As one of the big players in New York, the pressure is on NYU Langone to innovate. That means often thinking outside the healthcare bubble and investigating how other industries use technology to bring the best experience to the end user, according to Caitlin Cronk, the associate director of digital planning and strategy at NYU Langone.  

At HIMSS19, Cronk and her colleague Nader Mherabi, the chief information officer at NYU Langone Health, will be sitting down to talk about implementing a digital patient experience from scratch.  

“When we started thinking about the patient digital experience, we were creating the user journey or the patient journey. So we thought about it from their perspective. While we were looking at that patient journey we also did research in other industries,” Cronk told MobiHealthNews. “So we gathered a lot of different ideas from industries that are consumer and customer focused.”

When brainstorming new ideas Cronk said the department was interested in learning from what worked and what didn’t across an array of fields. 

“We didn’t think we had to limit our ideation sessions to what other health systems are doing. So we looked at the travel industry, the consumer products industry, you name it. We kind of surveyed everything and got ideas across the board,” Cronk said. 

User buy-in is one of the top concerns, and that’s why it’s always important to get the end user’s voice into the innovation process, she said. But there is a number of ways to get that input and learn about patient engagement behavior. 

“We have different forums that our patient experience team gets us connected with. We’ve worked with them a lot. We have also done some market research and leveraged some market surveys,” she said. “We have also worked with some firms to do some specific focus group discussions with different patients throughout some of these programs. We also have surveys we can leverage and we can look up the data of what patients are using across our different offerings as well so we can leverage analytics.”

Right now the system is focusing on patient access and telemedicine, as well as experiences across radiology, obstetrics and the post-procedural space. 

Cronk and Mherabi will be presenting their session, titled “Creating a Digital Patient Experience Strategy from Scratch” at HIMSS19. It is scheduled for Wednesday, February 13 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. in room W303A.