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How Healthcare Providers, Payers Are Connecting Patients to Care

At the Connected Health Virtual Summit, Banner Health and UnitedHealthcare leaders offered a glimpse into the technologies and care delivery models they use to connect patients to healthcare.

Anuja Vaidya
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Published: 03 Nov 2022

Providers have more ways than ever before to connect patients with healthcare services. The digital health boom, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in a wide range of connected care technologies and strategies that can help ensure access to every part of the care continuum.

At Xtelligent Healthcare Media's 3rd Annual Connected Health Virtual Summit, held in October, leaders from provider and payer organizations discussed how they are employing digital health tools to connect patients to care, the challenges they faced in deploying these technologies, and the strategies helping them address lack of healthcare access and other barriers.

CREATING A SEAMLESS PATIENT EXPERIENCE

The healthcare arena is becoming increasingly crowded. Not only has there been a proliferation of startups, but large, well-established technology companies, like Amazon and Google, are also making inroads into the industry. As a result, healthcare consumers' options to find and access care have grown significantly.  

This has prompted health systems like Phoenix-based Banner Health to revamp their digital solutions to connect with consumers and create a seamless patient care journey.

"We want to create one experience for our consumers so that they can start to rely directly on Banner," said Christopher Stallings, the health system's senior director of consumer digital, during a keynote address at the virtual event.

Stallings and his team focus on assessing patients' digital needs and preferences and providing new and upgraded solutions to ease their care experience. These solutions are organized around healthcare experiences, such as finding the right level of care, scheduling appointments, preparing for the visit, and so on.

The team has been responsible for deploying and upgrading several consumer-facing solutions at Banner Health. In some cases, upgrading an existing solution to make it more user-friendly meant looking to familiar platforms for inspiration. Stallings' team did this when upgrading the health system's online booking platform for urgent care visits.

"We had a tool that did a very good job of simply creating that appointment but didn't look great," Stallings said. "It wasn't something that our consumers were used to seeing and interacting with."

The Banner Health consumer digital team revamped the platform, making it look and feel more like Open Table.

"OpenTable is something that consumers were already used to," Stallings said. "They had experience with [it] and were able to easily understand [it]. Simply by changing [the platform] to a new form, we were able to go from a conversion rate of about 11 percent to 42 percent. That enabled our marketing team to basically cut almost all paid search and simply just convert on the business that was coming in already."

To ensure patient uptake of connected care solutions, providers must not only deploy solutions that are intuitive and user-friendly, but they must also take into account consumer behavior.

For instance, Stallings and his team found that when it came to consumers using the health system's symptom checker, the time taken to provide a recommendation matters. The symptom checker helps patients understand what medical issue they may be experiencing after they have provided a list of their symptoms and points them to the type of care they may need.

"We found a Goldilocks effect, and what I mean by that is you could easily have a symptom checker that could take 10 seconds, or you could have one that could take a half hour," he said. "And…those scenarios are the extremes, right? Where if it's way too short, then your consumers don't believe what [it recommends], and if it takes too long, they don't finish [the process]."

The sweet spot appears to be one and a half minutes, Stallings added. This is enough time to gain the patient's trust and make the symptom checker's recommendation feel credible so that the patient takes the recommended action.

"[About] 16 percent [of patient concerns] were actually de-escalated," he said. "So, individuals that thought they might be going to the emergency room and could actually go to the urgent care, or [those] that thought they needed to go to urgent care but could actually have a telehealth visit."

EXPANDING ACCESS TO HYBRID CARE

Though telehealth use has dropped significantly since 2020, it appears likely to remain a crucial part of care delivery. As a result, healthcare stakeholders are focusing on developing hybrid models of care that incorporate virtual and in-person treatment modalities.

For payers, incorporating hybrid care models into health insurance coverage can help support an overarching goal: reducing the cost of care.

"We know that virtual care incorporated with in-person care can help make coverage more affordable, and it takes costs out of the system," said Karen Silgen, general manager and vice president of virtual care at UnitedHealthcare, during a keynote presentation. "That includes just going to the appropriate site of service, lower-cost settings, [and] going to providers that offer unique virtual care services before in-person is needed."

UnitedHealthcare has changed its reimbursement policy to encourage patients to participate in virtual clinic visits with their providers when appropriate.

"And oftentimes I get asked, 'Well, is there a different member benefit?' or 'How would they access virtual care through their provider?'" Silgen said. "And I often describe that a member has a benefit, for example, for an office visit. It could be a $10 co-pay, and that member then can go see their primary care provider in the office, or they can see their primary care provider via virtual care, and it falls [under] the office visit benefit."

Part of the payer's overall member strategy is to facilitate virtual-first connectivity between providers and patients. According to Silgen, if patients have a digital entry point into the healthcare system, they tend to use it. And though not all care can be provided virtually, digital services can help patients reach the right type of in-person care.

"The system has to be simple, it has to be accessible, and it has to be seamless for people," she said. "And so, thinking about hybrid care, how do we create a simple solution so that people can move between virtual and in-person seamlessly?"

But for hybrid care models to be successful, quick and secure data-sharing is necessary.

Data not only needs to be shared across virtual and in-person care settings but also between telehealth modalities, such as live video/audio, audio-only, and asynchronous telehealth, Silgen said. 

Then, there is the rising use of wearables and the need to share data from those devices. Silgen stated that wearables — which are being used in remote patient monitoring efforts and at-home care programs, as well as in self-directed care models where people track their health and fitness goals and progress — expand the idea of virtual care beyond just telehealth.

"It's kind of shifting that focus a little bit from just virtual-only to care where you're at," she said. "It's really pulling everything together that we talked about, and kind of reinventing it to say where I am is where I can get healthcare."

As care delivery grows to include different types of digital options and in-person sites, healthcare stakeholders must consider how best to integrate these models to achieve key healthcare goals, like reducing costs and improving clinical outcomes.

"Virtual care as we think about it holistically is important, but that hybrid care model of wearables, in-person care, asynchronous-synchronous care, virtual care, is core to how healthcare is going to be evolving as we go forward," Silgen said.

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