At St. Joseph Health, David Baker has made it his mission to give patients a more personalized and transparent experience in the way they communicate with the healthcare facility, either through interactions with their doctors or simply setting up their next medical appointment.
"Most folks want to use self-service tools. They want to be able to get the information that's important to them as quickly as they can," says Baker, vice president of IT at the healthcare provider, which serves California and west Texas with 18 acute care hospitals and ambulance services. "I refer to it as bringing the way that you use IT in your personal life, into the business life."
Simplicity is key, he adds. "Anything that requires a user manual, an FAQ guide — it's not going to work. We're not going to deploy it. We're bringing intuitive and transparent tools in through our IT groups and then pushing them out through many tests and receiving the feedback to get those products as polished and user-friendly as we can."
Baker was one of three healthcare technology executives at IDG’s recent AGENDA16 conference to discuss how digital is transforming healthcare — from connected home medical devices to analytics to video-enabled doctor visits. (Listen here to an audio podcast of their panel discussion.)
The concept of telehealth is all about making healthcare more convenient for patient-to-doctor communications. "Through a simple Web portal or your smart device, you log on, book a virtual consult and have this real-time video visit," Baker says.
Wellness clinics with telehealth capabilities are being opened up throughout St. Joseph's service area. "Those clinics give you the complete telehealth model where you can have that consult in your time, on your terms, when you need it," he says.
A clinical desktop also advances healthcare, by removing obstacles for medical personnel. "Back in the day, the poor doctors and nurses were walking around with their building passes, and on the back, a Post-It note with an average of 10 to 15 user names and passwords," says Baker.
"We knew we had to change that, but it's a large and tough audience to deploy these mass technologies to and get the adoption and the engagement that you need," he says. "So over the course of probably a year, year and a half we embarked on deploying what we called Easy Pass, our clinical virtual desktop."
"We have an average of 16,000 caregivers every week logging into those systems, and seamlessly badging in, roaming between between, say, nursing station to patient room, the whole desktop coming with them, and only having to remember one user name and password," says Baker. "I really think we have a very robust model for delivering that clinical desktop to our physicians and nurses."