How to Invest in Healthcare Consumerism

Chris Hemphill:
Whoa. Okay. Everybody. We are now live and we are excited. Hello, healthcare. Hello, everybody on LinkedIn and hello to folks watching us on YouTube. We appreciate you spending a little bit of time with us this afternoon and what we’re excited about… What we’re discussing this week?
We’ve had conversations about what the retail disruptors and things like that are doing. What are some of the changes that we see coming a foot overall in healthcare? We’ve talked about that overall landscape, but what we wanted to do in this conversation is get more specific on what are the types of investments or what are the types of moves that we should make, or how do we validate our path down improving the consumer experience?
Because it’s a given now that there are organizations that are now heavily competing based on a lot of the gaps that they’ve seen existing in healthcare for a long time. So it’s incumbent on organizations to identify, “Hey, what are the gaps in the type of consumer experience that we’re offering and how do we value an approach to solving it?” So, to accomplish that, I brought in our CEO, Mike Linner, who has a background, not only within healthcare, but in other industries, such as finance, telecommunications and other things that have really sophisticated models of developing really deep consumer experiences. So, Hey Mike.

Mike Linnert:
Chris, thank you.

Chris Hemphill:
And also, we have Carrie Lichen. Carrie and I, we’ve been… This is need to tap for a really long time. I met her at a… While she was speaking on the impact of voice within healthcare at the Alexa Conference back in 2019. But Carrie actually leads healthcare efforts at Yext, which is a very consumer facing company that assist health systems in enabling much easier way finding experiences for their healthcare experience. But together there’s going to be a wealth of ideas and conversation and we invite you to join that conversation just regarding the types of experiences that consumers might be looking for. But Carrie, I just want you to be a chance to say, Hey.

Carrie Liken:
Hello, I’m happy to be here.

Chris Hemphill:
Okay, fantastic. Appreciate you. We want to get into it. I think folks want to get into. I see Terry speaking in the chat, hello Terry, shout out. And let’s just get into the conversation. I want to remove any barrier to understanding here. When I say consumer experience, it can mean a ton of different things and let’s get rid of the ambiguity and let’s just make sure that we’re all on the same table. So, how would you define the consumer experience within healthcare and is it different than the patient experience and let’s start with Carrie on that.

Carrie Liken:
Okay. Yeah, so think it’s interesting. The consumer experience, everyone’s saying, “Oh, consumer experience. We’re not going to be talking about a consumer.” But I think there’s always been a consumer experience and a patient experience. And I think that the consumer experience is the experience that you have with healthcare. When you’re looking for care, when you’re interacting with an organization, when you’re trying to interact or transact in that way.
You’re literally… Basically anything that you would be doing on Amazon, take that parallel and let’s talk about it for healthcare, that’s the consumer experience. But there’s also the experience of what happens when you’re getting care. I think that becomes the patient experience. I think the consumer experience is fairly poor. Generally speaking.
I think the patient experience, although, Mike you were talking about this earlier, you can talk about some examples there. I always thought that providers want to be able to provide really good care. So, the patient experience from a provider to patient standpoint, the providers are not… They’re not out there to give you a bad patient experience, but there are all of these elements around the experience itself that may lead you a poor patient experience. But I think and defining it as consumer experience is the interaction and then the patient experience is what’s happening when you’re actually receiving care. What would you think Mike?

Mike Linnert:
I agree. I think you’ve nailed it. And I think in healthcare, frankly, we are generally really, really good at the patient experience. And doctors go through years and years of training to be able to do this, nurses, everybody that surrounds a patient who’s in need. And I think we’re phenomenal. We should be proud of that, but consumer experience is separate and consumer experience to me is when I’m not inside the four walls, what’s my relationship like.
And maybe rather than a pining one way or the other, I’ll just invite people to compare it to what’s your consumer experience with Amazon? What’s your consumer experience with CVS? What’s your consumer experience? If you think about that, right? I would say those industries, those brand names are very proactive in thinking about how to engage me, how to create value for me, how to drive loyalty with me. And I think they’re doing those things in a way that health systems just fundamentally aren’t yet.

Carrie Liken:
I can think even about I bank with Capital One and I… And we even have a Capital One Cafe around the corner from where I live. And I don’t use cash for pretty much anything anymore. But I walking in there, if I do need to get cash, I can go to the ATM, they also have the Peet’s Coffee, et cetera. But what I think is the most memorable is when we bought our condo five years ago.
We had a large sum of money in our account that we needed to transfer to… I forget, to Escrow or whatever was. We had to get this large sum of money out of the account. And I called Capital One and they sent me through the IVR tree, but then I was talking to someone and I told them why we needed this large sum of money And the first thing they said was, “Congratulations, you’re meeting a goal that you had set out.”
Because in Capital One, you can actually name each of your accounts. So,, I had a house account. So we had saved the money for the condo, et cetera and they congratulated and they were like, “We’re going to take care of this.” So they didn’t make it… I think the worst part about it was the IVR tree that I had to go through.
So, even in financial services, which I wouldn’t necessarily say has the best consumer experience, I can say that there are certain companies out there including Capital One, where I would absolutely say, “This is wonderful. I will always patronize you. I will always be your customer because you make it so much better.” Can we say that about healthcare? No, not a single time could we say that about healthcare.
You could say it about an interaction with a doctor, just like, “Oh, Dr. Smith is such an excellent doctor. I’ll always recommend this doctor,” but the whole experience across the board to get to that doctor and then post, I would never have that same type of… I would never endorse for the most part because that consumer experience is so bad.

Chris Hemphill:
So given that, and I’m not being paid by Capital One, but I got to say that I really love my experience with them.

Carrie Liken:
You like them too.

Chris Hemphill:
Yeah. Oh yeah. Just from a data science perspective, I think about, if I ever get a fraud alert, there’s always a good reason for it, but a different soap box. First of all, I’m enthused by the energy from the audience in this conversation and curious just any kinds of thoughts or stories that you might have to share.
And I’d love to just read through those and maybe pop them on the screen. But while we’re thinking through that, Carrie, the type of… We’ve define the consumer experience, we’ve talked about what a good consumer experience looks like, but does any work on the consumer experience it will… Do you think that, that will actually have an impact on a health system’s ability to recover and retain revenue, given the pandemic and the scenario that we’re slowly moving out of.

Carrie Liken:
Yeah. I think you have to… Well, that’s a good question. I think you have to look at it in a short-term and long-term way. I was just talking to an academic medical center last week and we were talking about what’s going on with driving volume and where they were seeing patient volume that was increased or at least at pre-pandemic levels and then which service lines had volume that they were trying to figure out why are we not able to actually drive the same amount of volume? And we were talking about the consumerism and offering online appointment scheduling, for example, as just one, one piece of the convenience factor that people are now looking for.
And it’s interesting because I see this perspective within healthcare where organizations almost give up. So, this academic medical center said “We put together online appointment scheduling and we also put together virtual care literally overnight, last year. But, I have to admit that online appointment scheduling. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get there, because I just understand now that it’s just so difficult. There are just too many stakeholders involved and I just don’t think we’re going to be able to open up every physician schedule to be able to employ this, in at least the places where we can employ this.”
And they got off that call and I thought, “I’m so sad to hear that,” because I think the complexity exists far more in healthcare than it does outside of healthcare, but we need to be able to fight that. And so when we think about short-term and long-term, long-term, we need to get to a point where there is a much better experience and set the strategy to get there.
And that could take a really long time and that academic medical center I was talking to, might be taking the long approach because they just say, “Oh, this is so complicated. I’ll never [inaudible 00:10:00]. I think to short-term focus areas of just saying, “How can I improve something small? And as they make these small improvements, basically they’ll start to add up. So, how do I [inaudible 00:10:16] one small thing and then make that a better experience, take a look at the data behind it. How are you doing? And then, and then increasing to make another small improvement or a small increase.”
And I think a lot of times organizations look at the big picture and they say, “Oh Jesus, too hard. Now we’re going to take 10 years to do this.” But if we just take a look at these tiny little things. These tiny little things make up a big thing. And so maybe you won’t get immediate revenue, like pre-pandemic revenue from that small adjustment. But I do feel those small adjustments can really make a big impact in the long run.

Chris Hemphill:
And my… Similar question to just the impact that the consumer experience can have. And I think that it would be interesting to hear some thoughts, not just on the overall competitive and fee-for-service type revenue, but just considerations from the value-based side as well as. Just the impact that the focus on consumer experience might be able to have from a value-based perspective.

Mike Linnert:
Yeah. Running health systems is hard. So, I don’t need to propose that there’s easy solutions. But what Carrie said, I believe is true in a lot of places and this is fundamentally a problem. If you went to other consumer service industries and said, “Hey, what should we do today?” Right? They have a very customer-focused approach. In fact, I think Amazon’s mission statement or is something like, “Be the easiest place in the world for customers to discover and get things that they want.”
If a health system took that approach. And we talked about online scheduling, they would say, “Well, we need to be the easiest place in the world for people to discover and consume the care that they want.” Then we have to have online scheduling, right?

Carrie Liken:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Linnert:
And if the barriers to that are, it can be hard for physicians to let their schedules be open, or it can be hard to coordinate across silos or… That wouldn’t be something that stops us. That would be a okay, we dig in and say, “How are we going to solve this?” Right? We have to move to that. And I think one thing that we don’t talk about in healthcare that would really help us get there, is a lifetime value.
If we could unlock and say, “What’s the value of doing this thing?” It would change our decision criteria and a whole bunch of things. And I’m going to throw out some numbers, I’m willing to be wrong here, but I think the lifetime value of a patient is somewhere between 50 and $100,000. That is way ahead of any other-

Carrie Liken:
That’s a lot.

Mike Linnert:
Way ahead, right? And take that as a… Just stipulate to that for a second, we can circle back. But if you think about that, you think, “Okay, well, if that’s true, that means that Walmart, CVS, Aetna, Optum, Cleveland Clinic, right? There’s a countless number of really intelligent, really well-funded people who would want to have customers that are worth that much money.
If I can’t figure out how to serve them really well, somebody else is going to figure that out and I’ve got a problem. So then the only question at that point is, well, how much money can I invest in getting this figured out? And that’s where you have to… If you think lifetime value is less than you invest less, if you think it’s more, you invest more, but if you invest less, you risk somebody else thinking it’s worth more and invested more and then you have a problem.
And I think today, if I were to sum up the observation of where we are on the curve, I think Carrie nailed it. You asked Carrie where she banked, I think she’d say “Capital One.” If you asked me where I bank, I say “Wells Fargo.” But if you ask me where I healthcare, I would say, “Dr. Rangarajan,” right? I need to say, “I health care with the local health system and you’re as proactive as thinking about me as Netflix is, or as Amazon is.”

Carrie Liken:
Yeah. I think that, people tend to… With I… How do I compare this? People don’t know that an auto repair place is local or is nearby until they have a tire that needs to be changed. And I think it’s similar to healthcare. You don’t really utilize your healthcare, until you have a need to utilize your healthcare. But, the Optums of the world and the Blue Crosses of the world and even Google and Apple, they’re starting to get into this world of “How do we start to engage you in your health care before you even need your healthcare.”
And I think that’s where health systems can start to look at how they can start engaging beforehand. Because if they don’t engage beforehand, it will always be a reactive mode from the patient or the consumer perspective. And everyone else will be out there being like, “I can be your trusted health advisor. I can help you. I have access to all of your Apple Watch data and I can see that there’s all of these stuff going on. Your heart rate’s been high for the last three days, is there’s something going on? Or we need to do some type of monitoring. Here’s a signal, here’s an alert.”
They’re already in that game. They’re already in that mode of being able to advise on health. And I think that the health systems are going to have to play catch-up there. And they’re just not… They’re not even thinking about it right now, at least to my knowledge. I think it’s going to be a big issue.

Chris Hemphill:
Now that leads to a question that… I’m seeing this in the audience. I’m seeing some questions from it and I want to get into what this network of options that we’ve talked about. We know, “Hey, there’s going to be an impact, but where can we best impact the experience?” Got a great question from… Well, a great comment from Debra Murray, just with regards to one consumer innovation that we haven’t really delve deep on here is pricing transparency, which we know is a tough nut to crack.
I can actually talk personally to a pricing transparency experience later with Walmart Health. Really good experience there. But same… In a similar vein John Marzano asked, “Okay. So, with all these options we know that there’s a problem, but what’s preventing organizations from turning their ship in the right direction.

Chris Hemphill:
And so that leads me to this question really, how do we validate these efforts? How do we identify the right consumer experience? Given that there’s thousands of vendors out there that want to solve the problem, how do you validate what’s the right problems to solve for your health system? And then how do you validate the investments there?

Mike Linnert:
Very well. I’ll let you go first, please.

Carrie Liken:
Oh, gosh. I think you should go first on this one.

Mike Linnert:
Look, I think it has to start with the customer. So I… In fact, I just saw the comment from John Marzano, agreeing with Carrie that we’re selling something that no one wants. I think we have to start with, today we sell care. And it is true that when people are sick they need that, but what people always want is health, right? And there’s tons of platitudes about health over wealth and… if we can start selling health… And when I go to the bank, for instance, Wells Fargo has wealth advisors.
We should have health advisors. And you could envision a world where I got a monthly health income and balance sheet where the local health system was just saying, “Hey, Mike, we’re thinking about you and your family and here’s some things that you need to do to take better care of yourself,” right? That’d be really important to me. And I look at that. But holy smokes, if you also said, “Here are some things your kids need to be doing or you need to be doing on behalf of your kids and Mike, your parents are getting older and they’ve given us permission to talk to you. Here’s some things about them,” that would be the most important email, phone call, whatever, however you got it to me, that would be the most important thing I got that day.
And you know what else I would do with that? I would go tell all my friends that I got that. Okay? So imagine you’re the health system, I’m now consuming services, which is what today in the fee-for-service world, unfortunately, that’s what drives value from consuming services. I’m doing it happily because it’s for my family and I’m spreading the good news about what you did, right?
If we could get to that point, we could fundamentally change how people think about the healthcare experience. And I don’t think that points far away. I think the only question on the table right now is, “Who’s going to deliver that point to us?” And I’m going to be extreme just to be funny, Netflix knows the value of that. They’re not moving into healthcare, but let’s just say tomorrow they did.
They know what the experience needs to look like, your local community health system has all the data and all the capability to deliver that and so now it’s, “Okay, well, does the guy with the vision, but no history get there before the guy with all the history and just adding the vision?” I don’t know, that’s the race that’s on. And right now there’s opportunity, but the window’s going to close, right?
I don’t know if it’s two years from now or 10 years from now, but we are going to get to a point where somebody in healthcare owns relationships and we’re all passionate. We think about our relationship like we think about it with Amazon. We don’t really worry where I’m going to get my appendix taken out because I’m going to rely on that person I know, to find the best place for me and to optimize for my health, because they’re going to be incented to keep me healthy.

Carrie Liken:
But Mike, that’s… It’s interesting that I 100% agree with what your perspective and what you’ve said. It means that a health system needs to look at the patient first. And I could be provocative here and so, comment in if you think that I’m off my rocker here, but I don’t think that health systems are thinking first about the patient.
They’re thinking about themselves, the system and they’re thinking about the providers. And so Netflix is thinking about the viewers, that’s subscribers basically. Amazon is thinking about the customer. CVS is thinking about the customer, “How many customers can we get to walk through literally go fill the pharmacy prescription, but also in front of store. How many… What can I do to get them to spend more money in front of the store.” The health systems aren’t thinking about the patients first.
And so, I do… I talked to a lot of organizations about things like creating personas and actually sitting in your patient’s shoes. Sit in a 26-year-old shoes, sit in a 33-year-old pregnant woman’s shoes, who’s looking for a pediatrician for her newborn when she gives birth or looking for an OB-GYN, sit in a 55-year-old shoes, sit in an 87-year-old shoes and then go through that experience. I think it’s astonishing when we go through this with our customers and the customers say, “We’ve never done this before.” And I think, “Oh my gosh.”
You have to look at… Don’t be inward-facing, be outward-facing and think about that patient and/or consumer and what is their experience there? And then you always be thinking outwardly, instead of thinking about how great we are. If I see another US news ranking and plastered across whatever the banner might be or whatever the article or press release or whatever that might be. I know that’s great, but that’s so inward thinking. It’s all about us.
CPS is not saying, “We’re the number one drugstore.” They’re saying, “We want to make people healthier.” That they’re thinking about the consumer. We want to make people healthier. How do we think about that from a health system perspective? And I think, “We want our entire community, our entire population to be healthier.” And then base every decision afterward off of that.

Mike Linnert:
Yeah. I think one of the things that we talk about at our company all the time is that, our mission is to help drive health and loyalty, right? And adding the word loyalty causes you to think a little bit differently about things, which I think is important. But look, I also do want to acknowledge that this is not an easy problem to solve in healthcare, right?
And I’ll just admire the problem for one minute and then Chris, we can dig back in on how we solve it, but part of the problem is if you’re a health system, I throw out lifetime value of the customer is 50 to $100,000. I’ve done some math on what’s the lifetime value to a health system over a relationship with some local providers. I think that’s three to $4 million, right? That’s a different customer set.

And then I think about, well, what are my incentives? Right? Well, I get paid if people consume care, right? In today’s fee-for-service world. Not also maybe, but that’s how I get paid, but that means there’s a payer over here who pays me, who has a whole different set of incentives. So now I’ve got a payer, a health system, a doctor, a patient, right? Each slightly misaligned on some different things.
So, that’s hard. As value-based care comes, I think the number one thing value-based care does is start to aligned incentives, which is great. It’s great. But if you’re a health system, you have to be really careful about value-based care. Value-based care is probably a short-term hit to your revenue line.
Carrie Liken:
Yes.

Mike Linnert:
That’s the unfortunate part about it.
Carrie Lichen:
For sure.

Mike Linnert:
It is. The other hard part about it is in a fee-for-service world, if you have the care pyramid, the people who are chronic and acute, they’re the core of both my revenue and my cost, right? If we were a true value-based care world with capitated, right? Just as a thought experiment, the pyramid input, suddenly my revenue is all the people who are healthy, who consume no carriage here.

Carrie Liken:
Correct.

Mike Linnert:
Right? And the people who are chronic and acute are my costs. Well, luckily I’m already pretty good at that, but I have no plan for that… Those healthy people. So, I have a fundamental core competency challenge misalignment on the horizon as I moved to this new world. So, there’s a lot that goes into it, but I do think it does all fundamentally start with how do you drive value for customers and how do you unlock loyalty in health?

Carrie Liken:
Yeah, that’s a good… I like the inverted pyramid. That’s a really good way of thinking about it, but that’s where also your health advisors come in. For that inversion, that foundation that now is the top. That’s where they come in. And I think that’s something that is an interesting idea.

Chris Hemphill:
Let me say this, we got a lot of topic left, but not a lot of time left.

Carrie Lichen:
Oh. Okay.

Chris Hemphill:
We can go completely out of it. But that maybe want to get over to… For the folks who stayed on, I want to just identify, hey, who’s doing, who’s doing it well. Who is out there providing a good experience? And if there is any personal experiences… I might jump into one. But if there’s any personal experiences or just aware of anybody, who’s providing a good comprehensive consumer experience, your thoughts on that, Carrie.

Carrie Liken:
Interesting. So we work with Providence and I think Providence does a really good job of attempting to get to this level, although, it’s really hard… They acknowledge and we acknowledge that it’s really hard to do this, but they’re always thinking about the consumer somewhere else, not pulling and forcing the consumer to come to them, but going out and meeting the consumer in pretty much any way. Whether it’s digitally, whether it’s in a neighborhood, whether it’s on a website, whatever.
And they’re trying to figure out the transactions involved as well. I would say CVS does a pretty good job and that’s not really a health system. That’s I think a new market entrant, I would call it. And while I normally always have something to say about MGH, whenever I’m delivering webinars and I feel I can because I live here, but also my husband works there, I have to say that I got my COVID vaccine through MGH.
And it was the first time I felt MGH had moved into this decade as far as technology is concerned. So, I have to give them kudos on it. The text message I received that said, “You’re eligible to receive a vaccine, click on the link.” It was a mobile optimized ability to actually schedule at a certain location for a certain time.
When I got there, everything was completely digital. Everything to… I was shocked, I was telling my husband today, I was shocked that they were using a QR code and using a mobile device to actually input this information into EPIC. Fascinating. And then when it came time to get all my reminders as well, “Reminder, in two days you have your vaccine,” and, “Reminder, tomorrow you have a vaccine.” Excellent. I think it was absolutely excellent. How do we translate that across the rest of MGH or the rest of healthcare? So I would, those are a couple of examples.

Chris Hemphill:
And we got another question from John Marzano. I’ll throw it out here, but I thought it should be addressed. Is… There’s another… Well, we talked about disruptors and people changing the experiences. Another one that we haven’t really focused on today, which John Marzano points out, is the payer quietly taking charge of healthcare with claims data banks and huge swaths of knowledge and understanding on where to provide care efficiently. Just wondering when we… Carrie, you earlier mentioned the Optums of the world. What’s the provider response or thinking to that or just your thoughts on.

Carrie Liken:
I just sent a note about this to my team, in fact. So I… We use Slack and we are in different Slack channels and I have an industry info, Slack channel. And I just sent a note about this because I’ve read an article about how payers are getting into these different areas. They’re combining payers and providers. So, there was an article that was about Aetna, CVS, Anthem, Humana, Optum and I don’t remember what the other one… Cigna.
And it was talking about how they’re individually getting into this space. So Optum being a big one, they’re buying up physician practices, they have 50 plus thousand providers across the country now. I sat in at the Kellogg Business of Healthcare Conference last year, pre-pandemic, the CEO of Optum Care spoke and he talked about how they’re completely transforming how they provide care, when they provide care, how they advise on care and how they use data to be able to be predictive about care.
And I think that there is going to be something to be said about… All of a sudden, when I wrote this in the Slack channel, I basically said, “What does this mean? All of these changes? What does this mean?” I actually think that this threatens the primary care referral feed that organizations rely on. Now, whether it’s profitable for them right now or not.
And I don’t think that there’s really a lot of referrals that are going on. Patients are looking for their care in more convenient ways, but health system today think that primary care is a referral stream into other service lines within their system. Once these payers start to take some of that business, I think that’s going to be a huge hit to health systems. So what will providers do? I don’t know. I think they need to start looking at it now and start building a strategy around it. They can’t wait for the numbers to decline.

Chris Hemphill:
And Mike, I know we’re limited on time, but really curious… And thank you everybody who stayed with us past the half hour. We’re really bad at this. We’ve done over 50 of them, but we just can’t keep it contained 30 minutes. But Mike could you feed some thoughts as well?

Mike Linnert:
Yeah. I think that… Look, at the end of the day, we should expect systems to follow the economics, right? Now. It is true. Most of them are not for profits, but it’s also true no money, no mission, right? A.

Carrie Liken:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Linnert:
And I think a critical part of the future is getting value-based care right. It is getting incentives aligned that people, health systems, payers make more money if consumers stay healthier. And I think that’s important. And there was a thread there in the chat, talking about health systems have incentives for people to consume care. Well, in value-based care, it gives them the incentives to keep people healthy.
So, it’s still considered care, but the care that they need, not care, for care sake. And I think that’s where things are headed. And that means the… To me, the emergence of technology and really the battlefront right now in healthcare, where things are changing rapidly is primary care, right? You can see primary care.
There are new entrance, I guess they’re not so new anymore, but one Medical Village, you see Walmart, CVS coming in and what all of those people have in… And by the way, the payers are getting aggressive-
Carrie Liken:
Yep.

Mike Linnert:
In primary care. You mentioned Optum, right?
Carrie Liken:
Yep.

Mike Linnert:
Great example, payers are getting aggressive there. What all of those people have in common is, they’re going to use data aggressively to try to figure out how do I provide better care? How do I provide better health, right? In addition to care. And Carrie, you and I talked before we hopped on, I do think that is one place where health systems are behind. That truly nobody has data that can compete with what the health systems have, right?
Payer data, claims data, invaluable. EMR data, even more valuable in terms of helping predict, how do I keep people healthy? And I think, we live that every day, Chris and I here at our company, but our data really is unbelievably valuable. And if we can start using that more aggressively again, to drive both health and loyalty, the economic rewards, in addition to keeping people healthy rewards are in balance.

Chris Hemphill:
So, again, so many places that we could take this conversation. Since let’s talk about price, transparency, and talk about some other consumer issues. There might be some people who hadn’t seen a recent webinar that we did with this forum for healthcare strategists, H&PS. So I’m going to drop that webinar there where I actually had an experience with Walmart. We have James gardener and Sherry de Campbell also talking about the overall retail health landscape and experience and what people within healthcare systems can do as response to that.
I’m going to drop the link down in the comments, just so that you can jump in because it would be fun to get into the price transparency conversation here. But unfortunately, we’re running out of time. With that though, Carrie, Mike, well, I know there’s a reason that people logged into this and I know that there’s something that you wanted people to be able to take away from it. So, just wanted to get your final thoughts out and let the world know what you’d like them to think about next week, next month, moving forward.

Carrie Liken:
I guess I’ll start?

Chris Hemphill:
Yeah.

Carrie Liken:
Okay. I would say… What I was saying before, start with the small stuff. Because I think that making these big changes to help drive patient and consumer expectations… Health systems typically take a really long time to get something done. And by the time they get it done, the world has moved in a totally different direction. Just start with something really small, find something really small and then move on to the next thing.
I think that consumers are forgiving, but they’re not going to be forgiving forever in healthcare when they’re seeing that there are so many other elements of their lives outside of healthcare that are just easier. So, if you just start small and then you get some feedback on that small change or that small iteration and keep on going, I think that is a really good place to start.
So, whether it’s a digital change you need to make, or maybe it’s just, let’s say, online appointment scheduling just for urgent care right now and that’s the way to dip your toe in the water, or maybe it’s understanding value from one particular patient or subset of patients and then researching all of the financials behind it, so you can get the lifetime value, just start with one small thing and don’t let it deter you when it gets hard, because it will get hard. But I think you’ll do a lot better if you just start small and keep moving.

Chris Hemphill:
And the final thoughts and wisdom from Mike.

Mike Linnert:
I don’t know if it’s wisdom, but maybe I’ll just complement it by saying the opposite, which is, I think it’s important to keep in mind, “What is the mission? What are we doing?” And if you look over the last three to four years, a lot of health systems have started to update their missions. So one of my favorites is Intermountain’s mission or tagline now is “Helping people live the healthiest lives possible.” Right?
That is fundamentally different from something that says, “Providing care when you need it.” Right? Their mission, it implies our relationship, our support for you as an everyday thing. It implies that we’re thinking about you all the time. It implies a lot, right? And if you start with where you think you’re going to end, then I think you can put in context, we need to start with the small wins, but we know where we’re going and we can frame them the right way. But I do agree, small…Well, you have to start with small wins and get momentum going.

Chris Hemphill:
Well, Hey, Carey, Mike, really appreciate you coming and sharing with this audience. I feel there’s a lot of energy today and I appreciate what everybody’s brought to the table. Not just on-screen, but every… All the threads and chats going on off-screen. And I wanted to share a final thought too which it’s really related to a comment that came up earlier from Catalina Hart, which was about when we’re deciding what path to go down the consumer experience.
This quote here, that, “Health systems need to understand what their patients and demographics want,” it’s just summed up in terms of listen, so there should be that voice and feedback mechanisms for that voice to come in and really be able to understand how to direct efforts from our patients. But with that, we’re going to shut it down. We hope to see you in future sessions. We have some great things planned.
One thing I’m really excited about, we’re going to have a webinar on the 20th of this month with Alan Shoebridge over Salinas Valley Memorial health system on generation X and how we… I’m a millennial, then we got, there’s gen X-ers and basically, it might be a segment that’s being ignored. We keep hearing this be the argument between boomers, gen Z and millennial, but what about generation X? So, great book that the Alan’s written on that subject and he’ll be speaking to it. And we also have a plan coming up on data bias and racism in Artificial Intelligence. So with that, I hope you guys have a good weekend and you all have a great week. Thank you.

Mike Linnert:
Chris. Thank you for putting these on. These are fantastic and Carrie, thanks for joining us.

Chris Hemphill:
It was so great to be here. Thank you.

Mike Linnert:
Thank you.

Chris Hemphill:
Bye.