Jerry Young

The digital transformation of our health care system will require not only digitization of existing tools but also a redesign of our care delivery system and collaboration with digital partners. Traditional patient journeys are reactive to symptom presentation and delayed by health care system–centric scheduling, leading to poor experience and avoidable adverse outcomes. Patient journeys will be reimagined to a digital health pathway that seamlessly integrates various care experiences from… Show more

The digital transformation of our health care system will require not only digitization of existing tools but also a redesign of our care delivery system and collaboration with digital partners. Traditional patient journeys are reactive to symptom presentation and delayed by health care system–centric scheduling, leading to poor experience and avoidable adverse outcomes. Patient journeys will be reimagined to a digital health pathway that seamlessly integrates various care experiences from telemedicine, remote monitoring, to in-person clinic visits. Through centering the care delivery around the patients, they can have more delightful experiences and enjoy the quality of standardized condition pathways and outcomes. To design and implement digital health pathways at scale, enterprise health care systems need to develop capabilities and partnerships in human-centered design, operational workflow, clinical content management, communication channels and mechanisms, reporting and analytics, standards-based integration, security and data management, and scalability. Using a human-centered design methodology, care pathways will be built upon an understanding of the unmet needs of the patients to have a more enjoyable experience of care with improved clinical outcomes. To power this digital care pathway, enterprises will choose to build or partner for clinical content management to operationalize best-in-class pathways. This digital solution will engage with patients through multimodal communication modalities, including written, audio, photo, or video, throughout the patient journey. Leadership teams will review analytics functions to track that the digital care pathways will be iterated to improve patient experience, clinical metrics, and operational efficiency…This framework empowers enterprise health care systems to avoid collecting a fragmented series of one-off solutions but develop a sustainable concerted roadmap to the future of proactive intelligent patient care. Show less

We describe the design process and architecture for a software application that has been developed and deployed to optimize the referrals intake process by automating the processing and digitization of incoming specialty referral faxes, extracting key data elements and integrating them into the electronic health record (EHR), and organizing referrals.

SUMMARY
The screening of healthcare workers for COVID-19 symptoms and exposures prior to every clinical shift is important for preventing nosocomial spread of infection but creates a major logistical challenge. To make the screening process simple and efficient, UCSF Health designed and implemented a digital chatbot-based workflow. Within one week of forming a team, we conducted a product development sprint and deployed the digital screening process. In the first two months of use, over… Show more

SUMMARY
The screening of healthcare workers for COVID-19 symptoms and exposures prior to every clinical shift is important for preventing nosocomial spread of infection but creates a major logistical challenge. To make the screening process simple and efficient, UCSF Health designed and implemented a digital chatbot-based workflow. Within one week of forming a team, we conducted a product development sprint and deployed the digital screening process. In the first two months of use, over 270,000 digital screens have been conducted. This process has reduced wait times for employees entering our hospitals during shift changes, allowed for physical distancing at hospital entrances, prevented higher-risk individuals from coming to work, and provided our healthcare leaders with robust, real-time data for make staffing decisions. Show less