Success, she added, will ultimately be measured through both patient and caregiver satisfaction as well as technical performance metrics such as platform reliability and usage.
Mercy leaders say the chief product officer role remains uncommon among health systems, reflecting Mercy’s broader effort to bring consumer technology thinking into healthcare delivery.
For Ms. Scroggins, the immediate priority is learning Mercy’s operations and patient needs. Longer term, she hopes digital tools can remove friction from a system patients often experience as complicated and slow.
The goal, she said, is to make healthcare interactions feel more seamless from the moment a patient begins searching for care to the time they return home to recover.
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