Innovation brings together providers, customers, technology

Interview: IBC's Terry Booker on creating Silicon Valley of healthcare (Page 3)
Tools

By Alicia Caramenico

FierceHealthPayer: How does the innovation center involve providers and customers?

Terry Booker: One of the big things is that we don't get a lot of feedback from customers. Now we're trying to figure out what are those tools by which we can get feedback from customers and understand how they feel about the provider environment both on an individual basis and an institutional basis.

In the pilots we have going on with University of Pennsylvania Hospital System and NYU Hospital System, we are trying to focus on ways to better identify those patients who have chronic conditions so that we--ourselves as a payer and the providers on a large institutional health system basis--can proactively go after those customers to help them better manage their conditions.

FHP: What role does technology play in healthcare innovation as well as in getting that customer feedback?

Booker: Technology has a role in terms of being able to facilitate data mining and data crunching so you can really take large amounts of data and find the trends.

If you take it to the retail level, it's how to communicate with customers via their smartphones. Those are the things that are going to make the providers and the payers more ubiquitous with the member. The more ubiquitous we are, that will allow the member to think more holistically about their healthcare and do more to manage it and maintain it.