Digital Transformation in Healthcare: Paul Brient Of athenahealth On How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care

Patient engagement strategies that help to promote bidirectional communication with patients between encounters as appropriate because it can not only improve accessibility issues, but greatly increase patient loyalty, trust, and satisfaction in your practice.

As part of our series about “Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Brient, EVP & Chief Product Officer.

Paul joined athenahealth as Chief Product Officer in September 2019, with over 25 years of experience in the healthcare information space. His experience ranges from leading as a CEO at PatientKeeper, a provider of software applications that optimize physician and practice workflows, to leading the payer businesses for McKesson, to serving as founder and president of BCS, an early physician office management software company. Paul received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My healthcare IT career started early. My father was a surgeon and opened a solo practice when I was in high school. When it came to operating a small practice, he had a limited amount of knowledge — so figuring it out became a family affair.

At the same time, the first personal computers were also becoming available. Instead of trying to type the insurance claims on an IBM electric typewriter, I took it upon myself to learn to write software to generate claims. Eventually, I wrote one of the earliest PC-based physician practice management systems. By the time I went to college, I was supporting over 150 physician practices.

Can you share the most interesting or most exciting story that has happened to you since you began at your company?

I joined athenahealth three years ago with a strong admiration for the company’s wide network of partners. Two months into my tenure, I attended my first athenahealth user conference, THRIVE, and listened to many of our customers assert that a vendor should not neglect to build “core” functionality and, instead, rely upon partners to fill gaps. Coming out of these relatively difficult discussions, we were compelled to confront how athenahealth had done this in the patient experience space, making practices go to partners to get capabilities like a patient-facing app, online scheduling, and digital check in. Eager to address this gap, we repurposed our Austin research and development center to establish our new Patient Experience Division. I am pleased to say that we now have online scheduling and, we are in the beta-testing phase of our patient-facing app and a fully digital check in product. Taking an action-oriented approach to addressing the feedback has been a really exciting experience and makes me excited to see what else athenahealth will do.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Then, can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I’m not sure I have a funny mistake, but I am a big fan of making them. I don’t like repeating a mistake, I always strive to make new mistakes, as that is how I know I am taking risks and pushing myself.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I am curious, love to learn, and am reasonably detail oriented. These can be great traits for a leader but, like all strengths, have their downsides. I’ve had to learn how to be curious and detail-oriented without micromanaging and ensure that my curiosity empowers teams rather than the alternative. I think it is crucial for any leader to be self-aware and understand how their strengths can both help and hurt their ability to lead.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

There is so much going on at athenahealth, but right now I am excited about our efforts to reimagine the patient experience. Recently, as I mentioned in an earlier question, we established a full research and development center in Austin, TX, to build out a complete suite of patient experience products embedded and integrated entirely in our core product.

Additionally, I am really excited about continuing to find ways to automate processes to improve experiences for practices and pull work away from them. For example, our ongoing work with payers to build APIs that automate processes that would otherwise require logging onto the portal or making phone calls, automating prior authorizations, identifying care gaps, and bringing new data to the point of care, among other things.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about Digital Transformation in Healthcare. I am particularly passionate about this topic because my work focuses on how practices can streamline processes to better serve their patients. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like for a medical practice to engage in a digital transformation?

Digital transformation means elevating the level of digital engagement in healthcare to match that of the rest of our lives, and moving to a fully electronic way of working, with the goal of creating a consumer-grade patient experience. Today within healthcare, there is still a lot of utilization of phones, faxes, and physical paperwork, creating a bulky, disconnected experience with gaps in the patient story. Achieving true digital transformation within healthcare would have a significant impact on both patients and providers, enabling them to deliver the necessary care with greater efficiency and accuracy, leading to improved patient outcomes.

What are the specific pain points that digital transformation can help address in a medical practice?

There really are so many pain points associated with the use of paper within a medical practice. For example, think about doing away with the amount of paper used for medical history forms at each visit and the process of then transcribing the information into the medical record for the doctor; being able to do prior authorizations in seconds, instead of hours or minutes; ensuring patients have filled the medication prescribed, followed up on their referrals, and done the preventative procedure you recommended; ensuring patients are not being referred to providers out of network. The list goes on. In addition, as an industry we spend $36M per year sending out paper statements to patients. In a world with this level of digital communication, why? Patient, provider, and front desk satisfaction would be vastly improved with a digital shift.

What are the obstacles that prevent a medical practice from engaging in a digital transformation?

First and foremost, there is no real external driver of change within the healthcare space, and because it is both a time and cost intensive undertaking, the industry is slow to adopt and instead resort to what has been working for the past few decades. Additionally, I believe some of it is the maturity of the tools that are available to medical practices, including Employee Health Record (EHR) systems and the added burden of ensuring the technology and tools available are up to date.

Managing a healthcare facility is more challenging than it has ever been. Based on your experience or research, can you please share with our readers a few examples of how digital transformation can help a medical practice to provide better care? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

A digital transformation in healthcare would allow for better patient engagement, which would ultimately improve care. For example, it is not enough for a provider to simply fill a prescription for a patient. Instead, imagine a world where a provider could go a step further and understand what action, if any, has been taken on the prescription. If a patient did not take any action, a provider is able to initiate a check-in with the patient to identify and address any barriers to care. In a world of quality care, a physician’s role does not end at prescribing medicine; instead, it includes ensuring that the prescribed care has the desired impact — this is easily facilitated, given proper channels of communication that extend past the four walls of the doctor’s office.

Furthermore, a true digital transformation would involve a more connected healthcare system, where there is seamless information exchange between systems. This would give providers a better understanding of the full patient story during an encounter and would have a dramatic impact on the healthcare system and the type of care providers would be able to offer. Today’s physicians are optimistic that we can achieve a more wholly connected health care system in the near future and believe it will yield better patient outcomes and stronger provider satisfaction. Athenahealth’s annual Physician Sentiment Survey, which evaluates the state of the physician experience, found that 65% of physicians believe they will see a more wholly connected healthcare system during their career and nine in 10 physicians believe it has the power to improve both the physician experience and patient health outcomes.

Can you share a few examples of how digital interactions or digital intake processes can help create a frictionless patient experience and increase access for patients?

Imagine going to see a specialist that you were referred to by your primary care physician — where you had just filled out forms on your medical history, past surgical history, family history, demographics, and insurance information. You go to check in digitally, and it says, “Hey, we noticed that you filled in these forms at Dr. Smith’s office. Would you like to pull them in from Dr. Smith’s office?” You say yes and all you have to do is review the information. This enables providers to prepare for patient interactions in advance and work with up-to-date information, improving the medical decision-making process and directly impacting patient satisfaction as well as quality care. Digital intake forms offer a faster, more accurate alternative for documenting patient health information by eliminating the transcription process, and thereby the opportunity for human error; and protect patient privacy by ensuring that only authorized personnel can access patient data.

Based on your opinion and experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Effective Medical Practice” and why.

1. A modern, well-functioning connected EHR system to run your practice to provide better patient care. This is important to the patient experience as connected systems promote better quality and continuity of care and create an ease for providers as they rely on and communicate with different systems to gain the full patient picture.
2. Digital transformation — work aggressively to make your practice as paperless as possible. This helps to streamline processes, increase efficiency, improve costs, and better the patient and provider experience.
3. Incentives and reimbursement models for providers that align with your practice objectives, which will, if done correctly, benefit the patient, provider, and payer by ensuring quality and consistency of care while controlling costs.
4. Patient engagement strategies that help to promote bidirectional communication with patients between encounters as appropriate because it can not only improve accessibility issues, but greatly increase patient loyalty, trust, and satisfaction in your practice.
5. Inclusion of team-based care models — this will help to drive better patient outcomes by providing more consistent care across providers. This type of care can also help to reduce physician burnout, an issue that has been plaguing the industry for years

Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.

I think a bi-partisan, holistic look at the US healthcare system would do wonders. We have some of the best healthcare in the world — if you are sick with any given condition and go to the right places in the US, you will receive some of the best care in the world. However, if you look at our overall health outcomes, the overall expense of our healthcare system, and the incredibly complex barriers to accessing the systems, we could do so much better. If the industry could work together to overcome these challenges with a bi-partisan, holistic approach, I believe we could achieve a more accessible and equitable healthcare system.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can follow athenahealth on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!

About The Interviewer: David McNeil is the President of PatientPop, a Tebra company, a market leader in practice growth technology. McNeil is highly committed to helping the company build a modern go-to-market organization that delivers great value to practices in a time of rapid change in healthcare. McNeil’s business insights have been featured in publications such as Medical Economics and Los Angeles Business Journal.