How a Chief Product Officer Can Address Healthcare’s Technology Gap

Lina Scroggins is tasked by Mercy with making technology work for the patients. It’s a unique role that few healthcare organizations have – but many should consider.

Healthcare organizations often think of technology from the clinician’s lens. Rarely do they look at how their patients might be using the latest tools and platforms to access care – or understand why they can’t.

Enter Lina Scroggins.

Scroggins was recently named Mercy’s SVP and Chief Product Officer, a relatively rare role in the healthcare delivery ecosystem. A veteran of more than two decades with Google, where she helped shape Google Health and collaborated on digital health transformation projects with hospitals and health systems, she sits at a critical intersection between patients and clinicians.

“It is a really unique role in healthcare -- Product with a capital P,” she notes. “My job, and my team’s job, is to be wherever the consumer is, wherever the patients are.”

Healthcare has long sought to use technology to improve clinical care, starting with the EHR and now embracing the AI movement, but all too often that technology has thrown up a barrier between patients and their care teams. The long-standing criticism has been that healthcare is doctor-centric, but more and more organizations are putting the patient at the center and looking for ways to fashion care around them.

Pivoting From the Doctor to the Patient

And that’s where Scroggins comes in.

“Healthcare has traditionally been very provider-centric,” she points out. “We need to build the technology that patients want to use.”

It’s a strategy that targets a fundamental gap between traditional healthcare organizations and the health system of tomorrow. Consumers are demanding more control over their healthcare, and they’re using digital health, virtual care and other avenues to access that care. At the same time, retailers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple are vying for a slice of the healthcare pie, and promising frictionless and intuitive care options to consumers to draw them away from traditional care providers.

It’s up to health system and hospital leadership to counter that with a policy that puts the patient back at the center of care.  

Scroggins’ role, she says, is to “unify the patient experiences of receiving care with the caregiver experiences of giving care, and streamlining all of that to make it easier – easier to understand when you need to find care, easier to find that care, easier to schedule it, easier to come in and get the care, and then easier to bill for it and to pay for it.”

How Do Patients Use Technology?

Much of Scroggins’ work begins with the EHR, the platform “underpinning both the consumer experience and the caregiver experience.” Looking at this from the patient’s perspective, she’s starting with a patient scheduling tool, one of the top requests of patients looking for a better way of accessing the care they need.

One often overlooked element of patient-centered care, Scroggins says, is user design and experience.

“We need to look at examples of great design,” she says. “Perhaps I’m biased, but … Google is a very clean, simple design. We need to look at other examples of beautiful technical products that people love to use because they’re easy to use and they get the job done, and [we need to] get inspired by them and think of how we might be able to do that in our setting.”

This, she says, requires healthcare leaders to think differently than they’ve been accustomed to thinking. They have to think like consumers, or patients, adopting the viewpoint of someone looking to enter the health system, access services and use technology within the network.

Making It Work From Both Ends of the Healthcare Spectrum

So Scroggins and her team will work with technology experts inside and outside of healthcare as well as clinicians and the patients themselves to fashion platforms and tools that work for everyone.

That includes clinicians.

“Even if you have the beautiful design, which I want the healthcare industry to have, you also need beautiful execution and consistent execution and scaled execution,” she points out. That’s why she’s eager to see how AI affects the patient experience, but also wants to make sure healthcare systems like Mercy are properly prepared to use the technology.

Scroggins sees the Chief Product Officer’s role as bridging that technology gap, combining patient engagement with clinical effectiveness.

“It’s the integration that is most important, because there's technology behind every step in that journey,” she says. “Everything from patients searching for their symptoms on Google and then finding a doctor using Google Maps and then making that appointment on the doctor's website. These are all moments that right now are disconnected. Is there a way that we could connect them so that from the perspective of the patient, of the consumer, it's frictionless? It feels like one unified experience. That would be great. I think that's really the Holy Grail.”

“There is a large economic opportunity for them, given the size of the healthcare industry, [but there is also] a large moral and ethical opportunity to do right by folks, by contributing to their health and improving their care,” Scroggins adds. “I think both sides have not done as good a job of talking to each other and integrating with each other as we need them to be.. So I will try to do it now from the healthcare side.”