How can an intelligent health ecosystem create a smarter health experience?

The future of health care is not about the shift to digital. It is about people. Accustomed to on‑demand and self‑directed experiences in other areas of their digital lives, consumers and clinicians expect something more from health care. In combination, smart health technology, along with empathetic human touch, will transform how care is organized and experienced. Optimizing experience will be a key differentiator in terms of long‑term value for the health industry. If the experience of care is elevated, you can truly drive execution to reach the full potential of the quadruple aim: improved anytime, anywhere patient care experience, better and more equitable access and outcomes, improved clinical experience and lower costs.

Video transcript:

Hi everybody. I'm Aloha McBride, EY’s Global Healthcare Leader. I'm so happy to be with you today at this spotlight. I'm going to be talking today about intelligent health ecosystems and how to create smart health experience. First of all, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about EY's point of view on this as well as a recent white paper we've published and hopefully we'll be able to see you lastly at HLTH in October. But first off let me just say at EY, we believe that the future of healthcare is not about the shift to digital. It's about people. We are all accustomed to on-demand services and self-directed experiences and other areas of our digital lives, so we believe consumers and clinicians should expect the same in health. We believe that smart health technology combined with an empathetic human touch will be how we transform care and how care is organized differently in the future. It is important to note that optimizing the experience of health care will be a key differentiator in terms of long-term value in the health industry in the future. We believe that if this care experience is elevated, we can truly drive a differentiated experience as well as significant improvements in outcomes for our health experience patients and also for all of our ministries of health, consumer health providers, as well as our payer clients. 

So let me tell you a little bit about the white paper that we recently published. We started off by interviewing healthcare professionals, payers, providers, med tech companies, around the globe from the US, from Europe as well as from southeast Asia, and we really examined their real world experiences in driving customer engagement in healthcare and really creating value and we have some of those use cases within the paper. We augmented our interviews really with some desktop research as well as inputs from our own global health experts. And at the end of the day we came across through our analysis of what we believe are three important shifts that we're going to be seeing in healthcare. 

The first one, in order to enable that smart health experience is systematically paying attention to what matters most to each unique patient. So really getting at that N-of-1 experience the second shift, and I'll go into more details for each of these in a moment, but the second shift is that all of the players in the health ecosystem must work together to support the unique needs of that unique patient that again N-of-1 and that lastly driving user acceptance of a digital first strategy or digital first care experience must be built on long-term driving towards trust. And this trust really has to do with understanding how your users are using the technology that you're offering, how you've designed and implemented all of the appropriate security and privacy controls, and that you're really offering a tailored experience for each of your patients. 

So first just to orient around the smart health experience and driving a strategy towards that within the health system. You know I talked about paying attention to what matters most to the individual and it's super important that health systems really take care to understand what the value proposition is when they determine that they'd like to deploy different technology to strategize with different ecosystem partners, to change operating models, and to leverage different data sets, that they're really doing this in the interest of their consumer and of their workforce. And we know that in this highly competitive market consumer stickiness is really going to be the driver to value and for your customers to stay engaged with your health system. 

The second shift, that formulation of those smart health ecosystems is also critically important. It's nearly impossible for a health system to do all that it needs to do itself. It will rely on lots of different ecosystem partners and all of these ecosystem partners must be working together in a concerted effort to improve the consumer experience as well as the workforce experience. And in doing so is highly aligned towards driving better outcomes as well as better access to healthcare services. Really pulling together all of those parties online and offline, these health ecosystems can really drive efficient care as well as provide different perspectives on the consumer and on the workforce relative to the data they're creating and providing as well as the analytics that they're doing to really help understand the way in which the consumer would like to be cared for.  

And then lastly when we think about digital first strategies and user acceptance and the adoption of digital care, we know that this has to be built on trust and really oriented towards that user experience, really taking care to understand how every aspect of the enterprise is driving digital in the way it operates and really moving from kind of going digital to actually being digital. And this step will really define how a health ecosystem partner strategy can coexist within the greater enterprise of the health care provider. 

So really just to summarize I think we have to be oriented around trust and we know that trust has to be earned and that's going to be earned through that empathetic human touch and really driving care experiences that are unique for that particular individual. This systematic approach to understanding your consumers individually as unique people and being able to really understand what drives them, what engages them will really be key to the strategy of a better health engagement for consumers. And we all are taking the view of a digital first experience to heart I believe. We're seeing this around the globe with the creation of new virtual hospitals and the need to really have that ecosystem based on a networked platform structure that will help to share information as well as protect information and drive user experience of that new model of care. So with that I really hope you can check out the paper. I think you'll find it very interesting. You can find more information at www.ey.com/exploresmarthealth.

With that, I really hope I will see you at HLTH in October and I wish you all a great day. Thank you so much.