The Transformational Impact of The Collaboratives on Healthcare Digital Thinking
In today’s world, providing a streamlined and positive experience is not only preferred by patients, but expected. When someone checks into a hospital or physician office, seeking help for a chronic or acute condition, there are feelings of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. These feelings are not only felt by the patient but also by friends and family and others in their circle of care. Many companies are working to use experience design methodologies to alleviate these feelings and improve the overall patient experience. One company in particular, Flagler Health+, which includes an award winning 335-bed hospital that has a 130-year legacy of caring for the St. Augustine community, joined the Digital Healthcare Collaborative to do just that—take friction out of the patient experience through ideation and co-creation research.
Their Challenge:
Flagler Health+ was on a mission. Organizational leaders knew they needed to develop a digital strategy and make the healthcare experience more seamless to better serve their patients, but more importantly, they wanted to become a total care enterprise aimed at advancing the physical, social, and economic health of Northeast Florida communities. They wanted to support their community 24/7, 365 days a year for overall wellness and not just the critical times when patients need acute care.
When Flagler Health+ first joined The Collaboratives, we worked together to pinpoint 10 ideas around leveraging digital tools to better engage patients and take friction out of the patient experience. This initial research was essential to understanding where we, Stone Mantel and the Flagler Health+ team, needed to dedicate our time and efforts. The Flagler Health+ team used their 10-idea research and past research done by the Digital Healthcare Collaborative to form the basis of their future road map. Valuable past research for the team included learnings on what makes a trusted partner, supporting behavior change, patient engagement, data experience design, nuances on what makes for good notifications, and what is stupid, dumb, smart and genius in healthcare. The Digital Healthcare Collaborative provided the space, the research, and a process for Flagler Health+ to “Think Forward”.
Flagler Health+ & Healthfully (Creating the Virtual Health Village of the Future)
After all their planning, securing funding and ideating, in a press release, Flagler Health+ announced that they formed “an agreement [with Healthfully] to develop and deliver an integrated, HIPAA-compliant consumer platform that will serve as a virtual health village for consumers.” They chose Healthfully for their expertise and holistic platform needed to deliver on such a project. It was a great arrangement to quickly advance Flagler Health+’s vision to advance the physical, social and economic health of Northeast Florida Communities.
The Virtual Health Village Eliminates Friction and Provides Additional Access
The goal of the Virtual Health Village of the Future is to eliminate friction across all aspects of the healthcare continuum and serve as an engaging, singular space where patients and families can access virtual care, view and update health information, participate in social communities, communicate with providers, receive reminders, schedule appointments and more. Instead of touching base on a traditional yearly or bi-yearly basis, Flagler Health+ can be constantly involved in the well-being of their community. Having an all in one easy-to-use tool was at the forefront of this technology build. Healthfully used the research from The Collaboratives to ensure they are taking friction out of healthcare experiences and improving engagement with health. Paul Viskovich, CEO of Healthfully, says “We designed the app to be easy for users to engage with and manage their health and the health of their families. Over a third of app users are age sixty or above.”
Breadth of Unified Touchpoints
The Flagler Health Anywhere App has quickly iterated to include inpatient, outpatient, COVID, wellness coaching and community services. Healthfully was able to rapidly add in features to the app for COVID fast pass testing and COVID tracking to help the community get back to work.
In support of its vision, Flagler Health+ supports four county school districts through a program called BRAVE. The program serves as the HUB for behavioral health service referrals for 149 schools across Northeast Florida. Leveraging the Flagler Health+ Anywhere App, BRAVE receives school-based referrals and screens families for the most appropriate behavioral health support. School counselors and social workers are linked to the platform and can refer kids for a variety of behavioral health services and the “Brave to Speak” wellness community in the virtual health village. Once connected, each student and family is paired with a BRAVE Care Navigator to support their journey of becoming embedded with a provider. The Flagler Health + Anywhere App provides a smooth process for electronic referrals, eligibility, and real-time insight to improve wellbeing.
Over 32,000 people in the community use the platform and recent satisfaction was 4.94 out of 5 stars. Users love that the app pulls together inpatient, outpatient, Apple watch and other health devices into a single place for them to track their health.
The team at Flagler found it extremely helpful to have a third-party research firm help inform decision-making and share insights with key constituents like board members and physicians, as they refined their strategy, invested in a technology partner and launched their living lab. “The research that the Collaborative conducted on our behalf was integral to the development of our digital point of view and our road map, which we have nearly completed today,” commented Gina Mangus, Flagler Health+ EVP of Strategy & Advancement. “The depth and breadth of the research instilled confidence in our board that we were moving down the right path and supported buy-in from our physician partners and clinicians.”
The team isn’t done as they work toward their mission to support the community. Through innovative partnerships, they are seeing patients virtually via kiosks in grocery stores and local schools. They continue to focus on mental health as they work to deploy daily depression screeners and other key messages using geolocation insights, which are already available in the app today. They also want to use the platform to further improve the inpatient experience.