Unifying Digital Solutions to Improve Patient, Provider Communication

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted new solutions across the industry and intensified the need for convenient communication between providers and patients more than ever. Answering that call, DeliverHealth has been working to simplify health care since its inception in 2021 and its latest platform was built to unify solutions in health care.

In this interview with Integrated Healthcare Executive, Michael Clark, chief executive officer of DeliverHealth, discusses their new platform, its potential impacts on patient engagement and satisfaction, and how patient engagement will improve in the technology space this year.

Please introduce yourself including name, title, affiliation, and a bit about your background.

My name is Michael Clark and I am the chief executive officer of DeliverHealth, a global provider of technology-enabled solutions for hospitals, health systems, and group practices. I have more than 25 years of experience in health care holding executive roles in startups, private equity-backed midsize and mid-cap public companies, all serving the provider and patient space.

Prior to DeliverHealth, I spent 4 years as general manager in provider solutions at Nuance. There I led the division’s aggressive growth of its flagship, Dragon Medical One—a speech recognition solution used by hundreds of thousands of physicians—and an expansion in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

I founded DeliverHealth in 2021 to simplify health care by making it easier to tell the patient’s story, put patients over paperwork, and allow physicians to better connect with patients and patients to control their journey.

What are the benefits of DeliverHealth’s new platform?

Systemic issues such as physician burnout and health disparities are impacting health care on a daily basis and we are aiming to solve those problems with the DeliverHealth Platform.

Built to unify solutions in health care, our new platform is a cloud-based software suite that enables essential connections among providers, clinicians, and patients. Simply put, the platform connects DeliverHealth’s software capabilities and a provider’s disparate point solutions into a single secure cloud framework. From reducing physician burnout to accelerating reimbursement cycles to mobile-first patient engagement, each software capability of the platform is purpose-built and powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to solve for a specific issue impacting health care—while continuing to leverage human insights where needed.

Additionally, the platform provides a common data architecture and flexible data exchange that allows users to capture data once and use it many times. This reduces end points that create additional work and inquiries that complicate health care.

What are the potential impacts on patient engagement and satisfaction?

Throughout the pandemic, patient expectations have evolved alongside the health care industry with one of the biggest changes being an increasing expectation of convenient patient and provider communications. The all-encompassing platform was developed with this need in mind. It allows providers to spend less time on technology and more time on what matters—the patient experience and health outcomes. The platform and services come together to help providers truly realize the value of their electronic health record (EHR), automate coding and documentation, accelerate reimbursement, and more—ultimately reducing the complexities of the health care system and allowing clinicians more time for value-based initiatives.

Patients also want providers to meet them where they are—on their phones. And with our digital health arm of the new platform, we are enabling them to do just that. We have created the industry’s only digital health ecosystem comprising digital front door software and omnichannel communications, giving patients a true mobile-first experience.

Can you discuss how this new DeliverHealth Platform simplifies the health care experience for clinicians and providers?

In all of our endeavors, our mission remains to clear the way for the health care connections that matter most—between clinicians and technology, providers and patients, and people and their health. We recognize there’s a better way to solve meaningful, real problems that hospitals and health systems experience every day and the answer is not always more technology. We believe the greatest value comes from unifying the technology providers have already invested in.

An increasingly connected health care experience is beneficial to both the patient and the provider. We work tirelessly to strengthen the connection between patients and providers, wherever that connection occurs. Our entire platform is designed with both patient and provider in mind and offers solutions tailored to issues we know exist. Ultimately, when patients and providers can easily connect with each other or with technology, the whole health care experience becomes less complex.

For example, our revenue cycle integrity and EHR realization solutions enable more efficient provider workflows by creating a seamless experience for both parties, and our documentation solution reduces physician burnout by giving clinicians multiple ways to create timely, accurate documentation while reducing staff and care team activities that get in the way.

What do you forecast in the technology space for improving patient engagement this year?

Recent studies report a 92% increase in preference for scheduling via mobile apps since 2018, and that nearly 65% of patients will switch providers for a better digital experience, according to a survey conducted by Cedar. Additionally, the demand for telehealth has multiplied by nearly 40 times since the start of COVID-19. The health care landscape is constantly evolving and we can expect the demand for digital to increase.

The expansion of our digital health solutions comes at a time when digital-first experiences have become table stakes and essential to accelerating the digital transition of group practices and health care systems, yet providers find themselves unprepared for delivering digital experiences at scale. As a result, technology will continue to evolve as we find more ways to connect patients and providers in a seamless and integrated way.

Is there anything else you would like to add to the conversation today?

In addition to our platform unveiling, we are excited to share our recent acquisition of San Francisco-based PresidioHealth, a health care technology and clinical intelligence company. Our acquisition of PresidioHealth enables us to vastly improve coding quality, coding production, and documentation for physician groups, free-standing emergency departments, and urgent care centers, which, as a by-product, accelerates the reimbursement cycle. It also gives us the opportunity to expand to other specialties, such as radiology, orthopedics, and hospital medicine, to name a few.

With PresidioHealth technology now integrated into our platform, we have the ability to provide a fully connected documentation ecosystem from language access to 4 different capabilities in documentation through to coding and getting paid—all within one comprehensive mobile app. That helps us further advance our mission and can help our 800-plus health care clients across 2200 facilities expand their own capabilities. Together, we are disrupting the status quo by uniting the latest technology to automate complex processes and propel our customers into the digital age with explainable, purpose-built AI in the workflow.