Talking Patient Engagement Trends with CipherHealth’s Mandana Varahrami
Speaking on a patient engagement panel at HIMSS 2022 in Orlando this week will be Mandana Varahrami, chief product officer at vendor CipherHealth. Last week, Healthcare Innovation caught up with Varahrami for a preview of that discussion of some of the industry dynamics driving patient engagement innovations.
Varahrami has more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry. Prior to joining CipherHealth last year, she spent over 11 years leading global product teams for healthcare and emergency services technologies, delivering enterprise SaaS healthcare solutions to hospitals and health systems and emergency services platforms to 911 call centers. She has experience in building digital workflow, analytics and AI technologies, with a heavy emphasis on human-centered design. Most recently, Mandana led product teams at RapidDeploy, Babylon Health and the Advisory Board Company (now Optum Insights).
I asked Varahrami what interested her in working on patient engagement issues at CipherHealth.
“One of the things that drew me to CipherHealth was the work that they have done with Epic,” she replied. “During my career in healthcare, one of the barriers to innovation I noticed was the challenge of integration. When I was exploring Cipher I wondered how we were going to manage innovation alongside the Epics of the world, and there was some great work that was about to be released right during that time, which is our ability to have a bidirectional feed with Epic on rescheduling appointments. To me, that was exciting.”
She added that the pandemic also brought her back into healthcare because she recognized the importance of communication platforms and the role they play for providers in general.
Were there some specific lessons learned from the experience during the pandemic in terms of using these communication tools that will be sustainable by the health systems going forward?
“COVID increased the pace of adoption of technology in healthcare, including the use of telehealth. I think the same goes for what we're trying to accomplish in terms of making it commonplace to engage with the health system around scheduling an appointment, and sharing intake information,” Varahrami said. “In addition, we have built in more automated communication for nurse managers to communicate with caregivers, when they can't be by the bedside. We know that's a COVID-related need. I think the hard part for technologists and for companies who are trying to innovate in this space is the challenge of doing beta testing or initial piloting of this work because people don't have time to engage on it because they are treating patients. Hopefully, that will change soon.”
I asked Varahrami what CipherHealth is focusing on in 2022 and what she hopes to discuss on the HIMSS panel.
“A critical part of what we're focusing on this year is how we can help health systems reduce the number of vendors that they have to engage with, so that there's a more streamlined experience, and there's more centralized information,” she said. “There's a digital-first element to what we're doing and where patient engagement is headed.”
She noted that joining her on the panel at HIMSS is a patient who is a quadriplegic and who can stress the importance of patient engagement from his experience. “I think there is a true opportunity to create a digital-first mentality in healthcare with patients as consumers," she said. "But we need to keep in mind the importance of maintaining human touch and human voice, where necessary. I think that’s an important piece of this from a design research perspective that we're also focusing on this year.”