Premise Health

Laurel Cipriani

Integrating New Technologies into Existing Clinical Applications to Enhance Functionality and Efficiency

An organization our size receives frequent requests to add new technologies or devices to our portfolio. At Premise Health, we strive to maintain consistent standards across our 400 large employer clients, making it tricky to balance innovation and standardization.

Our robust governance process begins by asking senior leaders from each department whether we should pursue a particular technology request. If the answer is yes, the request moves into a technical review where security and compliance, interoperability, support needs, standardization, and resource bandwidth are considered. Projects are then evaluated and ranked across the enterprise to ensure efforts are aligned across departments. It’s important to remember that even minor changes on paper can cause significant disruption if they are not communicated clearly and providers and staff aren't properly trained and supported. We know training, change management strategies, and communication are crucial to ensuring end users are well-informed and prepared for changes as they are implemented. This coordinated approach ultimately ensures we deliver the best possible experiences for our team members, clients, patients and families, which we call members.

Experiences From An Important Initiative That You Were Involved In

When I inherited Premise's application training team, our trainers held two roles simultaneously: Each trainer was responsible for owning content development and maintenance while actively traveling around the country to train and support end users during go-lives. I recognized that this was placing an extreme burden on the trainers and made it difficult for them to have the bandwidth to create and maintain optimal training content. So, I advocated for a dedicated instructional design team, trained and experienced in adult education and learning management systems. Since then, what started as a single person performing instructional design has grown into a team of instructional designers and e-learning developers tasked with creating robust content, ensuring it's up-to-date with current upgrades and releases, and staying abreast of industry trends and developments. Our trainers are now fully focused on training and assisting end users with 'at-the-elbow' support on many of those 'how-to' issues that arise during go-lives. Now, our trainers and instructional designers can operate at their highest levels, using their strongest skill sets. This new structure has become invaluable for our team and end users.

Areas In Clinical Applications Where Current Services Struggle To Offer A Solution

With an increasing reliance on technology, many organizations risk leaving behind certain segments of their populations. Our mission is to make healthcare more accessible by providing secure online access to personal health information, appointment scheduling, and the ability to attend visits and communicate with providers when it's most convenient for our members. That means we're always thinking about how we can help people who may not have access to the necessary technology or may have difficulty using it. We're asking ourselves questions like, 'How can we best help members who aren't as comfortable using a mobile app for pre-appointment check-ins,' and 'What about members whose preferred language is not easily accessible via translation?'In some of our population segments, digital literacy remains an area we're constantly looking at ways to address. Ultimately, we want to ensure that the most vulnerable patients, some of whom are the least likely to have the right tools, can easily access their healthcare with Premise. That's an area of continued focus and energy for us.

Exciting Technological Advancements

People are typically drawn to the newest, shiniest developments. Today, that's generative AI, and I think the healthcare industry is just beginning to understand its possibilities, implications, and risks. But there are many other exciting advances as well. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) continues to bring better connected healthcare to even the most complex and vulnerable populations. Similarly, extended reality (XR) complements the devices of the IoMT by introducing the possibility for patients to have fully engaged encounters through a combination of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Underpinning all of these advancements is the vast potential of living within rich healthcare datasets themselves. While these are exciting prospects, it's important to remain focused on the groundwork to ensure this technology is accessible, interoperable, reliable, and secure. With thoughtful safeguards and guidelines on proper usage in place, these applications will make high-quality care more accessible and effective than ever before, particularly for historically underserved populations.

Advice To Professionals In The Clinical Applications Field

It's well-known that healthcare providers did not go into healthcare to become technology experts. While some healthcare professionals learn to use (and even love) technology, many do not. That means best-in-class clinical application training for healthcare professionals is critical. To that end, we continue to build and deploy training in several different formats and modalities to accommodate all types of learning styles. We offer both on-demand training for those who are already comfortable with technology and live instructor-led training for those who want real-time support and the ability to ask questions as they learn. Long-term, we strive to maintain that level of value for our end users with our robust online library and more advanced and nuanced training once they've established a knowledge base. We take great pride in the work that we've done to meet everyone where they're at, supporting them until they're confident on their own.

As I mentioned previously, it’s invaluable to have an expert instructional design team dedicated to creating and maintaining all application training content. Our team’s efforts to go above and beyond have brought a number of recognitions and awards for Premise’s training and development programs. Even so, we're always looking for better ways to support our end users. For example, I recently challenged my team to identify possible knowledge gaps and teaching opportunities by proactively reaching out to newer users to listen to their perspectives on their experiences. This type of feedback will allow us to get closer to addressing issues in the best way possible before they've even presented themselves.