Takeaways from HIMSS21 | Lirio on the Future of Healthcare

Each year the HIMSS Global Health Conference provides opportunities for healthcare leaders to come together and have meaningful conversations about the state of the industry and the role of technology in improving healthcare delivery and outcomes.

While HIMSS21 was unlike any other with its August timeline, digital/in-person hybrid format, and vaccination and mask requirements due to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases, the commitment to innovation and collaboration remained the same. We gathered in Las Vegas with like-minded professionals to identify ways to “be the change” in healthcare.

Lirio was proud to be part of the event, and our team had a successful week leading educational sessions in the booth and meeting with industry executives. Though the crowd was not as large as previous conferences, we found attendees to be intentionally engaged in discussions and activities.

Throughout the conference, we noticed a few key themes that we anticipate will be top of mind across all areas of healthcare for the foreseeable future.

1. Sustainable Digital Health

Like we mentioned in our previous HIMSS21 blog post, due to the digital health revolution accelerated by the pandemic, patients now have more options than ever for communicating with providers and receiving health information. Digital is the way forward, and the industry must sustain the momentum in order to realize real change.

In a HIMSS21 recap article from Healthcare Dive, Aaron Martin, Chief Data Officer at Providence Health, said “I am demanding from my team that every service we provide has a digital endpoint to it. And [application programming interfaces] – you’ve got to have an API for every one of these different services.”

COVID-19 eliminated significant hurdles to innovation and prompted rapid technology adoption, but it will take a conscious effort to not revert back or further splinter the healthcare technology stack. The interim impact has been a wide range of point solutions that don’t necessarily work together and lack a holistic perspective.

Lirio works to bring this holistic approach to healthcare organizations by providing an intelligence layer that connects systems of infrastructure with systems of engagement. This allows you to make meaning of all your patient data and use it for effective communication and engagement, and better outcomes overall.

2. Deeper Patient Engagement

Many HIMSS21 conversations focused on the need for a true patient engagement system that goes deeper than simply calling or emailing patients. Instead, healthcare providers must be able to listen to, understand, and meet patients where they are.

The primary objective of healthtech solutions should be their human impact, with features and functionalities serving as a secondary consideration. Healthcare organizations don’t need technology for technology’s sake, but rather to create change through better experiences, meaningful engagement, and personalized, accessible care.

According to many HIMSS21 speakers, this will require healthcare systems to be de-siloed. In this Healthcare Dive article, Shreesh Tiwari, Principal at professional services firm ZS said, “Especially during the pandemic, there has been a growing realization that all the ecosystem players have to come together to drive patient centricity. There has been a missing link and that’s trust.”

Lirio’s Precision Nudging™ solutions facilitate deeper patient engagement via hyper-personalized messages that contain behavioral interventions tailored to each individual’s cognitive biases and barriers to action. By infusing behavioral science expertise into your patient communications, you can get to know your patients better and address the unique, underlying factors that influence their health decisions.

3. Personalized AI

On the whole, HIMSS21 attendees and speakers recognized that AI is an essential component to achieving sustainable digital health and deeper patient engagement, but how to use it remains a question for many organizations.

A successful approach to AI should be about more than just automation and predictive analytics. Instead, the focus should include personalization, which requires empathy, equity, and responsiveness in a real-world setting. Personalization via AI will not only allow organizations to streamline workflows and improve operational efficiency, but it will facilitate more comprehensive care that leads to healthier patient populations.

That’s why the Lirio platform does more than automate messages. Through continuous learning, it gets smarter over time and identifies which behavioral interventions work and which ones don’t for each patient. It then adjusts the messages based on these learnings to enable hyper-personalized interactions.

Keep the HIMSS21 Conversation Going

Due to the success of our in-booth educational sessions featuring Lirio’s behavioral science and AI experts, we will host two follow-up webinars. If you missed us at HIMSS21 – or you want to keep the conversation going – we invite you to join us for these virtual events.