WebMD Ignite’s Ann Bilyew on Building a Patient Engagement One-Stop Shop

WebMD Ignite has grown through acquisition over the past few years to develop an integrated suite of patient and clinician engagement solutions. Its assets now include Krames, Medscape, Mercury Healthcare and Healthwise, among others. The organization says it now works with 95 percent of the top 40 health systems in the United States.

Executive Vice President Ann Bilyew, who heads up the Healthcare Solutions Group, recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about the company’s strategy and the impact it is having. 

Healthcare Innovation: When most people hear WebMD, they probably think about online health content for consumers. But you have purposefully pulled together through acquisition some interesting companies to build something that extends much further. Could talk a little bit about the thinking behind that?

Bilyew: I hope when people hear WebMD, they think about it as a leading site for health information for consumers. We also own Medscape, the leading site for information for physicians and other types of healthcare professionals. But four years ago, in 2020, we set about to build a business that could support the patient engagement needs of health systems and the member engagement needs of payers, building on the tremendous reach we had with consumers with WebMD and with providers with Medscape. We wanted to build a solution that met the unique needs of health systems, other types of providers, and payers. 

There were really four critical points. The first was precision. So who are the right people to whom to be communicating, the right patients, the right consumers, the right members? Then there was the ability to reach these consumers or members or patients. Then there's the content to create highly personalized engagements; and then there's the ability to measure the impact. We wanted to put all of those pieces together in a way that  created a seamless experience for a patient, as well as an enterprise-level solution for a health system and a payer. So we started making some acquisitions, as well as some internal investments. But everything we've acquired, everything we've done, falls into one of those categories.

HCI: Is there a challenge for you in bringing together several companies through acquisition and creating a unified whole out of those? Are there some growing pains to getting to where they are operating in sync? 

Bilyew: It is always challenging to make sure that there's a seamless experience for the client, right? These companies might have had different cultures, different ways of doing business, different business models. It takes time and it takes leadership. You have to have a very clear vision. You have to articulate it crisply, and then you just have to get out and keep talking about it constantly.

HCI: Is one of the selling points of this to a health system or a health plan that it offers one-stop shopping for a lot of different services that address pain points for them, as far as patient engagement or retention?

Bilyew: Yes, it is the ability to work with a single enterprise-level partner vs. managing 15 different point solutions that don't integrate, don't talk to each other, and may, in fact, be out of business in six or 12 months. We're obviously a large, stable business that can operate with them at scale. We have systems that scale. 

HCI: From your perspective at WebMD Ignite, are patient portals a success? Or are there a lot of missed opportunities for engagement and a lot more potential for improvement there?

Bilyew: Would I say that they're a success? I suppose that depends on what the measure is. They successfully got their dollars from the government. But were they successful in terms of being able to effectively engage consumers or members or patients? Not much, because they were built by folks who didn’t put the consumer in the center. They were built from the enterprise-level CRM or EMR outward, instead of being purpose-built for the consumer. Individuals now are so used to effective digital engagement. They know what it looks like and what it doesn't look like, right?

HCI: Do the portals have a potential to be the avenue for engagement if they were improved, or should it come through a different route altogether?

Bilyew: I think both, actually. I think they have to be improved, no doubt about it. But for members and patients there is a very particular journey, and you have to be present. And the use cases are different at different points of the journey. For a consumer who's very early on in their health journey, that's discovery. They want to understand their symptoms. They want to do research. They want to understand what treatment options might be. Once they're diagnosed, they want to find specialists. So you need content that's purpose-built for that particular point in the journey. 

Then once they're in active care, it needs to be seamless between their physician and the patient. That's why we acquired Krames and most recently Healthwise, because now we have content embedded in the EMRs so we can be present for the patient when they're sitting across from their doctor, when they've completed a visit, or when they're preparing for a visit. Those use cases are completely different, and they need to be mediated. 

HCI: Your company says it has solutions that involve enhancing clinical efficiency and improving outcomes. Can you describe which solutions focus on that aspect?

Bilyew: Yes, that is our patient education solutions. We improve clinician workflow tremendously by our search and recommendation engines about what is the right piece of content to give this patient, based on where they are in their clinical journey, given their clinical history, given their preferences. That makes it super easy for the clinician to interact with the patient. We also have a solution that is very focused on the clinician. It basically distills the latest research and gives them access to journals and other things that help them stay on point and current within their specialty. 

HCI: Could you talk about a new solution called Referral Growth Targeting?

Bilyew: Traditionally many health systems had physician liaison departments that would go out and knock on the doors of physicians and ask why aren't you sending us your referrals? When they were having their financial challenges in 2020, 2021, 2022 and even 2023, a lot of them just wiped those departments out to take cost out of the system. And those weren't really scalable anyway. Now they are saying we have got to get back to communicating with the physicians in our community, but we need to do it more efficiently and more effectively. That's where we come in. We have the ability to reach these clinicians digitally, and digital reach is far more effective, far more scalable than departments of physician liaison folks.