Our team met with leaders from over 60 health systems, payors, and digital health companies over the three-day conference, and a few key themes surfaced around where providers are focused in light of ongoing challenges with staffing and burnout, waning patient engagement, and disparate technologies:
1. There is a renewed focus on patients
Organizations are putting patients at the center of their stories — something that was not entirely true pre-pandemic. Rather than thinking about the care delivery organization’s goals and constraints first and then considering how to connect patients into their system, there's a greater sense of empathy in how organizations are approaching patient engagement and retention by starting with the patient.
2. Patient and care team experiences are equally important
With limited time and resources, it’s tempting to focus heavily on delivering the best patient experience or creating a top workplace, but it’s not an either/or situation. Leading healthcare organizations recognize not only that patient experience and care team burden are tightly intertwined, but that to truly deliver in one area you must put equal focus on the other. It's critical that we think about the experience of the patients and the care teams, not the patients or the care teams.
3. Workforce challenges will get worse before they get better
As we move past some of the darkest parts of the pandemic and healthcare organizations look toward the future again, there is a renewed energy and motivation to transform healthcare — but we have a lot of frontline workers who are burned out and disenfranchised. Health systems are looking at new ways to keep their clinicians engaged and seeking technology partners that will enable care teams to spend their time more meaningfully, not add administrative burden to their already-full plates.
4. We need platforms over point solutions
There has been a tremendous amount of innovation within the healthcare space over the past several years, only accelerated by the pandemic and the shift to digital health. Health systems are now grappling with how to efficiently bring together many different point solutions — or replace them with a comprehensive platform — to create a seamless experience for both patients and clinicians. We’re still in the early stages of this next shift, but there is a growing need for care delivery organizations to think more holistically about how care is delivered in order to truly improve experience and quality.
5. There’s work to do in health equity
Our CEO Manav Sevak spoke on a panel about health equity - or “techquity” - and the opportunities we have to use technology to reach marginalized populations to improve engagement and outcomes. However, the positive stories he and other leaders shared are still the exception and not the norm. Healthcare providers are increasingly seeing the need to reduce barriers to care, from removing onerous portals and apps to increasing access to healthy foods or social services. But we still have a long road ahead to create truly equitable care.
BONUS: No one knows how to say “ViVE”
Is it veev or vyve? We heard it both ways, but the consensus from our team and conversations is vyve (like “hive”).
It was refreshing (and exhausting) to be back in person with so many forward-thinking healthcare organizations and digital health companies after many months of Zoom meetings. The enthusiasm we heard for what we’re building at Memora was invigorating, and we’re excited to bring our vision to make care more actionable, accessible and always-on to more patients and care teams.