According to a recent post in Hospital & Health Networks, 83% of the time that a patient spends for a doctor's visit is waste!  Waste, as defined by practitioners of lean management, includes time that is not spent where the "value" in a transaction occurs - in healthcare, that would be where doctors and patients interact.  When factoring in travel and waiting, a patient spends just 17% of his/her time with a provider.

Technology, especially smartphones and tablets, has the power to change this.

This will come through digital interaction.  ER Express and MyIdealDoctor, two ValorBridge portfolio companies, are tackling this challenge by reducing the time patients wait to see physicians.

In the case of ER Express, the company's online scheduling application reduces ER wait times for patients potentially by 80-90%.  

MyIdealDoctor enables access to physicians within minutes when it can typicaly hours, days or weeks to schedule an appointment or head to an urgent care center or emergency room.    

Speed and convenience through technology has disrupted several industries, including using the functionality of scheduling to accelerate disruption.  Health care will be no different.

For hospital systems and other providers, mobile health and scheduling is a great opportunity to connect with younger consumers and capture local market share.

A link to the article is here.  

At the recent Becker's Hospital Review CEO + CFO Roundtable, the acceptance of telehealth as a part of the patient engagement experience was front and center.  According to a summary (here) of the Roundtable, 70% of employers plan to offer telemedicine as a benefit in 2017.  

Increasingly, we are seeing hospital systems deploy telehealth as part of their patient care.  This is out of necessity due to supply constraints of specialty-based physicians and increasing demand for healthcare due to demographics.  We foresee these trends as sustainable; MyIdealDoctor and other telehealth providers will see opportunities for their offerings expand.  

Click here for the full article