ViVE 24 panelists share how they are transforming health through human-centered design

How many times have you read about an innovative digital health pilot or startup that never scales? Hundreds of times? More?

That’s why I was thrilled to hear from some of my panelists at last week’s ViVE 2024, all of whom brought tactical, real-world strategies for how they are leading human-centered digital health transformation at scale.

Why have digital health investments over the last decade failed to transform health care in meaningful ways? “The reason why is because we as clinicians weren’t included in most of the solutions that were designed,” said Dr. Eve Cunningham, Chief of Virtual Care and Digital Health at Providence. “You have to work together with the people who actually do the work to design the solutions.” Dr. Cunningham also told the audience at EY’s event that she was pleased to see more clinicians mingling in the crowd at ViVE alongside the developers of health technology, something I noted as well. ?

Whereas previously, her organization may have had tech scouts who were not clinicians, now they partner the tech and business experts with the physicians and nurses. They also make sure the projects they select address one of three existential challenges for health care: workforce shortage/burnout, hospital throughput and capacity, or care fragmentation. It’s a nimble but focused approach. ?

In addition to building solutions with the clinician, my takeaway from the EY panel is that you need to gain executive commitment for the pilot — but more importantly, to go beyond the pilot. Also, your change management has to be rock solid, and you need to use the data and proof points to win over the doubters in the organization.

“I really don't take on a project unless I can walk into any room with a patient and explain to that patient why what we're doing is good for them,” said Dr. Sarah Pletcher, Executive Medical Director for Strategic Innovation at Houston Methodist. Then storytelling is key to prove to executive leadership and the bedside care team that the projects “truly in their heart give time and care and comfort back to the patient and the care team and actually make sense for the financial performance of the health system.”

It’s also important to show clinicians, not just tell them, how a new digital health solution will change care delivery. For example, Dr. James Mault, CEO of BioIntelliSense, sees something click for clinicians when he can show them data from their own hospital of how his company’s wearable BioButton can continuously monitor vital signs and proactively identify a patient deterioration event earlier. “There's this epiphany. People want to take better care of their patients and if you show them how much better this can be, they come willingly, but it does take time,” he said.

Providence also has used a human-centered design model for their clinical intelligence engine MedPearl, which helps make sense out of the reams of information that can overwhelm clinicians daily. “We need tools that not only help us summarize information and give us data insights; we need actionable intelligence,” said Dr. Cunningham. They involved frontline clinicians in determining the information that should be surfaced to clinical teams, and how it should be presented and organized on screen. The team asked for continuous feedback and iterated based off that feedback.

Semantics was also an issue in some health systems. Dione Rogers, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer for an NHS Trust in England, said her team actually found success by dropping the use of the word “pilot.” People perceived a pilot as something that passed or failed, started then stopped. So they shifted to using “pioneer” instead when deploying a new app. “People loved when we said, ‘Do you want to be a pioneer?’ Oh, my goodness. We rolled this app out in record time.”

Dr. Pletcher agreed that the perception of a “pilot” can inhibit some. “Lots of times, people use the pilot as a cop out to just get something done and through the door instead of taking a minute to actually envision it to scale,” she said.

The bottom line, as Dr. Mault summed up, is something I tell health systems across the globe: “We must make this transformation, or a lot of people are going to suffer and we're not going to be able to pay for it.”

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The views reflected in this blog are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.