Jordan Shlain, MD, is an Internal Medicine Physician with Private Medical and is the Founder of HealthLoop.
On May 10th, Dr. Jordan Shlain will serve as a Keynote Panelist at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 10-11th 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Shlain's session, click here.
Question: Who or what are the disruptors that have your attention? Why?
Dr. Jordan Shlain: At risk of appearing not humble, I believe the "innovation by irritation" concept I hatched in my medical office is significantly disrupting the payer-provider paradigm. While I still practice internal medicine full-time at my clinic, I have a front-row seat to the disruptive company I started. I purposefully stayed in the clinic so I could keep my ears to the tracks of change.
At HealthLoop, they are particularly excited to see payers stepping up to pay providers for using patient engagement solutions that have a track record of improving outcomes. After all, we all want patients to have the opportunity for the best outcome. For example, we recently completed a study with Anthem that demonstrated a 45 percent reduction in readmissions and a 54 percent reduction in complications for patients in total joint episodes. The resulting cost savings has made it a no-brainer to expand the program to additional clinical episodes and subsidize providers' use of HealthLoop to accelerate adoption. We are seeing other payers like Blue Cross Blue Shield find ways to incent provider use of tools like HealthLoop because they impact both outcomes and member experience. While patient engagement has always been the right thing to do, incentives for providers will accelerate adoption and impact for patients and providers alike. On July 19, 2016, Becker's Health IT and CIO Review listed HealthLoop as a top 50 app for clinicians to look out for.
Q: What change in reimbursement is your organization feeling most acutely and how is it affecting your 2-5-year strategic plan?
JS: As a physician, I'm thrilled to see CMS and payers recognizing the clinical value of efforts to engage patients outside of the care setting and patient friendly monitoring tools that identify patient risk in real-time. I am excited the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, the Merit-based Incentive Payment System and new CPT codes for remote patient monitoring are beginning to fairly compensate physicians for leveraging technology solutions that engage patients outside of the care setting, across non-face-to-face interactions. Patients spend less than 1 percent of their lives in a physical care setting with face-to-face contact.
As an industry, we need to find ways to be stickier and empower patients with actionable information they can digest and act on. Hospitals, doctors and all providers have a brand and a reputation to protect. Imagine the win-win-win if we all got paid to engage our patients and the opportunity for patients to stay connected and get the best outcome.
Q: How do you define patient engagement?
JS: I believe patient engagement is about empowering patients with insightful, actionable information that ensures they understand what to know, do and expect. Specifically, patient engagement is about trust over time — this leads to empowerment, low-friction information exchange and timely interventions based on data. We need to de-emphasize compliance and adherence, and focus on mutual participation. Too many digital health companies are focused on driving compliance or pestering patients to complete tasks that might drive better outcomes. At HealthLoop, we've learned you need to give patients value in order to get value in return. We can essentially make the patient a part of the care team if we can make care instructions service oriented, digestible and empathetic. If this is done well and patients use the platform, care teams have an entirely new set of data and a window into the patient to assess patient risk in real time. Care teams can also more efficiently allocate clinical resources to support the right patient at the right time. In short, patient engagement is all about creating actionable connectivity between patients and their care teams.
The discreet elements of digital trust are:
• Preferences and listening. Know who your patient is and honor their preferences. This inherently makes future decisions more relevant.
• Context. Respect adjacent information in space. This makes information inherently more actionable.
• Relevance, both personal and temporal. This helps construct a narrative.
• Literacy. Comprehension enables participation and the ability to follow the narrative.
• Anticipatory/Proactive. Be smart, give patients the sense of being looked out for. This builds trust and sets expectations.
• Responsive with feedback. Treat each interaction as an opportunity to delight, not fright, and optimize for social norms theory. Ask, "How am I compared to people like me?"
• Actionable. Progress is the single most important aspect of medicine. It enables each interaction to be informed and acted upon in pursuit of the 'best outcome.'
• Shareable. We are social animals who have friends, family and other caregivers. We have the ability to share almost everything else in our life.
• Invisible. All things digital should be easy to use. This is more of a user-interface/user-experience issue.
• Safety. You can't have EMRs and people selling information without opt-in consents.
• Fidelity and predictability. Knowing you will get a degree of consistency is important. It becomes your friend and builds trust.
• Stability. It's there when you need it and doesn't break.
Healthcare is a people business that needs technology, not a technology business that needs people It's always both: what's the matter with you and what matters to you.