Using Technology to Drive Your Consumer-Centric Strategy

Hoag chief digital officer, Kathy Azeez-Narain, shares how the health system developed an app to strengthen the relationship with its consumers and keep them connected to their health.

Today's healthcare consumer is more tech-savvy and connected than ever before. They want to be involved in how their care is delivered. They want more than a simple transactional relationship with their primary care physician. They want options and they want to be in the know.

To keep up with their patients, health systems are developing new strategies that focus on the connected consumer. This includes developing patient portals and digital health apps that connects patient to provider at any time and place.

Kathy Azeez-Narain, who serves as vice president and chief digital officer for Hoag, a regional health system in Orange County, California, helped develop Hoag Compass as part of their consumer-centric strategy. The application and services provided help connect their patients to their health and strengthen the relationship between patients and physicians.

Azeez-Narain recently spoke with HealthLeaders about the app's success so far, and offered her thoughts on consumer-focused technology being integrated in healthcare.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: What are your thoughts on healthcare organizations using technology to be more consumer-focused?

Kathy Azeez-Narain: It's obviously a necessary thing right now. As you think about where healthcare is, the demand from the consumer market and patients' expectations on what the experience needs to be like for them within healthcare is high on the list.

Healthcare has been on that journey for a little bit now. COVID probably accelerated that as well, where the consumer market is now in a more of a demanding state: I want things that are more accessible and convenient. I want to be able to reach doctors in different mediums, not just in the traditional office setting. Technology has a critical role in enabling a consumer-centric strategy; it's necessary as we think about what's ahead. But beyond that, it's become almost table stakes for us to be able to compete in today's market.

HL: What trends are you seeing in the digital space for consumers?

Azeez-Narain: AI is playing a critical role these days in how we use our data, and how personalized we can be in our outreach and in our products that consumers are going to interact with.

Virtual primary care models and virtual pharmacy models, those are high on the list, and there's demand from consumers. A big one that's come up recently is in the behavioral health space and mental health, and supporting that entire community getting virtualized. COVID shed a light on tools like Talkspace, Headspace, etc, that people can tap into, and now more and more you're hearing about companies that are heading in that direction.

So, quite a few trends from the AI world to the different care models, and [we are] virtualizing them to net new niches that are leveraging digital technology to reach patients about episodic and or pre-episodic care that they might be looking for.

HL: Why did Hoag create Compass and what pain points do you hope to address with it?

Azeez-Narain: I joined Hoag in 2020 right in the heat of the pandemic, and this was a newly created role in the organization that I came in and took on. The intent of it was to address what problems are there for our customer base where digital solutions could be built to help solve.

Overarching, the strategy has been around what are the true problems we see in the Orange County market from patients that exist today and/or new community members and customers. What do they want? How does digital help support that?

Step A was doing a body of research to listen and understand what are the needs out there. What are people asking for? What problems are they still dealing with within healthcare? Through that body of research, we came up with findings that people still want us to focus on and/or solve for them.

A couple that I can think of off the top of my head [are centered around how the patient/doctor relationship has changed:

• Patients don't want to just see their doctor once a year in one facility; they want to be able to communicate and have a dialogue with and reach them in between visits.
• Patients want the opportunity to book an appointment or to see their medical record.
• Patients don't want a transactional relationship with their physician.

Compass was born out of those ideas and feedback that we got from the community in the consumer market space. What we drill down into is there's this need from the market for Hoag to step into a relationship with patients pre-anything going wrong.

Compass embodies three pillars:

The first pillar embodies the accessibility area, which I would say is your logistical tasks that you might want to do, including meeting the doctor virtually, setting up appointments, looking at health records, and filling prescriptions.

The second pillar is the relationship with that physician and being able to build a relationship beyond just the moments of the visit, including messaging between visits.

The third pillar is continued access right into our world class care model and a larger care team. With Compass Plus, you get a care coordinator who gets to know you one-on-one and helps you at all the logistical things you're trying to take care of as it relates to your healthcare. You also get access to three health coaches and a registered dietician, exercise, and mindfulness coach.

We have patients on the app already that are coming to the Newport Beach Hoag On-Demand Care and Innovation Center that opened as part of the Compass offering. We have people already signed up on Plus that are talking to the coaches. Their feedback has been positive, and we've heard they feel connected to this larger care team and the accessibility of getting all of those things through the device, as well as feedback around experience.

We're trying to also ensure that as we add features, and as we think about what we're hearing and learning, that the user experience remains best-in-class and we continue to focus on that as a pillar.

HL: How do the different versions of the app work?

Azeez-Narain: There are two parts.

1. "Base model"

You can form a relationship with one of our primary care physicians here and you can download the app to be able to do all the accessibility pillar things that we talked about. [You can] book your appointment, you'll see your visit summary, [ and] you'll be able to see what kind of next steps you need to take.

You can come to the physical location, you can still see your doctor, and still have that relationship with your doctor. Your access is still there and you still have a deep relation that you can build with your physician.

2. Plus membership

When you move over to Plus membership, we're really going beyond a physician relationship. When you go into Plus, that is where you're going to get access to the health coaches and your care coordinator, who's helping all the logistical parts, and they're guiding you along the way as well to ensure you're getting the care you expect and the quality of care that you were expecting. You get your access to the three health coaches, you also get specialists connection from a Hoag-accredited specialist if you do have to go down that path. And you get your care plan, which is that additive component to get you going on a deeper level of insight about steps we are recommending you to take as you're trying to attain those goals. Part of the Plus model is you get access to the Premier Lounge, which is basically a space that you can come in and meet with the coaches.

I would think of Plus as we're really activating this additional suite of things on the whole care concept of health, whereas your base model is still there to support you through your relationship with a physician and trying to get normal level of care completed and done.

HL: What metrics will you use to track patient satisfaction and outcomes?

Azeez-Narain: From a metrics perspective, there are app downloads, usage, how often you're logging in, etc. But, there's a bigger angle that we're looking at. We want to help patients get to the goals they've set for themselves, the health outcomes they've set for themselves, and we want to make sure that what we're building here and what we're providing to the community is actually bringing value to them.

What will take us some time, because we need people in the model for a little bit more before we can pull some of that out, is going to be, did we see the population using these features getting more health benefits out of it? Are they achieving the goals that they were trying to achieve because of this model?  It comes down to: did we bring a new model of care into the market that is helping the lives within our community?

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