Dr. Nichole Wilson, Vice President of Integrated Primary Care and Ancillary Services of Community Health Network, shares her insights on healthcare consumerism and its role in transforming and improving patient care.
Nichole is a board-certified Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives. As the senior executive directing the operations and strategy for several ambulatory divisions, she is responsible for developing and implementing innovations and experiences focused on consumerism and retail in the healthcare setting.
Highlights include:
3:10 – NW: “The ways that we can transform consumerism is thinking about that person and what their needs are and when they like to schedule, how they like to schedule, the means by which they like to schedule and get their care, and forming healthcare around them.”
6:27 – NW: “And we transitioned many of our sleep tests to home sleep tests during the pandemic. And now that’s the wave of the future. We’re not going to need as many beds to accommodate overnight sleep tests. Only in those instances where it’s really required that they need that. But there’s many cases where that can be done at home and that’s more comfortable for the patient and that’s really thinking about them and their frame of reference, how convenient is it for you to just stay at home, put the device on.”
12:08 – NW: “We say retail mindset, because you don’t go into any type of retail store and not know what the price is of something. It’s right there on the label of every item that you want to buy.”
15:04 – NW: “Our team at Community Health Network has tried to be as progressive as possible. Within our urgent care settings, for an example, you can kind of save your spot in line. You can look online and see wait times or available appointments and lock yourself in. And you’ll get text message updates as if you were, for instance, if they were running behind and say, ‘Hey, come at this time or start at this time.’ So that has been great for patients as well.”
23:13 – NW: “COVID has really reinforced the huge disparities that you see in Black and brown communities when it comes to health outcomes. And so as we move forward and try to plan for a better future, that really needs to be addressed as a part of our plan. If health systems, you know, haven’t been aggressively incorporating that, then we’re really not going to recover or it’s going to be more of the same.”
Leading with Health is hosted by Jennifer Michelle. Jennifer has a Master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology and is a former EMT. As President of Michelle Marketing Strategies, Jennifer specializes in healthcare marketing. She is on a mission to create a healthcare system that actually cares about the patients and the providers.