2024-11-22
Valtech was a sponsor of the 2024 HCIC, and our team was there to spend time with clients and partners, to present, and like everyone else to learn.
Before we unpack the rich themes from the conference, it’s worth noting that Valtech had a great showing at the pre-conference awards ceremony. We took six awards for our clients Baystate Health, Baptist Health and University of Maryland Medical System — a great way to start the conference!
Through attending numerous sessions and networking with close colleagues accumulated over the last two decades, a clear picture has emerged of what is on the minds of sophisticated digital leaders in consumer healthcare.
Some of the main themes in the air at HCIC included:
HIPAA and privacy
Since the 2022 redefinition of digital analytics and profiling as PHI, organizations have been forced to up their sophistication and consider new training, platforms and legal arrangements in order to just continue their baseline operations.
In 2024, the considerations expanded to include FTC and state privacy laws that overlap and interact with digital programs. As we have written about before, there is an uptake in CDP adoption as organizations push for more sophisticated tools in the hopes of getting some long-deserved relief in the process of fixing their HIPAA analytics problems.
The message was clear: No healthcare provider of any scale can afford to approach analytics in a basic way, and investment in the research platforms and people necessary to do it right is a foundational element in 2024.
Composable experience platforms
It was interesting to see the focus that digital teams had on flexibility and better tooling to run their operations. It’s clear the current wave of redesign project is headless, and under the hood the tools tend to be SaaS decomposable, meaning built to play with other vendors.
It’s notable that at this point every single healthcare-specific vendor with a “single source platform” has given up that approach and partnered with one of the major CMS platform vendors.
There are still a ton of healthcare organizations running on insecure platforms and missing out on efficient, digital operations.
For some organizations running WordPress, the urgency to change has ratcheted up recently due to major conflict among key players in the WordPress universe, which threatens to confirm its unsuitability for important websites.
Mergers and acquisitions
The serious financial woes that started in 2022 and dominated 2023 have led to waves of acquisitions, with a whole new crop of healthcare providers moving through the rigorous process of trying to combine what may have formally been market-competitor hospitals.
A key theme was getting consolidation and baking in the change management and strategy necessary to challenge legacy practices that would impede any marketing integration.
To do this clear articulation of business value, you need to be brought together with cross-silo partnerships, not to mention marketing and IT. Brand loyalty, not to mention large amounts of revenue, stand in the balance.
Being able to present a unified system, though difficult and politically challenging, is well worth it.
Another topic across multiple discussions was the relative dislocation between digital efforts and the need for service design — changing the processes, expectations and in some cases physical spaces in healthcare activities.
Through service design, organizations rethink and improve their basic interactions with patients. But if these changes have no clear improvements online, or if opportunities are missed to expand real-world experiences online, value is left on the table.
I think there is a general understanding that healthcare needs to change and that patient expectations set in other sectors need to be met. The question is how many organizations will align changes in their real-world operations with the powerful support digital practices can give it.
The idea that digital projects might also trigger rethinking of outdated irrational practices in the real world is not a new idea, but on several fronts it seemed to have deep-ended the discussion and started the kind of change we are happy to see.
New models of patient interaction
Completeness of experiences and complex care were two major themes around digital experience in this year’s conference.
While the rest of the conference were contemplating how long it would take for AI chatbots to become legally viable for customers and the mainstream, others were working away in the details of trying to support some of the most complex things that go on in hospital systems.
These include making sure patient logistics are adequately addressed through digital encounters, including everything that gets the patient to the door, and everything that they have to do after.
Similarly challenging are the issues around representing complex care without the aid of a quarterback or nurse navigator. Increasingly, organizations are building specialist scheduling applications that involve multi-stage, automated forms that help a user through a process.
Along with chatbot assistance, some organizations are grappling with the issue of complex care and trying to find experiences that can reduce stress and help families keep track of what they need to do for a relative whose illness covers multiple service lines and requires multiple specialists.
This is for sure still an area for innovation and development, but something we have not seen get as much attention as it has recently begun to see. Call centers, still crucial but shrinking, continue to change, and we expect to see innovations that will make it much easier for families of patients to understand what is really going on and how to navigate it.
AI in digital operations
Valtech Health had the opportunity to speak with longtime client Johns Hopkins Medicine about the special issues for content operations in academic medicine. In this session, we discussed innovative programs that combine AI with DXP and workflow systems to dramatically leverage the output of content teams.
Working through a series of great examples, we showed how many tasks can be automated and how independence from specific software vendors was desirable.
Elsewhere in the conference, it was becoming evident that a very large number of desktop AI tools were being used for social media, PR and marketing, and that the tool set used by managers and designers in these areas has definitively changed from the proliferation of previously impossible tool sets.
The field is simultaneously urgent and disorganized, but we hope we brought some clarity to the proceedings about a way forward.
Wrapping up
HCIC continues to be an outstandingly substantive and critical conference, drawing from a long-standing community of people who are really working on the difficult problems of healthcare and healthcare marketing.
It is always a privilege to participate in discussions of this depth and spend time with a sophisticated group of clients, partners, healthcare providers and third-party vendors to get a well-rounded view of how practices and the business of healthcare are evolving.
After the conference, these relationships continue and lead to important collaborations.
