Too often, I hear from patients and families that healthcare is uncaring. Healthcare can seem uncaring because of the obstacles that block the path to wellness and healing. Unfortunately, patients and families frequently encounter unnecessarily difficult and dehumanizing policies, processes and procedures, giving healthcare an uncaring taint. These undesirable patient experiences are usually not the result of uncaring healthcare administrators or caregivers. They are the unintended consequences of an imperfectly designed system.

Systems reveal the principles embedded in their design even if the outcomes of those principles were not intended. For example, for-profit healthcare functions differently than faith-based healthcare because the very foundational principles upon which they operate are radically different. For-profit healthcare systems are strongly driven by profit motives and stockholder values; whereas faith-based healthcare systems are usually driven by a higher calling. Both systems are similar in foundational business and clinical structures, and are governed by the same medical science, but they differ greatly in how those structures are controlled, science applied, and therefore the care experience they produce.

Compassionate caring administrative and clinical healthcare professionals face many constraints in their desire to heal and serve because the systems in which they work often incentivize uncaring acts. It has been said that you get the behaviors you reward, and you promote that which you permit; and those principles are at play in healthcare systems.

Healthcare Information Technology (IT) professionals have successfully automated many healthcare clinical and administrative processes, but automated systems function without empathy and compassion. CIOs are uniquely positioned to act as environmental sensing agents who can detect blind spots that may exist in the executive suite or clinical services leadership. Information is the connecting tissue of every process in healthcare; therefore, CIOs are well-placed to design and build humanity into the processes their teams automate. CIOs operate on the other side of the stethoscope and financial ledger from their peers and can provide objective critical analysis as to whether processes are serving or hindering the system’s mission to care. To earn such a place of trust among healthcare peers, CIOs much demonstrate a grasp of the intricate relationships between people, process and technology, and the impact these have upon the patient experience, as well as the bottom line.

It’s not about CIOs swimming outside their lane; it’s about widening it. The how-to of earning this trust is another subject, but at a minimum a regular diet of healthcare related clinical, financial, marketplace, technology, cultural, consumer, scientific, and behavioral insights is necessary to hone this skill. These insights position CIOs to champion and catalyze improvements in current services and create new ones. Virtual healthcare is a good example of technology leaders bringing unrelated technical, clinical and cultural elements together for the good of the patient and the health system.

Automated processes work well until a process exception occurs and no one is around to deliver human judgment. An example is when you call a service-line only to find the selection tree does not include the issue you called about, but there is no way to get to a human; leaving you with a feeling of being dehumanized and uncared for.  For this reason, IT professionals and process owners must be careful to build off-ramps to automated processes so humans can step in to ensure customers are cared for with dignity and respect. Of course, artificial intelligence when done well can help solve this problem.

CIOs play an important role in establishing secure data-sharing agreements with vetted, non-traditional diagnostic and treatment providers and can help patients choose by making a list of approved services available on the health system’s website. As patients increasingly seek and pay out-of-pocket for services outside traditional healthcare settings, they would benefit from guidance toward reputable options. For example, Precision Medicine testing based upon genetics can reveal the best drugs and even the best workout regimen for a patient. Genetically based allergy testing can reveal not only common environmental and food allergies but go deeper to find food sensitivities that may not create an allergic reaction but still feed inflammation. Making this external diagnostic information available to healthcare system providers can greatly enhance patient outcomes.

There are consumer-facing laboratories that use bacterial DNA profiles to detect bacterial infections that might be missed by a traditional lab and even determine which antibiotics will be most effective. A popular wearable health-tracker provides on-demand access to blood testing at local labs for less than $100. Importantly, this type of information can reveal trends instead of undependable one-time measurements.

Many of these technologies and services give patients the means to validate actions taken by traditional healthcare professionals and hold them accountable – not necessarily a welcome reality. Patients entering their doctor’s office with certified lab and test results that are better than can be attained at clinics or hospitals, raise the game and sometimes the ire of health professionals.

In part two of this post, I will examine examples of uncaring acts that result from factors such as duplicative testing driven by profits, inconvenient scheduling to maximize reimbursement, and even unconscious racial bias that reduces the quality of care. I hope you agree with me that we can and should make sure healthcare really cares.