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Creating Person-Focused Tech That Is HIPAA-Compliant

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People are frustrated with the traditionally narrow entry point into healthcare: the phone call. Short of showing up at urgent care or something similar, a patient still typically first contacts a provider by phone rather than through a convenient digital front door. Sometimes the provider then moves on to electronic engagement, such as appointment reminders, but very few places are capable yet of using technology to open up their clinic in order to improve cost and care. The patient may wait on hold as the providers juggle other duties, while many of their tasks could be handled faster and with more precision online. Both sides of the desk can benefit from person-focused tech that increases patient and provider satisfaction while securing protected health information.

Modernizing healthcare

In other industries, such as banking, we’ve come to understand and use the online experience to meet our needs, save time, and feel secure as we set passwords, chat with intelligent AI, and enter PINs to handle our finances on our own schedule. Healthcare must take steps to catch up. GoCrew bridges this gap by meeting human needs through cutting-edge digital solutions.

The right tool for the job

In healthcare, there is more than just private health information about which doctors you are seeing for what conditions. There is also financial, insurance, and identity information. In the age of cyber-attacks, ransomware, and social media hacks, HIPAA sets guidelines to protect our personal information, and the company that manages or handles that data assumes responsibility to protect it. Clinics need updated tools to relate sensitive information securely in a seamless, patient-centered manner. With GoCrew, the patient and clinic experiences remain simple and accessible while our technology does the heavy lifting in the background to ensure HIPAA-compliant communication.

Open communication in a secure environment

In healthcare, people sometimes crave the consumer experience at the expense of security, but the right balance is crucial. At the infrastructure level, whether you’re a technology firm or a radiology lab, the back office is constantly under threat from external hackers who could expose your members’ data. GoCrew’s innovations allow for high-speed communication in a secure environment. For instance, patients may text their OBGYN to ask questions and receive follow-up video instructions. Or a lab sends out bloodwork results. Or a patient enters emergency contact information that lists a family member’s private details. In all those cases, people want smooth communication that still protects them and their loved ones.

Creating a communication platform for healthcare needs to feel as easy and open as messaging apps but must have sturdy gates to protect patients and clinics. When the patient or clinic logs in to the platform, GoCrew encrypts the shared data, adding an extra layer of security. It’s critical to treat even the name of the clinic as information to hide and encode, as merely the fact that a patient is communicating with a certain provider could reveal information that the patient prefers to protect. Patients and providers can enjoy rapid text and video exchanges without having to think about all the safeguards running in the background.

Precious information

Adding only a password or a single form of verification is cheaper and quicker both for the clinical and the patient side. But when things go sideways, it’s risky to fix. When mentoring teams, I ask them: “What is the most precious information you have about yourself? Imagine that’s what we have in our database. Protect that information as if it concerns you or your own spouse, children, best friend, parents, or relatives.” Our team appreciates that this is the data we’re holding in our hands and that we’re dedicated to securing.

Tech-boosted continuity of care

On the clinical side, providers need more ease of communication. What if a doctor has an appointment with you for an hour, advises several actions or medications, and then wants to check on you later? Because of the current barriers in the clinical system, it’s difficult to follow up with a patient. Clinics need a way of using protected text messaging rather than a patient’s personal phone number, to share and track information.

By using a HIPAA-compliant communication platform, not only are we securing the messages but we’re also tracking the messaging history, for health and legal reasons. Both parties are able to refer back to what medical advice was given when. Patient-provider communication is no longer dependent on disparate pieces of information shared over time. GoCrew’s app keeps all the communication together, making it easier for both providers and patients to reach each other and continue the conversation. In the past, a lab might spend hours calling a patient who can’t pick up the phone at certain times of the day. Now the lab can share those private results quickly and securely, and instead of patients worrying about receiving results or calling back to discuss them, they can immediately review their tests and write back with specific questions. This continuity of care improves the quality of treatment by removing barriers to effective communication throughout a patient’s healthcare journey.

A Vision for Connected Healthcare 

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As a practicing physician, I remember when there was a time when we focused more on taking good care of people and less on the business of medicine. These days, starting your own practice is more challenging than ever. Patients want a better connection with their providers, and doctors are not given the tools or the reimbursement for this expanded service. Privacy rules, billing rules, and technology costs and limitations make evolving your practice time-consuming and expensive. Our time and labor are two of our most precious commodities. 

You have an opportunity to return the locus of control to the patient-physician relationship and away from bureaucratic interference. Smart, dynamic online tools can be the difference of success for your practice and your patients. 

“GoCrew Health has a vision for connecting providers
and patients in a meaningful way using old-fashioned values
with a modern mindset.”

Our app is easy to download and operate immediately, with a clean interface you can personalize to your practice. Patients want a solution that makes them feel seen and heard by their providers. I witnessed firsthand how my aunt was able to get the app on her phone and sign up in two minutes. Those moments of connection create a new relationship between her and her doctors, refocusing priorities to center her understanding of her own treatment and her feeling of being well cared for. 

On the technical side, the app’s key functionality is right where you expect and works instantly. The software can be used on desktop, laptop, and mobile. At a time when the business of healthcare has threatened to eclipse the reasons we went into medicine, GoCrew is providing the essential tools that let us return to what we do best. The modern iteration of the telehealth, clinic management, patient data-monitoring software suite is pared down to the critical bits. Quality of care goes up, costs come down, and both patients and providers are more confident in the details of their care and more satisfied with their personal connection. 

I value taking care of people. I keep my patient population small, so we can connect often. With GoCrew tools, my patients say they feel like they have their personal doctor on call for them, with all of their protected healthcare visits in one place. With any given patient encounter in GoCrew, the provider and the patient have immediate access to all prior encounters, shared documents, and videos. And all of that can be uploaded to the patient medical record. 

This higher level of connection with patients is a new experience for me. A simple change to my routine, and the results are tangible. Now at the end of each visit, I tell the patient we’re going to make a quick video, and I hit record. I summarize the visit, which is like dictating a brief note, and then I give the plan. That is the patient’s favorite part. I go into as much detail as I can in just a few minutes, which is a lot! The video immediately appears on the app, where a patient can revisit our exact conversation. It’s private, personal, and meaningful to both of us.

GoCrew Health is offering the tools required to function as an independent provider in the modern healthcare system. This is just the beginning of our vision for the future of the independent practice. 

Digital Discharge Instructions Are Key to Better Care 

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The genesis of GoCrew was to improve communication. The Latin root of doctor, docere, means “to teach,” and, after diagnosis, the most important thing physicians can do is educate patients and families around their diagnoses and associated treatment plans. 

One often overlooked area of patient care is supporting patients as they leave the clinic. Studies have shown that 45-50% of patients or their caregivers don’t read or understand much of the complicated written post-care instructions they’re handed. These paper instructions have become more of a legal document than the educational tool they’re meant to be.  

As practicing Emergency Medicine physicians, we routinely see patients return to expensive emergency care because they simply did not understand their post-care instructions. Delivering the highest quality of care requires us to provide care for our patients and to educate them as well. Imagine going through the steps required to provide an accurate and thoughtful diagnosis, only to send the patient home with little information and education about how they can stay healthy moving forward? Not only is this frustrating for you as a provider, but the impact on the patient can go beyond frustration to lack of trust.  

This is one of the many reasons we launched GoCrew Health. Our team is innovating patient-provider communication by giving patients the ability to send and receive post-care instructions on their cellphones in a personal, HIPAA-compliant way.  

Imagine your patients stepping out of your office with a phone notification to check their chat history. Before they’re out of your parking lot, they’ve received a video message with their personalized post-care instructions. No physical paperwork. Just a video message they can reference at any time. They can also ask a family member to watch the video to help understand and implement treatment. 

GoCrew’s video discharge

Of course, every patient is different. A standardized post-care video message may work for one patient, but a customized post-care video accompanied with written instructions would be more beneficial for another. With GoCrew, providers also have options to customize their approach to care. Providers can: 

  • Record a quick video directly after a telehealth session to send to a patient in seconds. 
  • Create standard videos for the most common procedures to send at the end of face-to-face or telehealth visits. 
  • Upload documents for patients to read or print. 

GoCrew combines the best of technological advances with direct communication. Unread or misunderstood post-care instructions cause huge issues in medicine every single day. We’re addressing this missing piece of clinical practice by meeting patients where they are and seamlessly delivering the information they need. The result? Personalized patient-provider experiences and increased care adherence. 

The future of healthcare is mobile-first for better communication and education. We’re excited to be leading the way. 

Introducing GoCrew Health

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New product? GoDoc Providers
New name? GoDoc Providers
New brand identity? GoDoc Providers
New website? GoDoc Providers

We are thrilled to introduce GoCrew Health, where we make doctor-patient relationships simple and accessible for modern practices. The GoCrew name was derived from the idea that we are all part of the same team, striving for better health for all. Our goal is to move forward as a team. 

This past weekend we met up – as a team – to not only discuss the future, but to also take time to celebrate the launch of the GoCrew platform in the practices of four launch partners. We’re thrilled to support their practices and we can’t wait to see how the practices benefit from the provider and patient apps.  

Want to learn more about GoCrew? Sign up to connect with a member of our team.

Key Trends Create Opportunities For Independent Practices

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You already use a variety of tools to manage a successful practice, but changing consumer expectations and competition for low acuity care may require a new approach to attract and retain patients.

Trend One: People are motivated to shop for health care and will pay for access

Patients are increasingly price sensitive as their out-of-pocket costs have surged.  As much as 50 percent of the working population is covered by a high deductible health plan and average deductibles have increased 25 percent over the last five years.  As a result, your patients are financially incented to shop for the highest value available in healthcare.

And they expect to shop for healthcare like any other modern shopping experience.  According to industry surveys, 90 percent of respondents used online reviews to evaluate providers and 84 percent indicated they trusted online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Access to comparative information has reinforced and enabled the trend to shop for healthcare.  

Patients want convenience AND access.  According to Trilliant Health, of the 25 percent of patients who used an emergency room in the last 12 months and who believed they could have gone elsewhere, 65 percent cited access-related reasons (i.e., office closed, couldn’t get an appointment in time) for choosing the emergency room.  In addition, an increasing number of people and employers are turning to direct primary care or concierge medicine.  With fees ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per year and a growing number of practices converting, it is clear patients are willing to pay for better access.  

Trend Two: Patients have fewer reasons to rely on a primary care provider

Competition for low acuity care isn’t new – walk-in clinics, telehealth, home based care  to name just a few. But, there is some good news.  Patients who use urgent care are also more likely to use telehealth, so these two factions will increasingly compete for the same patients.  The bad news is that these patients already shift an average of $30,000 per provider per year out of your practice.  The even worse news is that app-based diagnostic tools and home testing kits, coupled with consumer willingness to use these tools, have the potential to shift even more low acuity care out of your practice.

And the nature of your competition is changing.  Teladoc, a national telehealth company, launched a service enabling patients to select a primary care team to manage their care clearly signaling an intent to convert those who first used them for a simple telehealth visit to long term clients.  The initial threat to you was the loss of low acuity care, but the emerging threat is new patients never contact your practice and even your established patients may switch for the convenience.  

New ways to serve your patients

The ability to serve patients in new ways is critical to your future success.  They have access to a variety of tools to self-manage, convenient access to a variety of settings and shop for health care differently than ever before. GoCrew puts the power to run your business — effectively and profitably — in your hands. Now you can better manage the quality and cost of the healthcare experience by giving patients access to you and your team when and how they want. Our platform was designed to support convenient access and uses tools like direct messaging, video discharge instructions and real time feedback to optimize the experience of both you and your patients. Improving time to care, care efficiency, and patient loyalty will also improve your bottom line.

Dual-audience experience: driving happiness for patients and providers

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COVID-19 advanced telehealth in ways we have not seen before. Adoption of telehealth services prior to the pandemic hovered optimistically around 11 percent. One year later, adoption skyrocketed to 46 percent of patients using telehealth to replace their typical care appointments.* 

Patient adoption of telehealth means practices have had to ramp up their telehealth offering practically overnight, often with varying results. 

The loser of the adoption-by-fire strategy is the patient and practice experience. The practice premise being that we need the technology, any technology now. And the patient premise being that it’s better than not receiving care. 

Strip away the “healthcare innovation” mantle and what you see is an industry whose thinking lags the technology that we all use every day. Take, for example, your phone. How often do you use it as a phone? The healthcare industry is evolving at a rapid pace, with healthcare consumerism driving behavior and the adoption of new technologies like telehealth. However, we are pushing new technology without addressing the systemic restrictions that make the healthcare system so cumbersome. For example, it’s great that we can now fill out our insurance information from our phones, but why transcribe this information when, with a few clicks, we can send an electronic insurance card.  

We are pushing new technology without addressing the systemic restrictions that make the healthcare system so cumbersome.

GoCrew was founded on the idea that virtual care patient experience should be simple and seamless. With just a few touches, patients can be chatting with their medical or dental practice, jump on a telehealth visit, and receive video follow-up care instructions, and an encounter transcript, all at their fingertips. For their part, the practice can simply integrate GoCrew for a personalized experience, with huge ROI. 

Why is this important to the experience? 

  1. Experience can drive satisfaction. Data shows that patients who engage with their providers are more likely to gain better health outcomes. Many insurance companies are adopting 3rd party telehealth solutions where you visit a new provider every time.  Not only does this impact the well-being of the patient, but also the well-being of their independent provider.  
  2. Experience can increase patient adherence. Studies have shown that the use of short video clips allows for more efficient processing and memory recall. The visual and auditory nature of videos appeals to a wide audience and allows each user to process information in a way that’s natural to them.   
  3. Experience can drive loyalty. As our healthcare system evolves from a fee-for-service to outcomes-based reimbursement model, patient loyalty and the patient relationship are huge drivers in outcomes, but also in practice revenue. 

Driving innovation doesn’t start with the current healthcare experience. It starts with the current human experience and builds off the technologies we use every single day. 

*McKinsey COVID-19 Consumer Survey, April 27, 2020. 

Well-being begins with a strong patient and provider relationship

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Have you ever been in your doctor or dentist’s office and seen the pictures of patients taped to the wall? They could be milestone photos- graduations and birthdays – or holiday cards with the entire family.  

This is why most clinicians practice medicine. No, not for the photos (although we love them), but what they represent. We practice because the relationship we have with our patient and their family is not only central to their well-being but ours as well. Patient and provider satisfaction is not mutually exclusive.  

As a young doctor, I knew the importance of the relationship a family has with their pediatrician went a long way towards overall health. While working as a pediatrician in a small coastal town in Oregon, I regularly performed home visits. These home visits allowed me to not just diagnose a child’s condition, but also allowed me a glimpse into a family’s living situation- giving me a unique connection to the patient and their family. Over the past 25 years in practice, I’ve learned that the diagnosis and symptoms become secondary to authentically connecting with my patients, ensuring they feel heard and cared for.  

With the rise of healthcare consumerism, my team is seeing increased dependence on urgent and 3rd -party telehealth models that offer convenience but may not be tethered to a patient’s primary care provider. This concerns me for a few reasons: 

  1. Quality of healthcare and healthcare outcomes is diminished when a long-term relationship between a patient and a provider doesn’t exist. Entrusting the details of your health to a new provider every time is risky. This isn’t just about carrying detailed health records. It comes from the ongoing interactions with the patient and their family that allow you to see the family dynamic, which can greatly impact a person’s overall health. 
  2. Bi-directional communication is vital to the health of a patient. This is more than just a conversation. This is an understanding of what healthy looks like for that given patient. It also means understanding the importance of (or lack of) healthcare in their life.  
  3. Independent healthcare practices are unable to leverage new technology to compete with urgent care and 3rd party telehealth services.  

We founded GoCrew with the very simple mission to transform healthcare by strengthening the relationship between providers and their patients. GoCrew is an app-based HIPAA compliant virtual care platform built specifically and personalized for independent providers. While the patient is at the center of the healthcare experience, GoCrew allows the practice to better manage the quality and cost of their healthcare experience by giving the patient access to their doctor when and how they want. Patients can have access to their care teams in-clinic, via phone, text message, or via video visit, all managed through a single app. Patients can also receive follow-up care instructions and visit transcription, all at their fingertips. No more verbal instructions as you are walking out of a clinic. No more paper discharge instructions. 

Now with the GoCrew app, patients have peace of mind, knowing that their care team is there when, and how, they need them. And providers, like myself, can focus on connecting with patients in meaningful and efficient ways.