Technology and the patient experience

David:                                   00:10                     Technology does so much when it comes to the patient interaction too. I've found that now I'm not just finishing up a patient visit, going out dictating or taking a lot of time to go back and do all my charting. Now I can go and see a patient and have a tablet in my hand, talk to the patient, document in real time. As the patients adding things I'm adding things into their chart, clarifying things with the patient.

David:                                   00:44                     Now I can actually sit down and converse with the patient, as opposed to, now I need to get back out and do my documentation. I'm doing my documentation right there with them. And so I'm spending that much more time with them. And then ultimately the, uh, it's-it's less burden for me as a provider because my documentation is done when I'm—when I'm walking out of the room

Neil:                                       01:06                     It's so much easier to get in touch with providers even within minutes. When I have a patient in a room, I can use text or computer or our EMR to send over a message. And you hear back from them so quickly. In fact, when it's been more than a day, I always get it, "I'm sorry it took so long." But it really does help streamline care. And it's been so impactful for patients when they say, "you know, I really don't want to do this," "It's hard for me to travel," "It's too expensive to do this." "Well, let me talk to your specialist and see what we can do." And the next day we have an answer, "well, we'll do this instead and we'll just see how that works out." And you do that constantly and you're actually making changes with patients. They know that they're being taken care of.

Lena:                                     01:43                     Not only do we have the specialist notes that—they depend on us. "As our primary care doctor to kind of put the whole big picture together, take care of me as a whole," but then also when we get the hospitalist notes too, "What happened in the hospital, I didn't understand such and such," and then they really depend on you to be able to have that technology. Ad Optum Care provides that to be able for us to say, "I got you. This is—this is what they did, this is how we take it from here."

David:                                   02:07                     Not just the collaboration of care, but also access to care. With, uh, the technologies that Optum Care is utilizing, for instance, we-we've really been delving into telemedicine. We've gone out into rural communities that didn't have access to care otherwise. And so they go to the clinic, they sit down with a nurse, they work back and forth with the technology there, and I act-I actually can listen to the heart. Let's look in the ears and the patient can actually see inside of the ears too. And so they, they not only have better access, but even enjoy their experience even that much more.