Jim Neumann Of Further On How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care

An Interview With Jake Frankel

Create a frictionless customer experience across channels. The need to connect and coordinate patient care across phone, SMS, email / web, and in person visits is critical in delivering a customer centric experience, as well as reducing duplication of efforts and costs. As experts in data integration and cloud technology, Further has developed roadmaps and executed on creating the foundation for delivering this type of customer experience.

As part of our series about “How Medical Practices Can Use Digital Transformation To Provide Better Care”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Neumann, Healthcare Industry Lead of Further. Jim’s expertise lies in working with clients at the intersection of marketing, data, and technology. For over 30 years, Jim has helped companies leverage data, technology, and analytics to drive marketing impact for leading healthcare brands.

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?

I started my career in information technology at Merrill Lynch, where I quickly developed a fascination not just with technology itself, but with it’s potential to drive significant business outcomes. This was at a time when the use of data and technology in direct marketing was emerging as a differentiator for leading agencies and brands, and my career followed that trajectory. Over the years, the channels and technologies have evolved, but the core principles of utilizing data, technology, and analytics to enhance marketing effectiveness have remained constant. I’ve been fortunate to work with most of the major pharmaceutical companies and many hospital groups over my career, which provides me a window into the world of how many of the leading brands use data and analytics to improve everything from the customer experience to their business operations. Today, I’m proud to serve as the Healthcare Industry Lead at Further, where we’re on a mission to transform sales and marketing strategy with cutting-edge solutions for providers, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, and delivery of care organizations.

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

I joined Further in 2022 following the acquisition of my own firm, which I founded in 2012. I was immediately impressed with the people, culture and capabilities of the Further organization and knew it offered the opportunity to have a broader impact on the clients we served. Immediately after the acquisition, I was excited to see the expertise that Further offered and how combining that with my firm’s expertise could provide impactful solutions to clients in the healthcare space.

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 would consider this a “funny” mistake, but it certainly was a good learning lesson for myself and my team. I was running a line of business for a multinational company and we did much of the data segmentation and preparation work for targeted marketing campaigns on behalf of a mortgage client. It was a complex process using credit data and a variety of data sources. For one campaign, we were racing to meet a client imposed deadline and skipped some important quality assurance steps in the process in order to get the targeting list to the vendor. About a week later, we started receiving calls from the client asking why their employees were being targeted by this campaign. In looking into it, we had inadvertently failed to execute the suppress process that removes employees and previously declined mortgage applicants in the campaign.

As a result, we did the usual retraining, but also printed signs and put them up across the office encouraging the team to prioritize accuracy over speed. I told them I would happily call any client if we are late in getting a campaign in market due to following our process vs. having to field the inbound call from an angry client due to mistakes we made. It was a good learning experience for not only the team involved with the mortgage client, but also served as a critical learning experience and cultural change moment for the entire team — and is something I keep top of mind to this day when working on campaigns for our customers.

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?

The character traits that have helped me lead successful teams are:

a. Leading by example. Model the behavior you expect from others from both a work effort and ethical perspective.

b. Setting goals and measuring progress toward them. I’ve always been goal oriented and believe it’s critical for individuals and businesses to have measurable goals. Holding people accountable for delivering on goals is a key aspect of goal setting and management.

c. Creating a positive and supportive culture. I’ve worked for a number of firms and have seen the impact that a positive corporate culture has on both the individual and the overall success of the organization.

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

With a focus on the healthcare industry, we sometimes lose focus on the fact that the work we do to help educate patients and doctors about medication and treatment availability is a key aspect of helping people get proper treatment and return to a healthy lifestyle.

One emerging area of focus in healthcare is leveraging AI to enhance the patient journey and preemptively mitigate future medical issues. For instance, we’re implementing AI within hospital networks to identify patients at high risk of readmission post-discharge. This insight allows hospital staff to proactively intervene, addressing potential causes of readmittance before patients leave the hospital. Additionally, we are using data to actively prompt patients to schedule essential health maintenance activities, such as annual checkups, timely vaccinations, and lab tests. This proactive approach aims to detect and manage conditions before they escalate into serious health issues.

The healthcare industry is moving from a focus on simply treating conditions, to helping patients live more healthy lives — and the use of data is critical in this transformation.

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?

I would define digital transformation as the use of data and technology to streamline and enhance the acquisition and delivery of care to patients. This doesn’t mean that every interaction and function needs to be “digital” or an online only experience, but does require that touch points across channels (web, call center, in office, etc.) are coordinated and leverage data and analytics to provide a holistic experience.

Medical providers were forced to adopt electronic health records (EHR) systems years ago by the government, but those systems focused (at least initially) on the treatment aspect of the patient journey. Practices need to map the customer journey starting from the acquisition and scheduling steps, through the visit and follow-ups. By identifying all of the interactions that could happen and designing a patient journey around optimizing the delivery of care and supporting the patients long-term health needs, a provider can construct the ideal experience and then put the pieces in place to support that journey over time.

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

Digital transformation can help throughout the patient acquisition, scheduling, pre-visit prep, and post-visit follow-ups. The digital channel (e.g., digital media) is a cost effective manner to acquire new patients and offers the ability to target new patients for specific service lines within the hospital. Email and text messages serve as an excellent channel to communicate with patients to schedule and confirm appointments, as well as filling out any pre-visit forms (online) or getting pre-authorizations that may be required based on the insurance carrier. Follow-up care and drug compliance is often ignored by patients and digital engagement offers the opportunity to improve this — and thereby the overall health of the patient.

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

Coordinating care effectively over time and across different service lines within a healthcare organization necessitates integrating patient data and systems capable of utilizing this information to communicate appropriately with patients. However, we identify two major barriers to fully capitalizing on the opportunities for digital transformation:

1. These organizations remain structured around functions rather than being centered on the customer.
2. Marketing is responsible for acquisition through appointment, service lines are responsible for delivery of care, and there is limited focus on the longitudinal customer journey within the organization.

As a result of a functional organization, there is limited coordination and integration of customer data from across all the touch points of the organization. There are often numerous point solutions to address a need (e.g., text reminders for appointments), but they are rarely fully connected and integrated to provide a customer experience that is coordinated.

Lastly, while digital transformation leverages technology at its core, like any change it also requires people and process change to fully take hold. It’s no secret that the bulk of healthcare costs (and therefore services) are provided to older patients. These are folks who didn’t grow up with technology and may be slower to adopt. Over time, more and more patients will expect and demand a more integrated digital experience.

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.

Healthcare facilities have been hard hit with increasing costs with limited ability to adjust pricing due to contractual agreements with insurance companies and reimbursement increases trailing inflation. As a result, they have the following goals to try and do more with less. We see these as the critical challenges facing healthcare providers today:

1. Growing revenue in an increasingly competitive landscape.
2. Changing from a fee for service financial model to one that is built around payment for outcomes.
3. Reducing costs for the delivery of care.

The ability to be more customer centric and leverage data, cloud, and AI are critical to overcoming these challenges. A few examples of how Further has helped support these key needs for healthcare organizations are as follows:

1. Through the use of data and analytics, Further revamped a hospital group’s digital media buying strategies and generated a 6:1 return on their digital media spend. Further was able to provide a rotational targeting strategy to support the various service lines within the hospital, optimizing the number of new patients for each service line based on the hospital capacity.
2. Data helps to unlock and measure lifetime value of patients, as well as allowing for maintaining a long-term relationship with the patient. For a major healthcare provider, Further has provided their analytic center of excellence the means to leverage a fully integrated view of patient and operational data from across the hospital system. Combining over 50 different data sources into an easy to use platform, this solution provides the critical mechanism that helps identify opportunities for both growth and cost mitigation.

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?

Much of the intake process for healthcare providers involve the delivery and confirmation of receipt of information from the provider (HIPAA waivers, etc.) and the collection of data from the patient (medications, symptoms, insurance information, etc.). This entire process can — and should be — done digitally ahead of the arrival at the facility.

Additionally, there is no need to ask for the same information over and over, by presenting the patient with existing data already provided by them, they can simply update information as appropriate, which creates a much more customer-centric experience.

Many of the leading EHR systems offer patient portals to provide a digital platform for the exchange of information (test results, etc.), but often this only serves the customer needs relative to receiving treatment and they only manage and present data for patient engagements within the provider network. Any visits and relevant care information is held in the EHR for the network from a patient’s other provider. This information can be shared, but only when directed by the patient and when the systems can exchange information. Creating a more seamless process for full integration of patient treatment data would be beneficial to both the patient and the providers.

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

1. The ability to communicate appropriately to patients throughout the patient journey. This will reduce acquisition costs, operational costs, and ultimately lead to better health outcomes. We worked with a provider network that had eight different systems communicating with patients throughout the journey, which not only drove up costs, but reduced the effectiveness of each message. Finding an architecture that delivers communications effectively and centrally is highly recommended.
2. Use of data as a predictor of future medical needs. This concept spans genomic testing to identifying and supporting patients likely to struggle with post-care follow-up. Further has deployed AI for a provider to help identify patients likely to be readmitted to the hospital, allowing the providers to proactively work with the patients to reduce re-admittance thus lowering costs and increasing healthy outcomes.
3. Use of advanced analytics with a focus on measuring business impact in a longitudinal fashion. Too often we see practices or hospital groups measuring individual components of the delivery of care “funnel.” For example, they measure cost per appointment, appointments kept percentages, reimbursement rates, etc., but don’t organize data to measure the business impact over time. Further has provided enterprise wide analytics solutions that allow provider networks to understand customer lifetime value, which not only allows them to optimize the acquisition of more valuable customers, but also reduces costs in finding the most effective and efficient customer journey to care.
4. The management and use of patient data in a HIPAA compliant manner is foundational and an absolute must in this industry. This is a need that requires ongoing oversight and management. How systems are architected and data is used, especially in the digital space, is ever increasing in its complexity. Consumer privacy laws vary by state and are ever changing. Provider networks need to maintain a focus and diligence around this aspect of their business. Further has a practice dedicated to customer privacy and has helped numerous companies remain HIPAA compliant from both a policy and a technology / data perspective.
5. Create a frictionless customer experience across channels. The need to connect and coordinate patient care across phone, SMS, email / web, and in person visits is critical in delivering a customer centric experience, as well as reducing duplication of efforts and costs. As experts in data integration and cloud technology, Further has developed roadmaps and executed on creating the foundation for delivering this type of customer experience.

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.

When thinking about the health of the American people, I would love to see a movement that creates a healthier lifestyle for the masses. The trends around increasing obesity and a more sedentary lifestyle are alarming and unfortunately, society seems to be leaning into acceptance relative to obesity and / or the use of drugs not exercise and moderation to combat obesity. The healthcare costs to support an increasingly unhealthy population will be a significant challenge based on the trajectory today.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

We invite readers to follow up online via our website at www.gofurther.com where you can also sign up for the Further newsletter. And be sure to also follow us on LinkedIn!

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