By Benjamin Ross

August 29, 2018 | NASHVILLE—The first day of the Health:Further festival, which was held August 27-29 in Nashville, Tennessee, featured prominent figures in healthcare, including clinicians, patient advocates, and company executives as they discussed the changing landscape of the industry.

During the festival’s kickoff, one theme came up over and over: listening to the patient and their story.

“Look at things through the eyes of the patient,” R. Milton Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of HCA Healthcare, told the audience during his fireside discussion with Health:Further’s founder and CEO, Marcus Whitney.

Johnson said that during his 36 years working at HCA he has always tried to be intentional with the patient, walking the halls of hospitals to get an idea for how particular technological innovations affect the people getting treated.

“There are a lot of things that have changed in healthcare, but in 50 years what hasn’t changed is the patient,” he said.

A Superstore Approach To Healthcare

Walmart is one company in particular seems to have gotten the message of addressing the needs of the patient. And perhaps they might be the perfect company to tap into what the patient wants, with nearly 95% of Americans having shopped at the superstore in 2016.

Walmart has made waves in the last few years as the company has waded into the deep waters of healthcare, being the largest private, self-insured employer, as well as having partnerships with health insurance companies, including Humana.

Marcus Osborne, vice president of Health & Wellness Transformation for Walmart, told the audience during his talk that the superstore is taking a retail approach to healthcare, adding that the problems with the healthcare system can be boiled down to a problem of design. “Too much of the time there’s a ‘build it and hope they come’ mentality to healthcare,” Osborne said. “So we thought, what can we do to drive engagement?”

What works, according to Osborne, is when the patient takes control of their health. Osborne pointed to Walmart’s ZP Challenge, a weight-management program that crowd-sources your progress.

According to Osborne, the program was not created as a weight-management challenge, saying that the challenge is basically a story-telling output, drawing on the theme of the festival’s opening night.

“[The ZP Challenge] is a storytelling program,” Osborne said. “We said ‘If you’re doing something to make your life better, tell us about it. Share it with the community. Oh, and if you’re a really good storyteller, you can make money. The person who tells the best story gets $100,000 in cash, as determined by your peers.’”

Osborne said that, while the money was certainly a great incentive for promoting health, people soon began engaging with the challenge for the sake of a human connection

“Very quickly it became that if you had a good story to tell you wanted to tell it because you were excited about it,” he said. “And what we noticed was that people would pay attention and carefully read through the stories. They would read how someone did these three really small things that helped them lose 20 pounds and they’d think, ‘I can do that.’”

Those people would modify what they read to what was best for them, Osborne said, and then they would tell their own story. “Pretty soon we had thousands of stories,” he said. “I think at this point around 60% of our active associates have engaged with the challenge in the last 30 days.”

‘Nobody Lies To Their Search Box’

Osborne concluded by discussing the impact of electronic data on health outcomes. Oftentimes the face- to-face interaction with a physician leaves a patient feeling unheard, driving more and more people to online search engines for answers. He cited a study conducted by Microsoft where scientists were able to identify internet users who were suffering from pancreatic cancer, even before they have received a diagnosis of the disease, simply by analyzing large samples of search engine queries.

“We’re on the cusp of an emerging reality that, if we could take this data and really use it, it may fundamentally transform how we diagnose and engage individuals in their health,” Osborne said.

Jess Barron, VP and GM of Livestrong.com, a website dedicated to health and wellness (not to be mistaken with the nonprofit Livestrong Foundation), echoed those sentiments during her presentation, adding that there is a growing community of individuals who do not feel engaged by the healthcare industry: women.

“Women have unmet needs in healthcare,” Barron said. “And they’re turning to [lifestyle] websites for information.”

According to Barron, over 32 million Americans engage with Livestrong.com monthly, the majority of those users being millennial women between the ages of 21 and 34. Barron stressed the importance of the healthcare industry understanding the diversity of health, especially how it manifests itself through different genders and ethnicities.

“Because we have this large website, and it reaches so many people, we have a lot of data on what they’re reading and what questions they’re asking,” said Barron.

“A positive wave is coming,” she said. “Data and science are improving. The fact that I can tell you about, on aggregate, what millions of people are searching for and what they care about helps me shape the future of what I’m going to do to work with people to get better results and help more and more people.

“Technology is evolving, and health is becoming more personalized... The great thing is no one ever lies to their search box.”