#010: Healthcare IT ROI: Show Me the Money

Last week we explored how a lean, agile approach is required in healthcare IT product development and marketing. 

Is there a payoff, a profit realized in the investment in healthcare IT? Can healthcare IT vendors make a real value case for their solutions? Sure, there are instances and signs, but the verdict is still out. Digital health, mobile health, telehealth integrations all too often are organizational disruptions rather than disruptive innovations leading to better communications and increased efficiencies in healthcare delivery.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into how a lean, agile approach is again the way forward to addressing healthcare IT ROI.

 

About This Show:

Each Wednesday, Sam Stern, founder and Chief Marketing Technologist at Modallic, an mHealth marketing and brand development firm reveals his winning Mobile, Digital and healthcare IT marketing strategies, shares real life Mobile Health marketing success stories, and offers breakthrough marketing tips and tactics so you can lead the field with your Mobile Health and healthcare IT solutions.

Discover how to craft compelling stories to open doors with key health care system decision makers. Understand how an agile marketing mindset and approach positions you to create a profitable, sustainable business.

Gain insights into Mobile Health and healthcare IT marketing strategy, how to tell your unique mHealth and healthcare IT marketing story, creating your mHealth buyer personas, how to integrate an agile marketing process, mobile health and digital health brand development and market positioning, and learn what really works in attracting and landing mobile health and healthcare IT clients.

 

Show Notes: 

Is Investment in Healthcare IT Profitable?

According to this article at Healthcare Technology Online, third party evidence shows clear evidence of the cost cutting power of healthcare IT. While the University of Michigan study cited in the article demonstrates that use of EHR vs. traditional paper-based patient records reduced outpatient care roughly 3%, it doesn’t reveal if investments in healthcare IT are profitable for healthcare providers. It’s too early in the game to know this.

Again, a comment on the HIMSS Linkedin Discussion Group goes to the heart of the challenge with healthcare IT. Catyln S., SVP at Integrated Healthcare Solutions and Strategies says:

“What I have found (by asking the % of time spent question) is that all EP’s (docs, nurses, etc) now spend more time facing a screen than actually facing a patient, this is not patient facing care….. 

Most importantly if we continue along the path of purchasing based on what the vendor can supply and has built rather than what is required (clinical, operational and non-tech teams need to be involved) we will continue to see lack luster ROI. 

Also the need for front end 1 to 1 (1 patient to their correct MRN) identity of demographic and clinical data is necessary, (MRN’s with multiples, overlays, dups, etc.) if we are to control cost, improve efficiency and reduce medical errors in care.”

Catlyn’s comment confirms what we talked about last week. Healthcare IT firms must adopt a lean Build-Test-Learn approach to product development. This product development must start with the front line medical clinicians who are using the technology tools daily. Having a doctor or nurse spending more time facing computer or iPad screens rather than face to face with patients certainly isn’t going to improve patient engagement and quality of care. 

While the front-line medical clinicians want, and will use technology tools that help them better communicate, access the right information at the right time for the right patient, and as a result deliver healthcare more effectively and efficiently, what does the healthcare organization’s executive leadership want from healthcare IT?

In most cases, the healthcare organization’s executive team, the leaders who actually make the buying decision on healthcare IT system changes, want to avoid making an expensive mistake. As a result, they will fall back to what the current vendor or prospective vendors can supply, rather than what they front line clinicians actually want and use. Customers don’t really know what they want, and what will actually work, until you put it in their hands and let them experience it. Getting the healthcare organization’s agreement to ‘buy” the Build-Test-Learn must be part of your product and your marketing.

Perhaps a Build-Test-Learn front-line assessment is the initial “product” you sell to the healthcare organization.?

As Ken Congdon says in his article:

“To me, the best way to gain a sense of the true potential of health IT is to look at individual facilities that are leveraging technology solutions effectively instead of a collective population. More often than not, the facilities succeeding with health IT are applying it to solve very specific organizational or process problems as opposed to simply adopting technology for the incentive dollars.”

Use a Lean, Agile approach to develop products that solve individual organizations very specific problems. And, at the same time, Build-Test-Learn your marketing message. Gather the language front-line clinicians use to describe these problems and how they responded to your solutions. Use this language to market and sell to the healthcare organization’s executive team your enterprise IT solution. Capture the success stories that emerge from your tests and tell them in your marketing to attract additional healthcare organization clients.

Next week… What Healthcare IT Entrepreneurs Should Never Do

 

Resources:

Finally… Proof of Health IT ROI– article at Healthcare Technology Online

HIMSS LInkedin Discussion: Finally… Proof of Health IT ROI

 

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