4/04/2023
Healthwise Communications Team
What is content as a service, or CaaS, in the context of health education? CaaS is building blocks of information—think Legos, but text and images instead of plastic—that are formatted so you can mix and match to build whatever education content you need. You could use one “block” for a simple social media post, or combine several blocks to create a full webpage. (Here’s an explainer blog post on CaaS in healthcare.)
For healthcare technology companies, using CaaS ensures that your users hear from one consistent, reliable source of education. And since you don’t have to create and maintain your own education library, you’re free to focus your resources on what you do best: create innovative technology.
Here we speak with Get Well's VP/CNO of Content Strategy and Clinical Programs LouAnn Bala, MSN, RN, about how they use CaaS to fulfill their health education needs.
Q: Tell me about Get Well. In simple terms, what do you do?
A: Get Well is a platform that creates personalized health care experiences. Our tools provide a critical connection with care teams, and they’re designed to be available when and wherever patients need them most.
Here’s one way to think of what we do: In my family, I'm the person who works in healthcare—I’m a nurse. Whenever relatives have health questions, they call me and ask, “Hey, should I do this?” or “What does this mean?” Get Well’s goal is to make that type of information available to patients who may not have a nurse in the family. Whether people are preparing for a planned event like surgery or managing a critical issue that's just popped up, our tools keep families and patients informed and help them ask the right questions so they can make informed decisions about their care.
Q: How do patients interface with your solutions?
A: We have both inpatient and outpatient solutions, and we create care journeys for patients to follow during their experience. Not everyone’s experience is the same, so our care journeys give patients options and present content as a guide they can have at their fingertips.
For example, a patient preparing for a surgical event will go through the pre-op period, the inpatient period, and the post-op period. There are critical things the patient needs to know and do during each of those periods. Our tool may reach out before surgery to say, “Hey, have you checked the box on all these things you need to do to prepare?” And we also provide information on what they’re going to see, feel, and hear during the experience.
Right now, we primarily service healthcare systems, hospitals, and clinics—for them, our biggest benefit is connecting people with their care teams. Our app is a trusted source of information next to, and with, a patient’s care team, so it becomes an essential part of the patient journey. Many apps nowadays can provide information about what patients will experience, but those apps don’t also connect patients with their healthcare team. Our tools do both, and they can be embedded into the portals that patients and clinicians already use. We offer asynchronous messaging, so patients don’t have to call their hospital—they can ask questions through the app and get a response from a human on their care team. Care teams can also use automated messages for frequently asked questions; this feature was useful during COVID when there were long phone wait times.
Q: Why is it important to have health education integrated in your solutions?
A: We have a lot of different service lines—everything from maternity services and surgical procedures to lifestyle medicine and wellness. That’s a broad amount of content to manage. I have three clinicians on my team who help write content. Our writing connects the dots for patients—what are they going to see, how are they going to experience it, and what questions they should ask along the way. And then we share related education or clinical content if they want to learn more.
We recognize that we are not the subject matter experts on clinical content. We want to make sure the clinical content is relevant, in the simplest format possible, and maintained so it's always current. And we want to make sure it’s coming from trusted sources and has sign-off from experts in the field. All of that requires a stringent maintenance process and a lot of dollars. So, that's why we decided we would be responsible for the patient navigation and guidance from one point in the journey to the next, and not for the clinical content.
Q: Why did you decide to go with Healthwise’s CaaS product?
A: We’ve traditionally partnered with Healthwise for video education. When I heard about your CaaS product, it seemed like a good fit. Our goal has always been to provide education in the simplest format possible. Patients are stressed out and, for the most part, they can’t consume a ton of information. Going to the doctor should not be like doing your taxes—it should be much simpler. So, using Healthwise’s micro-content in the different buckets across the app has worked. When my team says, “Okay, I need to talk about diagnosis now,” I can choose the right diagnosis education from CaaS. And when I'm ready for tests and treatments, I can choose that education and populate it into the right places. So CaaS helps us easily create a streamlined experience for the patients.
Healthwise also provides the ability to visually show what patients need to do, which helps them absorb and understand information. English is not the first language for a lot of people, so they need simple formats and imagery. And it’s important to us to be culturally relevant and diverse in the content we select and to include multiple languages. Healthwise offers all those things.
Q: What types of education do you build with CaaS?
A: I mentioned the patient’s capacity to learn. A few years ago, Get Well published the Patient Engagement Index and learned that everybody has different measures of capacity to engage at different moments throughout their health care journey. While someone may be active with technology and able to use the tools, they may not be ready to learn at a deep level. Other people may want to do a deep dive into learning—that's how they calm themselves. So, we designed a platform where people can choose when they're ready to learn. We provide the simplest format first in the content journey, and then our tool allows us to add libraries of content, or larger chunks of content, into different streamlined features within the tool. If a patient wants to do a deep dive, we can provide them with information to do that. And that's one thing I love about CaaS—it has both a simple format and more detailed information.
Q: What are some of the outcomes or improvements you’ve seen with CaaS education?
A: Internally, CaaS education is helping us build care plans efficiently. If we need a specific care plan type, we can create it much more quickly. And it’s so important to speak in one voice. One reason we've selected Healthwise as one of our preferred partners for both inpatient and outpatient is to formulate one voice across our platforms. Healthwise content is simple, the library is robust, and it has diverse and great imagery to help patients understand.
As for patient activation—we have some great activation stats. Essentially, we see 72% activation on our procedural or surgical loops, which are care management tools for automated virtual check-in. It’s one of the highest activations I've seen for a technology product. Patients often say they don’t know what they would’ve done without our tools and the information they learned. Another example: we’re working with a mental health hospital to reach teens, and we've gotten great feedback around the content from providers. They said the easily accessible and understand educational content provided by vendors like Healthwise makes the program so much better.
The way Get Well uses CaaS is just one example of how CaaS provides easy access to one versatile, reliable voice in health education for healthcare technology. If you’d like to learn more about how Healthwise’s Content as a Service can provide health education for your technology, visit Healthwise for Digital Experiences.