Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: You float like a slow pen upon no hands look pawn no frame no shame Numb me up like a cane can't focus shake again which moment makes a man? Cause I'm hoping to just be welcome. I'm Dr. Robert Groves, your host for the Groves Connection Podcast.
The Groves Connection brings you intimate conversations with pundits, providers, patients, leaders and laypeople, all to help us understand understand a contradiction.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: How can our health care system be
[00:00:36] Speaker A: both magnificent and yet so deeply flawed?
We're going Inside Healthcare to talk candidly with those who know what they have to say. May delight, surprise, frustrate, or at times even anger you.
But I invite you to get curious and listen to the truth about health care and those who want to fix it.
Maybe the answers have been there all along.
We just need to make the connection.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Groves Connection. In this new year of 2022, I want to wish all of you listeners a very happy new year.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: And for those of you who are
[00:01:25] Speaker B: connectors, who subscribe to the show and who show up every, let me say a big thank you. If you're listening for the first time, I want to welcome you and offer a special thanks as well. We have big plans for 2022 and our second year and I'm looking forward to bringing you exciting new guests who have a lot to offer in terms of their insights into the future of healthcare and what we can all do to make it better. This is another special episode, a holiday episode if you will. I am rebroadcasting an episode recorded live as I did a keynote on behalf of Arista MD at their sponsored conference. Again, that's a R I S T A Arista md. This is a company that's doing some very interesting stuff that is so elegant in its simplicity. They have an econsult platform that they've developed to establish a relationship between a primary care physician and a panel of board certified consultants in specialty care. It increases access, it lowers costs and it improves outcomes. And AristMD has been able to show that over time, over 70% of in person face to face specialist visits can be avoided because the question that needs to be answered can be managed in this very efficient way. You'll learn a little bit more about that as we get into it, but I encourage you to look up the platform and see what they have to offer. You know, gosh, I wish I'd thought of it. It's one of those things like wheels on luggage. When you go back and you think about it, it's like, wow, why didn't I think of that first? Well, aristamd has and they've also been able to show that approximately 12% of ED visits and hospitalizations may be avoided. More than 70%, as I mentioned, of issues can be addressed without having to go to a new doctor, repeat all of the stories over again, fill out all the paperwork, et cetera, and 90% of the time it has an impact to the care plan. So the primary care physician is getting this information and putting it to immediate use. So with that context, I invite you to join me as I present the keynote address about knowledge management.
Are you ready to connect?
[00:04:04] Speaker C: Good morning everyone.
Welcome to the Arista MD Econsult's Transform PCP Quality and Care Conference. My name is Crystal Mullis and I'm the Vice President of Member Backed ventures at Vizient SG2 and so glad to be your host and moderator today. This session is titled the Future of Knowledge Management is Digitally Enabled patient care with Dr. Robert Groves. Dr. Groves is the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at banner Aetna. Welcome, Dr. Groves.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Thank you, Crystal. It's a pleasure to be here. And good morning everyone.
As I was thinking about the keynote for the day that we're going to have here, one of the things that occurred to me is sometimes we get so far down in the weeds on specific strategies that we forget about the context. I thought I'd walk the group through some context about knowledge management in the past and then we'll get a little bit into the future and then we'll talk specifically about the problem that Arista MD seeks to solve and my view of that problem and the solution. What is digital healthcare? We're going to get into that. But first I want to talk a little bit about managing complexity, because if you want a framework to really think about this in a historical context, think about managing complexity. And what do I mean by that? Well, the speed with which knowledge is accumulating today is like nothing we've ever seen before.
It truly is one of those exponential curves. And to give you some perspective, in 1950 it took about 50 years for health knowledge to double. By 1980, that was seven years, in 2010, 3.5 years, and today it's doubling about every couple of months.
Now think about that knowledge doubling every couple of months. Those of you who know what exponential curves look like know that that is a rocket ship headed straight up. And there is absolutely no way that we can keep in our minds, even as trained experts, all of the knowledge that's out there that we ought to be aware of. So we need ways to manage that knowledge to some extent. Knowledge management has always been an issue. If you go back into the early 1800s, it was not unus for a local physician to write a letter to somebody in a center of excellence, if you will, at the time, and to get a response back. Of course, that took quite a while for that to happen. On the other hand, there wasn't a lot we could do in those days. And I think it says something about health care that even when an encounter with a physician was more likely to make you worse rather than better, they've still been an integral part of society. And I think that's about caring. But we do have a responsibility to take knowledge management seriously. And there are a few ways to handle that. One of the ways that we've seen in medicine, the practice of medicine, is differentiation, right? I mean, if you go back far enough, you had doctors and that was pretty much it. They did surgery, they did diagnostics, they held your hands, they put leeches on you, whatever it was that they were doing at the time. But there was no real differentiation. And as knowledge management has grown and it's become more and more difficult for any one physician to keep all that knowledge in their head, we started to see specialties. First division of surgery and those who don't do surgery, the diagnostician. And then you get all of the specialties, whether dermatology or cardiology, et cetera, and even sub specialties, for example, electrophysiology. So that's one way to manage complexity. The problem with that way of managing complexity is fragmentation. It becomes more and more difficult to align the sub sub specialist with the primary care physician who may have the ongoing relationship with that patient. We can talk about how that's been fractured and challenged later on. But what I want to do here is talk about another way of managing complexity. And this is one that Brent James has probably promoted more than anybody else, and that's standardization, right? In other words, experts convene together to look at all the evidence, decide what the expected clinical practice is or the evidence based practice is for a given set of circumstances, and design a strategy to manage that disease entity. And then build that into what we have today is a lot of our tools, order sets, et cetera. So those are the two main ways of managing complexity. Both of them are highly dependent on communication and collaboration. And that has not always been stellar in healthcare in the United States. So think in the context of managing complexity and communication and collaboration. And then the other important thing to think through is what problem are we trying to solve? One of the things I have responsibility for at Banner Aetna, which is a joint venture payer, we are literally a health insurance company, independently licensed from Banner and Aetna, but led by both of those teams. And one of my jobs is innovation, to keep my eyes on the horizon, understand what solutions are out there and how they might fit into Banner Aetna. As we try to transform healthcare in Arizona, that's our mission, to really make it different. And I'm talking about the quadruple aim. How do we really change the way that care is delivered in Arizona with our partner, Banner Health? So when I think about innovation, one of the challenges that I have is not all innovation is useful, not all innovation works, and not all innovation will take us to the next level. So the way I like to think about it, is this a solution looking for a problem, or is there actually a problem here someone's trying to solve? And that can be from a member patient perspective, whether it's convenient or access, it can be from a physician provider perspective. As we talked about, it's really tough to keep up with everything. What kind of decision management tools might you have? Or it might be quality or safety. How do we make sure that we don't miss anything? In 2005, one of the jobs that I had was rolling out tele ICU for Banner Health. And that strategy really wasn't a replacement for anything at the bedside. It was focused on standardizing our approach, taking care of the rote stuff with physicians, behind the camera, algorithms, et cetera. So the doc at the bedside could focus on what they do best, which is creating a relationship with the patient, recognizing complex patterns and setting up a strategy to manage that patient, get them better, and to care for the patient there. That word is again, caring, critical to the practice of medicine, and something that's been a little bit lost along the way. We'll talk about that again later. So let me tell you how it worked when I first started practice, getting knowledge out to the eastern plains of Colorado. I started my practice actually at a little hospital in Greeley, Colorado. And this was the mid to late 90s. And there were lots of little communities in eastern Colorado, Holyoke, Ray, and even southern Wyoming and western Nebraska. And I used to take, when I first started in solo practice, a day, a week, I'd hop on a little Cessna and we had a pilot that the hospital had retained and I would literally get on there and fly out to eastern Colorado or wherever we were going, see patients all Day specialty for pulmonary medicine, and then fly back and think about the time involved in that. And there's another critical issue. There is. I was petrified of flying at the time. And so it was really both nerve wracking, stressful, time consuming, and highly inefficient, but it was necessary. There were lots of people in those eastern plains that needed specialty attention. There were physicians asking for assistance, for support, asking questions about how they might manage a patient differently. And so that's what I did. And even when I recruited a couple of partners to join me, one of us would spend a week then flying out to the eastern plains to the various communities and seeing patients.
So that was one way to manage the problem of knowledge management for those primary care physicians out on the eastern plains. I want to talk a second about definitions, because when we think about telemedicine, what does that actually mean? I would suggest to you that probably the first telemedicine happened in the 1800s. The tool used was the telegraph, and it was leveraged during the civil war to coordinate the shipping of injured soldiers back to base camp to get services out to the soldiers. And that really is the intersection of technology and healthcare. And that is a form of telemedicine. Then that was about 1830, I think, that the telegraph was invented and it had a pretty short life because along came Alexander Graham Bell and invented the telephone. Although that was somewhat controversial initially for physicians to make decisions over the telephone, it became a standard for verbal orders and strategies for physicians to take care of patients and deliver information, communicate with those who were taking care of them in the hospital. Now, the other place where we've had the intersection of healthcare and technology is in where we see the patient.
Back in, I believe it was 1930, there were still 40% of visits were house calls. And I remember making house calls with my dad. The technology that we had then was only the telephone. And I remember a couple of things about that. You know, there are good and bad things about being connected all the time to everybody, everywhere. One night I woke up in the middle of the night and there were sirens going off. I looked out my window and there were police cars outside, Two of them that were pulled up. You know how they do, they, they wheel up and face each other and they were right there in my driveway. And it scared me to death. I didn't know what was going on. Is my dad being arrested? You know, did I do something wrong? I was just a little kid. Well, it turns out that that was before the days when we had good Pagers. And we lived pretty far out in the country. And the police were there because they needed my dad at the hospital. He was a general practitioner in those days, and he didn't hear the phone, and so they sent the police out to wake him up so that he could get into the hospital and take care of a patient. Now, fortunately, we don't have to do that anymore. That would be a real challenge. But I just wanted to give you this broader context of what it was like in those days to practice medicine. And the other thing I remember is we ate lunch every Sunday in the same place, and the staff would actually bring a telephone trailing the long cord behind and set it right there on the table where we were eating, because my dad got called so frequently that he could just answer the phone right there in the restaurant and take care of whatever was going on and continue his meal. I'm glad that things aren't like that now. And we can lament a little bit about being connected all the time. But one more short story about what it was like in those days, even when I was in training, and this would have been in the late 90s, I remember multiple times I would work really hard, just get done for the day, hop in my car and start driving home.
And then I get a page. And the question was always, do I turn around and go back to the hospital? Because almost certainly I'm going to have to come in. You guys that have practiced know that feeling, or do I drive home? Because if I go back to the hospital, I'm more likely to have to stay, and if I go. So, you know, that cannot. Or look for a phone booth, you remember those.
So technology has certainly made our lives easier, but it is also added to the complexity. So when you think about telemedicine, think about the intersection of healthcare and technology.
Telephone and then traditional telemedicine. I think it's really cool that we can actually use that term. Now. What do I mean by traditional telemedicine? Well, that's the audio video connection. And it's traditional in the sense that it still works pretty much the same way as it did. And there are some improvements, some iterations of that, but it is a set time for a physician and a patient to interact. In this case by audio, video connection.
Information is exchanged, a diagnosis or a diagnostic strategy is determined, and then they go on their way. Now, the problem with that is, is the same problem that you have in any situation where you're trying to get two people together at the same time. You got to Match schedules. That's traditional telemedicine. Optum has defined another category that they call telehealth. And when we start adding telehealth into the mix, you start thinking of the intern, of things, of being able to do home monitoring, of all of those tools and tactics that, for example, a company called Virta calls it continuous remote care because the patient can be connected to a physician 247 if they need to. They can communicate via text, they can send in their glucose values, they can send in their weight. All of this information can be exchanged electronically between patient and physician. And I want you to note that again because we've got a lot more data coming in that adds to the complexity. So we have to have ways to manage that. And then I think Optum uses a similar term, digitally enabled care or digital healthcare. And I include in that all of the strategies that are out there, whether it's scheduling, cost estimators, self service tools that may be on a web or an app where patients can learn, increase their health literacy on their own discovery, you know, new opportunities for care, all of those things. And when you wrap all of that together, all of that technology, that's what I call digitally enabled care. Now why is this important? You'll hear often that telemedicine is a thing, or there's not the uptake that we expected, or it went way up during the pandemic, now it's back down. And what does all this mean? Well, it's really hard to tell if we aren't specific about what we're talking about, if we don't have agreed upon definitions.
So think of it as the intersection of technology and healthcare. And I would prefer that we use the term digital healthcare when we're talking about that broader landscape, all those things that we're using now. Now finally, knowledge management and AI. There's, there's been a lot of talk about AI of late, but it is actually being implemented very broadly across healthcare. And it's being implemented because not only has it become impossible for a single trained human mind to gather all of the information necessary to take care of patients, it's become really difficult for old strategies like those of Dr. James to do the same thing. And so applying machine learning, AI, parsing out stuff that's important versus stuff that is not bringing in text recognition software, all of those strategies are helping us to manage that level of complexity.
Now we could have another whole discussion about the doubling of knowledge, how much of it is really knowledge. You know, we definitely have some challenge in healthcare in Terms of what's published in the literature, et cetera. But all that aside, the sheer complexity needs to be managed. And there are other categories of complexity that I think about in the position I'm in. I remember after 12 years on the delivery side at Banner Health, moving over to the insurance side about four years ago. I knew that it was complex because I had been in population health management role for the insurance division of Banner. But I was astonished by the additional layers of complexity. And you will find this in every category in the industry, whether it's pharma, pharmacy, payer delivery system, every single one has its own layers of complexity and its own silos, if you will, where the thinking takes place. And we want to get past that and communication, collaboration, that's one of the ways that we're going to do that. And all that requires knowledge management. To give you another couple of examples of where knowledge management might come in very handy, we're working on a project now to automate prior authorization. Well, that's not as easy as it sounds. Think about it. If I'm running a primary care practice, I have four or five or six or 10 insurance companies with whom I contract.
I have Medicaid, I have Medicare, I have commercial insurance and multiple versions of commercial insurance. And in each of those categories I have multiple products. Silver, bronze, gold, platinum. And each of those has very specific strategies for what gets approved. And by the way, do we still need prior auth if we use knowledge management? My, my guess is no, we don't. Now why do we need it in the first place? Well, it's because there's so much information out there that most physicians practice the way that they've always practiced and that's always consistent with current evidence based practice.
So knowledge management could help us in this way. If I'm a doc, I sit down with a patient and I want to get an mri. Wouldn't it be so much better if I had in front of me that person's plan the requirements that that particular company has for allowing me to get that mri. If I had all that right in front of me while the patient's in front of me, then I could answer questions about where do we go.
Maybe it's because physical therapy is required before I can get it, then I can have the conversation with the patient right then instead of scheduling a test for Monday and finding out Monday morning that it's not going to be approved by the insurance company, that puts me in a bad position. It irritates the patient. And by the way, on the insurance side, we hate it just as much as everybody else. It's expensive, there's all kinds of hoops to jump through. There's all kinds of administrative tasks. It delays care in some cases.
So if we could get knowledge management strategies in place, and we're working on that now, so that I could get an instant approval while the patient's sitting there, if all the boxes are checked, I could get an instant appeal or person to person response if there's something that I think doesn't need to be done, that's required, or I can say to the patient, instead of, I think you should get an mri, I think you should go to physical therapy. And so then the relationship is preserved between physician and patient and everybody's happy and it's far more efficient. And there are are issues of knowledge management in every single corner of healthcare that we look at. So think about it in that way and think about strategies to make that much easier in the long term to get patients what they need to improve job satisfaction for physicians. As a physician, there's nothing that I hated more than prior authorization. I felt like I was being second guessed. Now, I have to admit that there were many times when it was good, good that somebody said, whoa, have you done this first? And there are other times when it's not so good. And there are as many variations of that as you want to guess with all the insurance companies and plans and strategies that are out there for prior authorization. So that's just another way of thinking about knowledge management. Now I'll ask you, is that telemedicine? Well, no, not strictly speaking, but it is digital health care. So. So thinking about that in that way, I think helps us put everything in perspective and be very specific when we're talking about whether telemedicine is up or down in the marketplace and, you know, the tools of the trade. As you know, during the pandemic there was a surge in the use of real telemedicine. When I say real, I mean our standard definition of telemedicine, with the exception of the telephone, I mean that was an accepted strategy during the pandemic, still is in a lot of places for the management of patients.
And as a physician, I can tell you that very often, particularly when we're doing follow up, we don't need the patient to come into the office. What we need is to have a conversation with the patient, make some recommendations, maybe write some orders, send some prescriptions. And so a lot of care can be managed that way if we are allowed. And of Course, a lot of the rules were loosened up during the pandemic and we saw that surge in telemedicine. But what's also interesting is as the pandemic is coming to a close, a lot of that has dropped off. Now, why is that? And I would suggest to you that there are a couple of reasons. One is probably, you know, tradition. This is the way we've always done things. It's hard to completely change. But also there is a need for in person visits from time to time. And that relationship, face to face, physically face to face, is critically important to caring for patients.
You know, it's interesting if you ask patients what they value most about physician relationships, historically it's been the caring.
You know, people are smart. They know sometimes we simply can't fix something. Terminal cancer is terminal cancer. But having somebody there who will not abandon you, who understands what you're going through, and who cares about you as an individual, that's critical. And, and we'd got to get that back or not lose it, depending on where you are in the curve, to make sure that we can fulfill our mission to really care for patients, to care for our members, for example. And I'm going to talk about how aristamd supports even that part of the equation in just a minute. By the way, the first telemedicine was probably. Well, it wasn't probably. If you define telemedicine as, as audio store and forward, then one of the first telemedicine strategies was in the 1950s. And even then they were able to send radiographic images across phone lines. So that's not something I knew then. In the 1960s, you had the University of Nebraska that was attempting to serve rural populations. We had NASA that really accelerated the field in terms of transmitting across great distances and having that connection to individuals. And it wasn't until the 1980s that we had the first cell phones. You want to guess how much the first cell phones cost?
Some of you in the audience will be old enough to remember.
I remember when I first started my practice, and this was in 1996, one of the perks of the practice was I got a car phone. Now, if you look at the mid-1990s, I wanted a cell phone because who likes to be tied to a cord or hunting for a phone booth in between the office or the hospital and home? But the ph available at that time cost about $4,000. This was in 1983 that you think iPhones are expensive. That translates to about $10,000 today. So the first phones cost about 10,000 bucks. You could have this huge backpack that you carried around with you with a handset tethered to the backpack, or you could put it in your car. And then of course, we got into flip phones. But it's remarkable how recently what we see today, what we have today in terms of our access to the Internet, et cetera, how recently that occurred. In the 2000s, I remember enrolling out the EICU, the Tele ICU. It was still really challenging to get the right technology in place so that we could have effective instantaneous audio, visual connections. We had special pan tilt zoom cameras, et cetera. It wasn't until the late 90s, actually, that we got to 3G early 2000s, and that's what really opened up the Internet. So in the early 2000s, that was a big step forward.
And recall, the iPhone that changed the landscape completely for these devices wasn't introduced until 2007. Now, it wasn't that long ago.
In 1950, only about 45% of households had telephones. Now 85% of the population has a smartphone. You know, when, when the Internet was first opening up in the early 90s, I remember AOL dial up and sometimes you could hit that thing and it would dial for hours before you finally got through to the Internet. And it took forever for anything to load. The technology has advanced at an amazing pace. And if you'll remember the knowledge doubling strategy, that's kind of where we are with technology too. It is, is doubling in our ability to do things that we haven't been able to do before, but that hasn't solved all of our problems. And one of those problems has to do historically with geography. Now, I'm not going to suggest to you that the only problem is distance. With geography, there are certainly micro cultures, there are behavioral patterns within those micro cultures. There are inequities. You've heard of food deserts, income disparities. There are all kinds of things going on there. But access is a real problem.
Those who are in rural populations, for example, have to travel two to three times as far just to access health care. And if you're talking about specialty health care, they may have to travel even farther in those communities. The primary care doc is often a jack of all trades. It's hard to attract specialists, so they have to know an awful lot about what's going on with every patient and wait for, you know, for somebody to come to them or ask the patient to make a long drive to see a specialist. And by the way, wait times, if you're talking about how long does somebody have to wait? It can be from two weeks to two months for some specialties, and it varies by location. But imagine waiting a couple of months to see a behavioral health specialist or a dermatologist for a rash that you have.
Imagine waiting to see a cardiologist for four weeks, which, for some of our practices here in Arizona, that's the wait time. That's a long time to be put on the side, waiting for something to happen so we can change that part of the equation. And what I want to suggest to you now is that Arist MD Is really an elegant solution. The first time I heard about it, I was intrigued because we've all done this before as physicians. We had the sidewalk consult or the stop in the hall and hear a short story about somebody, and then we'd give some. Some kind of advice and some if thens. But that's really pretty sloppy when you think about it. It doesn't really meet the need necessarily, because sometimes key components of the story are left out that I, as a specialist, might want. Sometimes I, as a specialist, hear something different than what was said because we're in between functions. So it's not a perfect solution, but it highlights the fact that very often there's just a little bit of knowledge that we need in taking care of a patient in order to continue taking care of that patient and do it without missing a stride. So how does ARISTAMD address that? Well, you know, this is one of those ideas. And the best ideas are simple and they're elegant, and that's what I believe about this strategy because it clearly improves access. And the one point that I think is critical, that we sometimes miss is for these physicians in rural communities, they do develop relationships with those patients, and it's incredibly hard for them to send somebody off, you know, to the big city. That's the way they looked at it in eastern Colorado, to see a specialist. And, you know, sometimes they get bounced around between specialists, et cetera. What if I could ask a simple question and I could do that in a standardized way so that knowledge management is implemented, that knowledge is documented, and it's available to me when the patient comes back, and I can get that information within 24 hours? How does that change the equation? The Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimated that between 2006 and 2017, $89 billion was spent in wages, if you will, for patients because of wait times to access their physician. And a third of the time in health care was spent spent waiting, either in the waiting room or to Get a referral.
So it is not a trivial problem. And frankly, it's one that hasn't gotten a lot better. How about efficiency? There is no more efficient way than for me to be able to sit at my computer and give advice to a physician who sends me a request for sane. It is simple, it's elegant, and it gets results. And Arista MD has been able to show those results. Relationship and trust. However, I want to go back to that because it's always about caring. So the doc in rural Colorado maintains that relationship of trust when instead of saying, hey, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to get in your car. I'm not sure how long it's going to take you to get there. Go out to the front desk and Alice will help you schedule this, and then I'll see you back after your appointment. What if you could say, hey, call me back tomorrow, or I'll call you tomorrow and we'll talk about this. I'm going to get some information and then we'll have a discussion. Maintaining that relationship of trust and of caring, making it easy for patients to get what they want, when they want it, how they want it. That's what it's all about. And aristamd is really an elegant and simple solution that allows them to do just that. So in crossing this digital divide, I'm going to suggest to you that telemedicine is dead, but long live telemedicine. And by that I mean digital health care. We are entering a new era.
Knowledge is advancing rapidly. We need tools like Arista MD that simplify the operational process, that create communication channels that are quick, efficient, and easy, and that do that in a way that allows us to document that interaction so that we can always refer back to it and use it going forward. That's all I have for you today and I. I hope we have time for a few questions.
[00:35:29] Speaker C: Thank you, Dr. Groves. That was fascinating. I actually enjoyed the walk through memory lane on the technologies and how much of a game changer many of these technologies have been. Some have been incremental, obviously. And then you talk about some game changers. We do have a question.
Shifting to the patient's point of view, the patient benefits around services like Arista md. Can you talk a little bit about what the big benefit is for the patient? Whether that's around improving compliance and treatment and continuity of care. What does the patient really receive from technologies like Arista that are enabling their care?
[00:36:07] Speaker A: I think you just hit them all crystal.
Those are the benefits, actually. Think about it from your own perspective. Think about, first of all, the wasted time.
If you could get the answer quickly, electronically, overnight night, why would you want to ask your patient?
Even in urban centers, the wait times are incredible now for a lot of services, behavioral health comes to mind. Dermatology comes to mind. There are so many specialties that are underserved in urban populations, not because that's the intensity of the physician shortage, but because that's the intensity of the physician shortage with our current operational inefficiencies.
And so the benefit to the patient is it unclogs the system, number one, so that everybody benefits. They don't have to travel, Number two, they don't have to go to a new doctor and start all over with the whole story and the forms and, you know, all of that stuff that we go through when we have a referral. They don't have to do that now. Or, you know, 70% of the time, they don't have to do that now. Most things can be handled in the way that Arista MD has designed.
I think that's obvious, that benefit. The other benefit is knowledge for both patient and physician. Right. They are both educated, close to real time, and that's important. I mean, two months later, as a doc, I'm going back now, what did I. Okay, some patients I remember very well, we all have those. But some, it's like, now what did I refer. Okay. And, you know, reading through the note and trying to catch up with what's pertinent information in an EMR that's not designed for care. Delivery. Delivery. There are just so many challenges in that workflow, in that operational flow, that there's a disconnect. It makes things more fragmented. It introduces more opportunity for error.
So, you know, you hit on all the things. It's more convenient, it's more effective. It can take care of things up to 70% of the time.
And why in the world would you not do it? Is the question I have to ask. I think it makes perfect.
[00:38:22] Speaker C: It does. It does.
And we should not assume that patients in rural communities don't expect as much from us in health care as they do from other industries. Right. So they have access to Internet and convenience in other ways. We should be providing that in health care. And it's so good what Arista is doing and what you're doing. But I just wanted to thank you for all you do. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for joining us today. It's been a fascinating conversation and content from you, and I'd like to thank all of you for joining us for this session. This concludes our session here and we're going to move over to the next session that starts at 9:40 and we hope to see you there. Thank you all.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: You've been listening to the Groves Connection, your connection to the inside story on health care, featuring in depth interviews with those who know.
You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, give us a five star review to keep the connection going and hit the subscribe button to be sure you never miss a beat. The Groves Connection is produced by Dr. Robert Groves. Original music editing and creative direction provided by Alden Groves. Production Support Content Guidance courtesy of Janae Sharp and Elizabeth.
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[00:39:51] Speaker A: The professional ideas and opinions expressed in this podcast are mine and do not reflect those of any current or past employers. Thank you so much for listening and we hope you'll join us next time on the Groves Connection.
