High-Tech Care Delivery Plus High-Touch Human Interaction

Ed Rafalski, senior vice president and chief strategy and marketing officer at BayCare Health System

Consumerism is driving all industries to innovate, and health care is no exception. The ideal state is a digitally enabled, frictionless consumer experience. But in a highly complex industry like health care that has traditionally operated with a command-and-control vs. consumer-centric mindset, it’s a massive change.

Adding to the cultural challenges, the pain points on the consumer journey vary depending on the consumer. For an 80-year-old woman with poor hearing, it could be the difficulty of scheduling an appointment using a complicated IVR system. For a busy millennial mom, it might be the absence of mobile online scheduling.

“What I’ve been focusing on is removing the friction in health care and making it easier for the consumer to interact with the organization and not to feel the barriers and the difficulties and the frustrations,” says Ed Rafalski, senior vice president and chief strategy and marketing officer at BayCare Health System in Clearwater, Florida.

To move toward the vision of a frictionless experience, BayCare has invested in a digitally enabled ambulatory hub that offers consumers a full range of health and wellness services under one roof. We spoke with Rafalski to learn more about how a high-tech approach to care delivery can be combined with high-touch human interaction to meet the needs of consumers wherever they are on the digital usage continuum.

Four years ago, BayCare Health purchased property in the Bloomingdale suburb of Tampa with the goal of using it to launch an experiment in health care transformation. If the prototype ambulatory care center envisioned by the health system’s leadership worked, the hope was that it could be replicated in other locations.

Read the full article now: BayCare Health’s Vision: Evidence-Based Design for Care Delivery

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President