Accelerating Digital Patient Experience and Digital Transformation at UCSF Health

CDHI's Aaron Neinstein, MD describes where digital health is — and where it is heading — in the post-pandemic world.

The Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) was founded in 2012 with a mission to create effective digital solutions that transform health and enable compassionate care delivery for all. Due to its commitment to digital innovation and transformation, CDHI is now growing rapidly, enabling the Center to accelerate transformation efforts, leading UCSF in becoming a digital-first care delivery system.

At UCSF Health, we aim to become a Digital-First care delivery system, one that enables patients and consumers to easily and efficiently access and interact with care delivery in a way that is empathic, delightful, personalized, and modern. And CDHI are leading our work to get there, working in a digitally-transformed operating model, where cross-functional teams, focused on a core element of our customer experience, leverage data and analytics to iteratively improve those critical pieces of our business value chain. Digital-First care delivery is our destination. Digital Transformation is how we will get there. 

At the start of the pandemic, UCSF Health CEO, Mark Laret, announced to UCSF colleagues that the pandemic provided an opportunity to rebuild the post-pandemic world of healthcare in a different way, to ensure that we look different and interact differently with our community and patients than we did before. And, as we've now seen in almost every element of our lives, we have come to expect frictionless, customer-focused digital experiences. The time is now for UCSF to make rapid progress in digital health and digital transformation, reshaping how we work, how we deliver care, and how we move forward into the future. 

We've made exciting and foundational progress. In just the last two years, we've hired an array of talent across key areas like Design (David Steuer), Data Science (Bob Rogers), Patient Experience (Stefoni Bavin), Product Management (Jerry Young), and Solutions Architecture (Ed Martin and Sondra Renly). Among their other accomplishments, their prior careers found them redesigning Disneyland parks, deploying on-site clinics for One Medical, and leading Data Science at Intel. In turn, they've built teams of diverse, passionate, committed, creative talented people who collaborate daily with clinical product managers (including faculty leaders Drs. Anobel Odisho, Michelle Mourad, William Brown, and Tim Judson) and UCSF staff and operational leaders.

Combined, this group has already developed and implemented solutions that eliminate the friction as a newly-referred patient seeks a specialty consultation with us, driving faster navigation to a UCSF specialist. We have deployed automated virtual care programs that are actively providing Lung Transplant and Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients with continuous care at home. We accomplish this by working with key partners, like Luma Health, Conversa Health, Salesforce, and Philips, as well as our UCSF Health Affiliate network. We rely on cross-functional teams, working across all areas at UCSF and focusing together on creating the optimal patient journey and experience. These teams leverage analytics to drive iterative, continuous improvement and business transformation. 

And we're ready to take on more. With three main focus areas: 

1. Putting patients in the driver’s seat, partnering in their care to deliver a care experience that is unique to each patient. 

2. Making it possible to deliver exceptional healthcare everywhere, without borders or boundaries. 

3. Aligning the best of machine and human intelligence to deliver the next generation of care. 

We believe our efforts will help UCSF Health be a leader in leveraging digital health to erase the digital divide. And, as we achieve our goals in digital health and digital transformation, UCSF Health will be a better place to receive care and a better place to work. 

Please join us on our journey by following us on Twitter at @UCSFCDHI. 

By: Aaron Neinstein, MD, Vice President, Digital Health, UCSF Health; Associate Professor of Medicine