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 Welcome to this Week in Health, it influence where we discuss the influence of technology on health with the people who are making it happen. My name is Bill Russell. We're covering healthcare, CIO, and creator of this week in health. It. A set of podcasts and videos dedicated to developing the next generation of health IT leaders.

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If you are going to be there, please stop by. I'd love to see you. We caught up with Dr. Albert Chan, chief of digital patient experience at Sutter Health for this short conversation following his keynote address at Health 2.0. Have a listen. Hope you enjoy. So here we are with the, uh, at the Health 2.0 Conference.

We're with, uh, Dr. Albert Shan with Sutter Health. And your, uh, title is, uh, chief of Digital Patient Experience. Good morning. Good morning. Um, chief, so what does that title mean? What are you, what are you working on at Sutter Health? So I belong to an office called the Office of Patient Experience, which is an interdisciplinary team of leaders, uh, united together to, to transform the, and catalyze the transformation of the care experience for our patients and their families.

That's great. Like who, who else is in that, that office? We have the chief medical officer, chief nurse officer, uh, VP of of population health. Okay. Um. Okay. And VP of patient Safety. Oh, that's fantastic. Alright, so what kind of, uh, what kind of challenges are you guys looking to solve with that group? What are you really focused in on right now?

Uh, we catalyze change for on behalf of the system. So really take on initiatives that are global and scale, uh, looking for opportunities to . Improve our, and transform our health system in many, many ways. As an example, uh, my, my role is to look at digital health technologies, digital health interventions, and improve the experience of care through those interventions.

Okay. What are some of those inter, I mean, you talked about some of them in your, in your keynote, but, uh, what, what are some of those interventions that you've found that you've been able to scale and that . Really impact the patient well, we're really proud of the fact that we, we keep the patient at the center.

So, uh, our interventions, our initiatives are really with them in mind. And we try to focus our efforts, uh, trying to serve our patients in many, many ways. Some of the things, I talked about it in the opening kickoff. Where opportunities to do some very simple transactions that people need each and every day.

If you, I'll call it our digital health infrastructure, because it's really key for us. If we can't meet the patients where they are, then we really will have not achieved anything, even if we build WZ cool things. Right? So as far as that digital health infrastructure, we've done a number of key initiatives.

That's fantastic. Yeah. Is that because you're in San Francisco, do you think that you get a higher adoption rate because it's such a tech savvy area? Well, actually it is important to step back and say, where do we serve? So Suter Health actually serves over a hundred communities here in Northern California, and you can find in a community that's very much like any community in America, in Setter for health.

System from the very urban areas like San Francisco to the tech savvy areas like Palo Alto here in Silicon Valley to our more rural areas in Amador County and uh, the farm Belt out in Modesto. So we have a very wide range of patients that we serve and they have various needs, but we've been able to achieve that

Uh, engagement, uh, with that context in mind. So you talked about a couple of things and this, this is the kind of things we hear from patients as we have different interviews, but you, you talked about scheduling and rescheduling. Can you go through that use case a little bit? I mean, that seems to be such a great use case around.

Really improving the patient experience. Sure. Well, I, I showed a slide on screen, I dunno if you recall where I showed a picture of a very complicated maze and matrix, uh, flow charts. And for many people, that's what it feels like. Try to do a simple thing like get to see your doctor. It's not an easy thing to do.

And if you think about your, your, your non-healthcare life, your consumer life. It's pretty easy to do things on the web, for example, to book things. So a few years ago we took, we took under, undertook the endeavor and said, Hey, how can we make this better for patients? How can we make it easier for people to schedule the care that they need?

And that's why we took up online scheduling as a key centerpiece of center work we're doing. Uh, so you talked about the, uh, the ability when people, uh, cancel their appointment for people to be moved forward in terms of their, uh, scheduled appointments, maybe two weeks out. Yeah. So, uh, just some summary statistics we have.

We, as I mentioned, we serve over 3 million patients annually at Sutter Health and, um, several million of those patients in the ambulatory outpatient service. And so we said, how do we make it easy for those patients to seek care? Um, one thing is just make it easy to schedule. So, yeah. , we've really focused on that, uh, made it easy for our pa, easier for our patients to schedule appointments and to the point now where over 30 specialties are able to patient and over 30 specialists are able to book a return visit appointment, for example.

Yeah. And then, and then, but you know, that. That's the first line. Then you think, well, geez, sometimes when you get that initial appointment either by phone or online, you, uh, it's not as soon as you'd like. That happens. Our doctors are very busy. Yeah, very popular. So how do we, how do we indicate, how do we provide the service for patients if there's, should an opportunity prevail it?

Self. And so we've created digital wait lists, wait list that allow patients to say, as they're booking the appointment in real time, they check a box that says, Hey, consider me if an early appointment, if an early appointment shows up and through this simple intervention of a text or an email when patients are reminded of their upcoming appointment.

It makes it very easy for people to tell us that they can no longer come if, or confirm that they are coming. Right? And when patients say that they can no longer come, we automatically offer that that appointment to someone else. We've been able to do that over 600,000 times, so thus far. and, uh, patients who accepted those offers, uh, were able to see their primary care doctors 14 days sooner, uh, and for specialty care 22 days sooner.

Excuse me. That's fantastic. And I would imagine that cuts down on, um, potentially your specialists with, with empty spots on their calendar where people cancel or, or need to reschedule. Well, the most frustrating thing for a busy doctor is that they want to take care of people and they then they see a valuable slot going unused.

Right. So if we can make better match patients with available opportunities for care, that's fabulous. And that's, that's what we've tried to do. Can you give us, um, last question just on the symptom checker? Sure. So you, you have the, uh, symptom checker out there. Um, I know that Google's doing this and some others are trying to do this.

Um. Talk about yours and, and what you're doing for the community that you guys, uh, serve. Uh, one point is it's, we're, we're, we're part of a greater community at large. So unlike some other interventions, uh, this intervention is targeted towards the community at large. So any patient who, any, any consumer or patient who decides to log in to sutter health.org, our website or.

Public facing website can access this, this service. Um, and so in my, in my way of thinking, this helps improve the health of the community as a whole, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be a Suter Health patient to, to leverage this. Um, and what we're doing there is. We know that patients have questions and it, it's a pretty frustrating thing, I think, to be able to, to try to, to get care, to try to access care and, uh, end up at the wrong place.

Yeah. So if you could have or show up to, uh, visit that you didn't need to show up to. Yeah. So through, through the power of AI and through the symptom checker, the idea is have a conversation with our patients, create those human connections that we're all about. Um. Whether it be in the middle of the night or early in the morning.

And then they can have a, a AI based conversation with this symptom checker, get a sense of where they, what, what are the possibilities for the, the symptoms they're, they're, uh, experiencing and hopefully get assistance to where they should get, uh, what's the best place to get care. Right. So does that workflow lead to, um,

Direct them to telehealth or primary care or, uh, or a specific, um, uh, uh, emergency center, those kind of things. Right now we offer a, uh, navigational guidance to our emergency room centers. Um, same day services. Uh, we are about to launch, uh, other services into, into primary care and, uh, telehealth services that's coming in the very near future.

Fantastic. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate your time. You're welcome. You're welcome. That's fantastic. I really appreciate Dr. Chan taking the time after his keynote to, uh, sit down and, and talk to us about pragmatic digital health innovation. Uh, good stuff. Please come back every Friday for more great interviews with influencers.

And don't forget, every Tuesday we take a look at the news, which is impacting health. It, uh, keep your feedback coming, bill at this week, at health it.com. It's all really helpful, good, bad or indifferent. It helps us to make a better show for you. Uh, this show is a production of this week in Health It. For more great content, you can check out our website at this week, health.com or the YouTube channel this week, health.com, and go to the top right, click on, uh, YouTube as the quickest way to get there.

Thanks for listening. That's all for now.