HEALTHTECH: How have patients’ and clinicians’ expectations changed in the past six years when it comes to care access? What can attract a patient to a healthcare organization, and what helps clinicians stay at a provider organization?
WELCH: Early in my career, I was able to see consumerism develop in healthcare. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, that has become even more accelerated. It really opened the doors to different ways for people to access healthcare, through telehealth and other means. Since technology has driven change in other industries, we now all want convenience, immediate gratification, no abrasions. Patients want that experience as well. Convenience is expected, not a treat, and they don’t want healthcare to be hard to use.
For clinicians, they are still seeking a system of care where they can deliver in a personalized way that improves quality outcomes, without burning out and without the complexity that still exists. I do think technology has enabled a lot in healthcare, but for doctors, some of that has also meant learning new systems, so that complexity is still there.
At the end of the day, I think both providers and patients want the same things. For providers, it’s, “Can I deliver care in an easy way that allows me to establish trust, communication and still have a life?” And for patients, it’s, “Can I access care in a way that is not going to ruin my day, that’s going to be easy, that’s going to be personalized, and that allows me to maintain my humanity?”
HEALTHTECH: There are persistent challenges with patient engagement and care access that many organizations are trying to solve through technology. How does Sprinter Health address these challenges?
WELCH: I think we’ve done a great job of not losing sight of the importance of establishing that ease of access for patients as a means of engagement and trust. Two aspects of our model speak to each of those. One, technology is employed at Sprinter in a way to enable better clinical care delivery, as well as quality outcomes. Our digital tooling is used in the background. We’re using artificial intelligence to some extent, to accelerate those efficiencies. Tech-enabled, AI-driven operational efficiency, I think, is one of the core pieces that makes our model successful by helping us with patient engagement.
And then, the patients expect professionalism. Our workforce is one that we take pride in, in identifying people who understand the communities, who come from the communities and who are a W-2 workforce, as we call it, where they’re bought into our Sprinter vision of the way we deliver care. I think those two things really help to differentiate us and make sure that we don’t lose sight of trust and ease of access, which are critically important to patients.
READ MORE: Enhance patient care across settings with the connected care continuum.
HEALTHTECH: What work do providers still need to do to create a seamless care journey for patients? What’s the short-term outlook? And then in the long term, what still needs to happen?
WELCH: I think the answer for both is to get rid of care fragmentation. When I started in healthcare, we didn’t have a lot of the different resources we have now to make things a little easier for providers and patients. There’s been a lot of advances, but with those advances, we haven’t eliminated care fragmentation. In some ways, we’ve made it even worse. We’ve got to now start thinking about, how do we really deploy technology and what we know from decades and decades of delivering healthcare to reduce that fragmentation? We need touchpoints that are streamlined. We don’t need to overorchestrate the patient journey. The pathophysiology of illness has not changed, just how we approach those illnesses has changed, and we’ve got to do it in a way that’s much more seamless.
Stronger coordination between those touchpoints is critical. The ones that get it right will reduce fragmentation while still improving quality outcomes, decreasing patient abrasion, increasing trust, reducing provider burnout — all of those things go together to reduce and eliminate the care fragmentation that I still think is happening today.
