Q&A: 'With anything truly transformational, it takes time to educate the consumer'

Three years ago, Piedmont Healthcare tapped Katie Logan—then the Atlanta-based health system’s vice president of marketing and physician outreach—as its first-ever vice president of experience. Logan, who joined Piedmont nearly 10 years ago after working as a management consultant with KPMG, has since led efforts to increase patient convenience and make access to care easier throughout Georgia, rolling out projects like online scheduling, telemedicine and other services that create a “digital front door” to the health system. Logan spoke with Modern Healthcare technology reporter Jessica Kim Cohen about how she scales these projects across the 11-hospital system, from the initial implementation to evaluating success or failure. The following is an edited transcript.

MH: What does experience mean for Piedmont and what responsibilities fall under your purview in that role?

Logan: The experience for Piedmont is about creating a one-of-a-kind interaction and making it easier for our patients and their families to access and navigate the health system. Under that umbrella, we think about program development and execution. So it’s a little bit of the innovation and technology and digital solutions to support that, as well as partnering with operations and other areas of the business to deploy it and make it a reality. We think about everything from online scheduling, to partnering with revenue cycle on patient billing statements, to owning the business side for our patient portal and all of the functionality that comes with that. Ultimately we want to get into more customer service and more of that human interaction.

MH: What you would say a digital front door is and what is driving patient interest in it?

Logan: That phrase intrigues me because I think what’s driving us to talk about a digital front door is this expectation that we should be able to access goods and services right in the palm of our hands and that healthcare should be no different. But at the same time, it’s really about meeting people where they are and putting that convenience out there.

And so when I think of the digital front door from a Piedmont Healthcare perspective it’s a lot about the tools and programs to make it easier for folks to access our services. So it’s online scheduling, it’s a mobile app that’s useful and keeps people coming back. But it goes beyond that as well, to the point about meeting people where they are. If you want to make a phone call, we want to be able to provide you that same great experience on the phone or online.

MH: How do you roll out these projects to all of your different hospitals in different areas?

Logan: We have 11 hospitals, and we’ve nearly doubled in size over the last five years through acquisitions. And we’ve gone from a pretty central radius in north Georgia to a true statewide presence, so deploying programs like this at scale is probably one of the most challenging things.

In an example like online scheduling, we started with a group of interested providers and went live with them, got some data points that proved it worked and then started to scale across the rest of the physician network. So just standing it up, turning it on, iterating and learning as we go. And that’s true for all of our programs.

There are definitely regional differences. We have a lot of online scheduling in metro Atlanta but not as much in more rural parts of the state. We have a hospital up in northeast Georgia in the mountains. We don’t have as much utilization there, so it helps us understand how we educate the consumer and start to have the conversation differently in those markets. With anything truly transformational in nature like this, it takes time to educate the consumer that this is now something they can expect and have as part of their healthcare experience.

MH: Any there particular metrics you’re looking at as benchmarks of success?

Logan: Anything we set out to do, we set key performance indicators (of) success. With online scheduling, some of those metrics are utilization of the different channels—mobile app versus patient portal versus website.

How do we then rethink the messaging and deployment strategy? We use some of those indicators. A few years ago, we launched virtual visits. You can talk to our providers over a mobile app and get your diagnosis and potentially get a prescription and be on your way. Lots of conversation about it in the industry, lots of prediction that this is the way it was going to go. We launched the product and nobody’s used it. And so we had to completely reassess our thought process around virtual visits and do we work on bringing it in-house and using our own physicians? Do we keep at it? Even though adoption is not really material, do we potentially outsource it to another third-party vendor?

That’s the way we went, because I think there’s still an expectation that it’ll take off.