5 takeaways from Modern Healthcare’s Transformation Summit

Leaders at health systems, insurers, digital health companies and other organizations shared insights on digital health at Modern Healthcare’s annual Transformation Summit in Austin, Texas.

Panelists at the in-person event spoke of the urgency the pandemic has created to make healthcare more consumer-friendly and innovative.

“The world is changing in front of us,” said Rita Khan, chief data officer at Mayo Clinic. “How do we become more responsive and meet the needs of patients? This is a moment of significant change from a consumer’s perspective and how they view healthcare. We are changing, but our patients are saying they need more.”

Here are five major themes that came out of the Transformation Summit.

1. It starts with trust

To have a successful digital health initiative, a level of trust with patients is necessary from the outset. Health systems have a huge advantage because patients generally trust them, said Phoebe Yang, general manager of Amazon Web Services, during the keynote address.

“The reality is you sit in a very, very unique position if you’re a healthcare organization, particularly health systems," Yang said. "And that position is, you have what people, you’ve spent decades building what people would love to have, which is trust with your patient, your consumer, your member. That is a coveted position. Do not cede that. Leverage that, use that, get to know your patient, your consumer, your member better.”

Yang said the industry should partner with technology companies to connect with consumers faster. But health systems need to recognize the trust between patients/consumers and clinicians is what everyone else is trying to develop or finance, she said.

2. Disruption is difficult

The healthcare industry has a long way to go in disrupting itself. Karen Murphy, chief innovation officer at Geisinger, the Danville, Pennsylvania-based integrated health system, said the industry is still largely inconvenient and not accessible for all patients, and there’s no urgency to change.

“Healthcare is still a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday industry,” Murphy said. “The world operates 24/7. With digital enablement, we need to get out of this 9-to-5 mode and interact with patients much more efficiently.”

Michael Slubowski, president and CEO of Trinity Health, a multistate health system based in Livonia, Michigan, used the example that patients still fill out the same demographic and insurance information during every clinical encounter.

Dr. Stephen Klasko, executive-in-residence at VC firm General Catalyst and former CEO of Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, said while individual patient-facing technology has advanced, health systems continue to rely on antiquated processes. This sentiment was echoed by Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, chairman of the American Medical Association.

“My wife is an OB-GYN doctor and she’ll do robotic surgery in the morning, go back to her office and then fax the information from the surgery to the primary-care physician,” Mukkamala said. “It’s like if Fred Flintstone and George Jetson lived in the same era.”

Healthcare organizations must be willing to disrupt themselves, but it can be a tough sell for an industry that isn’t used to widespread change, said James Nicholls, partner at Fitzroy Health.

“You have to acknowledge that while disruption is an exciting and provocative word in Silicon Valley, that’s not the reaction you get in healthcare,” Nicholls said. “Healthcare is about ‘do no harm.’ The psychology of the word doesn’t fit neatly with healthcare.”

3. Buy-in remains a challenge

Part of the challenge with self-disruption within healthcare is that clinicians are skeptical of new technology thanks to the drawn-out adoption of electronic health records. A survey of health system executives by Teladoc Health and Health Management Academy shared during the conference found that only 39% of leaders say they have received sufficient clinician buy-in to implementing new digital health technologies. 

“That number is a hangover from the failure of EHRs,” said Bruce Brandes, senior vice president at Teladoc.

Suchi Saria, director of the Machine Learning, AI and Healthcare Lab at Johns Hopkins University, said her organization created an algorithm that detected sepsis in 2017. But only three physicians wanted to use it, she said.

“Physician adoption was terrible,” Saria said. “We spent so much energy deploying it. That was disheartening. Most health system projects stop there. You put it out there, you don’t measure things, you try to get something to work, it doesn’t work, you spent two years and then you move on.”

Saria said her research team spoke with front-line staff about the different barriers to using the algorithm and addressed them one by one. The technology needed to be easier to use, integrated into clinical workflows and vetted for clinical safety. Fixing those issues led to a 90% adoption across the enterprise, she said.

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4. Partnerships are key for providers

Organizations pushing forward on digital transformation typically accomplish it through strategic partnerships. According to the 
survey from Teladoc and Health Management Academy, 77% of health systems partner with external organizations on digital health.

Mario Schlosser, CEO of Oscar Health, an insurtech, said the company partnered with Holy Cross Health, a Catholic, teaching hospital in Florida and Florida-based Memorial Healthcare System, to create a Medicare Advantage plan. It also partnered with AdventHealth in Florida, which has its own health plan. He said the partnerships are centered on using data to improve membership engagement.

Jefferson Health went the extra step when it launched a partnership with VC firm General Catalyst to fund and partner with digital health companies. It also co-developed a hospital-at-home platform, even though it would hurt short-term revenue, Klasko said.

“Moody’s has downgraded a lot of health systems. Part of the reason they kept (Jefferson) at an A-stable rating was we were not only reacting to the changes that would affect our traditional revenue streams, but we also we started to own a certain percentage of those (digital health) companies that would do the disrupting,” Klasko said.

Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle, chief innovation officer of One Medical, a tech-enabled primary-care company, recommended health systems and digital health companies sign long-term deals. He said his most successful partnerships with health systems as a digital health entrepreneur have been 10-year relationships.

“Both sides need that commitment,” Fernandopulle said. “We as the innovators need to get the funding and reassure partners we’re not going away.”

Murphy said Geisinger has developed a platform to help manage chronic conditions that uses AI, remote patient monitoring and patient-generated data technologies developed by external partners. She said the organization doesn’t want to be a software company and would rather partner. However, the partnerships must be mutually beneficial.

5. Finding talent is a barrier to transformation

Whether it’s a health system, insurer or a digital health company, panelists agreed the biggest challenge is finding talent, particularly as health systems tackle digital transformation initiatives.

Khan, the first-ever chief digital officer at Mayo Clinic, went from leading a team of 200 staffers to 700 since she started in 2019. Yet, finding people remains a huge challenge. “We’re competing with technology companies for talent,” she said.

Providence, based in suburban Seattle, competes with Microsoft and Amazon for talent, said B.J. Moore, the health system’s chief information officer. To solve this problem, it has hired engineers in India.

“Three years ago we had zero Providence employees outside the U.S. and now we have 550 engineers in India,” Moore said. “We have a 24/7 engineering cycle. While we’re asleep in the U.S., they’re engineering in India and vice versa.”

Amid clinician burnout, Providence’s chief people officer, Greg Till, said flexibility is how health systems will engage and retain employees. Health systems need to give employees what they need where they want it and when they want it. He said Providence uses data to better understand employees.

“We have gathered a lot of data over the last two to three years and can predict with 95% accuracy where our staffing needs are going to be three to six months out,” Till said. “We can pinpoint the effectiveness of our interventions—whether it’s caregiver rounding, additional pay schemes or more flexibility—based on attrition at the unit level, caregiver function level and we’re perfecting it at the patient level.”