Joshua Liu

When we started SeamlessMD 10 years ago we faced lots of skeptics:

“My patients don’t like technology”

“My patients won’t know how to use an App”

“My patients are too old”

“My patients won’t be motivated to care for themselves”

“It’s great that this works for X’s patients, but my patients are different”

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that empowered patients can do more than we expect. 

To this day I remain in awe when I read patient feedback about how they are using SeamlessMD to track their symptoms, take incision photos, gain motivation to get up and mobilize, adhere to their infection prevention instructions – all because a piece of software, combined with the right clinical content/algorithms, gives them automated prompting, guidance and re-assurance.

And these are not young, healthy patients. Our biggest demographic are patients in their 60s-80s, often frail, with multiple comorbidities!

The downstream effects on quality, safety and cost for health systems has been incredible:

• ↓ $1,000-$8,000+ costs per patient
• ↓ 1-2 days length of stay
• ↓ 45-72% readmissions
• ↓ 43%-72% ED visit reduction
• ↓ phone calls by 50-65%

BUT patient empowerment requires provider engagement.

I’ve met providers who just look at a patient and assume they can’t be empowered with technology. So they don’t even offer it!

Yet we’ve seen the biggest successes and the best results when providers are fully bought-in:

• Framing the app to all patients as standard of care: it’s opt-out, not opt-in. No assumptions about who is able to use it!
• Promoting use across the patient journey, not just the beginning: in clinic, in hospital, at discharge.
• Engaging with the data: although real-time monitoring is not required for our platform, we see that when patients know they are being remotely monitored, they are more likely to track their data (and are thrilled with the experience!)
• Full organizational buy-in: not just frontline staff, but executives prioritizing the initiative’s success

However all this success and engagement starts with a single belief: that you believe patients can and want to be empowered

Organizations are regularly surprised by the level of adoption and engagement by their patients. It turns out if you believe in it, your patients will too.

How else are we underestimating patients? Maybe it’s time to re-think those other assumptions too.