At the upcoming Mid-Atlantic Health IT Summit on June 3 in Philadelphia, presented by Healthcare Innovation, one of the advisory council members is Neil Gomes, who is the chief digital officer and senior vice president for technology innovation and consumer experience at the Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. Gomes attests that in the evolving healthcare landscape, patient care organization leaders should be prioritizing two fundamental principles—that the consumers can drive strategy and that technology can bring about change. Gomes will be speaking at the Mid-Atlantic HIT Summit, and recently discussed with the publication topics of healthcare consumerism and digital innovation.
You certainly hold an interesting title when considering where healthcare is today and how things are continuing to change—digitally, and otherwise. Can you explain your role and responsibilities?
The chief digital officer (CDO) role is one that has been around in other industries for some time, but not so much in healthcare. There might only be about seven or eight CDOs in healthcare across the U.S. in the provider space. To a large extent, I architected this position [at Jefferson Health] myself, and what I wanted to have at the center of it was digital innovation and consumer experience. With companies like Netflix, Amazon, Tesla, and Apple, if you dig beneath the surface, they started with a belief that the consumer needs to be at the center of everything they do. Consumers come first, the staff comes second, and shareholders come third. At the confluence of two strong beliefs—that the consumer can drive your strategy and that technology can bring about change—you can find a lot of value.
So who can lead this change? It usually cannot be the responsibility of someone who has already been there and who has been using technology as a tool, like a CIO (chief information officer) or CTO (chief technology officer). Most of these individuals are heavily burdened, highly underfunded, and being asked to do new things with technology all the time. If you ask these same people to innovate and focus on the consumer at a broad level on top of that, most people would say yes they can do that, but they wouldn’t succeed because they just don’t have the time.
That is why you need a different kind of thought leader who can be exclusively focused on using technology to bring about change and be savvy enough to understand what consumers want. That involves doing the research, using designers, taking that data, bringing it into new services and products, building business models, and then infusing them into an operational climate of an organization. Years ago, people realized that technology is important and there should be a CIO. But they didn’t suggest that the CFO (chief financial officer) should manage it. It needed its own person to lead.
What are some ways Jefferson Health is specifically becoming more consumer-focused?
One example is by looking at the access point in healthcare organizations. If you call after 6 p.m. for an appointment, they will tell you to call in the morning at 8 a.m. And these are really large, multibillion dollar organizations that do this. If you are sick, you want to speak to someone now and have a consult, rather than wait. But in healthcare, we have conditioned people to wait. Sometimes patients will not even bother calling after 6 p.m.; they will go to an urgent care center or ER instead, and that is not optimal.
There are so many technologies now, such as chatbots, that could take information and put it into a call center, if needed. It’s ironic that in most of these organizations, you do have a 24/7 IT help desk, but you will not have a 24/7 contact center for patients to get appointments. It’s a simple thing we can do in healthcare—open our doors and treat ourselves like any other kind of business.
Sometimes you cannot get an appointment for three months. How can I ask a customer to wait three months to get something they want now? We have created a lot of volume in the last few years behind online appointments that don’t even need a call center. You can just log onto our Epic [electronic health record] or go on the web, create an account, and make an appointment 24/7. We have also started JeffConnect, our telehealth platform, that is available 24/7 and is much cheaper than going into an urgent care clinic.
On the convenience side, we need to close the loops on a lot of the experiences you provide. We shouldn’t be letting patients leave until all their questions have been answered.
What kind of culture shift is required for this? Does getting providers and health system leaders on board prove challenging?
The really hard part is being able to convince your [executive leadership] that this can produce tremendous value for the organization, and convince them you can create a solution to these problems. People know these problems exist and that these technologies exist, but no one has been able to put the two together to create a sustainable solution and deliver continuously to the organization. That takes creative thinking and great execution.
