Executing on Digital Transformation in 2020 and Beyond

The following is a guest article by Julie Mann, Chief Commercial Officer at Carium.

A Success Story in the Year of Vision

For healthcare, 2020 has truly become the year of vision — exposing endless opportunities for improvement and launching enterprise-wide projects. Edward Marx and Paddy Padmanabhan just released their compelling guide for healthcare leaders titled, “Healthcare Digital Transformation — How Consumerism, Technology and Pandemic are Accelerating the Future.”

Healthcare IT Today featured a talk and live Q&A with the book’s co-author, Edward Marx. The collaborative session focused on the “5 Keys to Developing a Digital Strategy” and served as a great opportunity for learning. The five keys are:

  1. Create a Compelling Vision
  2. Establish a “Team of Teams”
  3. Collect Multiple Inputs
  4. Organizational Alignment and Buy-in
  5. Resource for Duration

In my previous article, we explored the first key, “Create a Compelling Vision” by reviewing the definitions of digital transformation and vision statements. We also looked at iconic brands as inspiration. Today, I want to explore an example of a healthcare organization that is executing on their vision statement on their digital transformation journey: Perfect Care.

Their mission is to, “transform cardiac care by engaging each patient and their family — in the comfort of their home — with a novel, personalized approach. Perfect Care fosters collaboration between leading health care teams with the aims of learning faster and continuously improving the quality of cardiac care.”

Their chairman and executive director, Dr. Kevin Lobdell, is one of healthcare’s brightest leaders. He recently shared with me their unique vision statement — cleverly displayed as their name “Perfect Care.” Their digital transformation journey began about two years ago. Dr. Lobdell aspired to transform the peri-procedural care experience for all (patients, their family members/loved ones, and care team) and he called it what he aspired it to be — PERFECT care. The vision statement was inspiring and crystal clear. He built a world-class team and began executing against the charter.

The results were impressive: decreased length of hospital stay, avoided 28 emergency visits,195 interventions, and decreased hospital readmission rate for the 171 patients that went through their program. However, challenges presented themselves in the form of not optimal care team and patient experiences. Perfect Care was using a collection of technologies, devices, and manual processes that made it cumbersome. For example, to enroll new patients into the program, it took 90 minutes on average per patient. Dr. Lobdell aimed to scale their program and sought out a virtual care technology partner to streamline the digital experience.

In the Spring of 2020, Perfect Care partnered with Carium, a leading patient-centric platform for virtual care — where I currently serve as Chief Commercial Officer. We recently launched the Perfect Care program at Atrium Health, the first of many health systems in the Perfect Care collaborative. Dr. Lobdell also serves Atrium Health as a Professor and the Director of Regional Cardiovascular and Thoracic Quality, Education, and Research.

To support the 90-day post surgical care program, patients are equipped with a mobile application, Bluetooth enabled blood pressure cuff, digital scale, and Fitbit. The app is used to automate and streamline the program, from capturing patient biometric data, PROMIS surveys at predefined intervals, scheduling touchpoints with care teams, etc. It allows patients to be connected, engaged, and monitored by their trusted care team from their home, during this critical post-surgical recovery period. The Perfect Care clinical team can efficiently and effectively monitor their patients and proactively intervene when needed. The virtual care technology compliments and augments the care team to enable them to provide individualized care at scale.

The results are highly personalized care. After the first month, Perfect Care was able to streamline the experience for patients and their care teams. The once cumbersome onboarding process was reduced from 90 minutes per patient to less than 20 minutes. As a result, the Perfect Care team is already realizing one of their aims: delivering better care — at scale. With Carium, they were able to have a record month for patients supported.

Another benefit of Perfect Care’s digital transformation is the collection of rich, real-time biometric data and patient reported outcomes. Together with their clinical and technology partners, Perfect Care is able to curate clinical, financial, biometric, and patient reported outcome measures. This combined data set is foundational to unlocking insights into additional care improvement.

A core goal of Perfect Care is to extend their program to other health systems to collaborate, learn, and improve the periprocedural care journey together. Through the generosity of The Duke Endowment, Perfect Care received it’s seed funding. By expanding adoption, collaborating with others and together producing insights, Perfect Care intends to create a sustainable program and with their outcomes to date — they are well positioned to make that happen.

Per my previous article, the most powerful vision’s are bold, simple, articulate, and widely embraced by members of the organization. The future of healthcare is bright — but only because the bold are determined to make it so. Dr. Lobdell and his world-class team at Perfect Care embody bold-determination, with a strong dedication to collaboration to bring positive change to the patient and provider experience. They have a bold vision statement and are executing on their digital transformation promise of delivering perfect care. To learn more about them, please find them online at https://perfectcare.org/.

I hope this example of a powerful built-in vision statement and their success story helps you on your digital transformation journey and I hope you enjoyed the EXPO.health Digital Transformation Experience with Ed Marx on October 6th.

About Julie Mann:
Julie Mann is the Chief Commercial Officer at Carium. She is passionate about delivering innovative solutions to make healthcare work better for all. Julie provides leadership on the go-to-market strategy at Carium and enables healthcare’s digital transformation through virtual care and remote patient monitoring.  Carium empowers providers to deliver relationship-based, digital care across multiple clinical specialties, Carium extends the reach and impact of care teams through real-time collaboration with patients enhanced by actionable data insights and research-backed support for behavior modification.

   

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