The Very Big Business of Transforming Patient Engagement

Alexander Tsiaras, CEO and Founder of StoryMD, a digital health start-up in Brooklyn, notes that “When patient engagement is not a priority, everyone loses.”

Currently, just 12% of US adults are proficient in personal health literacy  a gap that leads to misunderstandings in care, poor health outcomes, and increased medical errors. Cementing the issue is the confusion and isolation that patients experience when they encounter complex health data, which piles on stress that is detrimental to their recovery. Simply put, the need for accessible and actionable health information is urgent. From the doctor’s perspective, poor engagement drives patients away, leading to negative reviews and revenue loss. The issue compounds up the chain as poor engagement carries significant costs for healthcare systems, including low medication adherence and worse health outcomes.

According to the National Library of Medicine, informed and engaged patients stick to their treatment plans more consistently. On top of better health outcomes, robust patient engagement tempers the need for costly medical interventions, hospitalizations, and patient readmissions. The financial potential of this improved adherence isn’t something to be sniffed at: as patients become active participants in their healthcare journey, they can avoid unnecessary emergency room visits and extended hospital stays, leading to substantial savings for both patients and healthcare providers.

The current predicament is mired in the fact that patient communications are often shrouded in complex clinical terminology and undecipherable data, making it difficult for the patient to engage and stay motivated with their treatment plan. This is where StoryMD steps in. With one of the largest coded visual health libraries in the world and an AI-driven digital ecosystem, StoryMD provides a revolutionary personalized patient portal to track and explain your clinical and behavioral data (wearables) in real-time. The platform’s proprietary AI technology maps the patient’s data to their records, turning the interaction into a highly personalized, digital hand-holding experience. StoryMD’s niche here is honing in on the often cold and impersonal clinical data and remolding it into a personalized and comprehensible “Story of You”. Tsiaras underlines the transformative impact of StoryMD: “We're changing the way patients view their health data. Instead of daunting statistics and clinical terms, we're using our proprietary AI to map relevant content to the patient’s records, providing a digestible story of their personal health journey and empowering them to understand, engage, and take control. In essence, it’s a personalized digital diary of your clinical and behavior data that you can understand and act on.”

This issue of patient engagement became starkly apparent for Tsiaras through his wife Susan’s experience navigating her hospitals’ patient portals. Susan was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and is undergoing treatment. Her experience, as shared by Tsiaras, further highlights the failings of the typical healthcare system’s patient portal in terms of how it services and supports the patient. Susan is receiving top-of-the-line treatment at New York’s premier cancer hospital, her institutional patient portal is filled with complex clinical data on her test and procedure results. Compounding the confusion are the multiple patient portals she is reliant on: the GP portal, the diagnostic hospital portal, and now the surgical and oncological treatment portals as well. None of these portals speak to each other, so Susan has to flit between them all to piece together information.

This often unnerving and intimidating data lands in her portal before an MD has the opportunity to consult and explain, leaving Susan filled with anxiety and apprehension. Fortunately, she had the “Ultimate Guide to Your Breast Cancer Journey” and the +StoryMDHealth • Personal Health Journey (PHJ) platform to serve as an antidote to current hospital patient portals. Throughout her journey, Susan has been uploading the hospital’s lab results and pathology reports to her +StoryMDHealth PHJ, and the platform has been invaluable in explaining — in a detailed and compelling multimedia format — each clinical data entry, including prescribed medications. At every step of the way, +StoryMD Health’s PHJ has provided Susan with a clear understanding of her clinical data and given her a sense of control and empowerment over her journey, hand-holding her through every critical decision she’s had to make. Susan’s health journey has further underscored the StoryMD mission that Tsiaras set out with in 2017: to empower and instill patients with a sense of control throughout the many health journeys they will face in life. As Tsiaras likes to emphasize, providing a patient-focused portal has the potential to be highly effective in reducing chronic stress levels and improving recovery outcomes. This in turn could accelerate the patient’s healing and recovery time, allowing  major savings for healthcare systems by improving patient compliance and recovery rates and reducing patient readmissions.

The contrast between traditional patient portals and StoryMD’s narrative approach underlines the platform's ability to demystify healthcare information. “Traditional patient portals are really mostly administrative values for the hospital, i.e., billing, calendars, appointments, and so on,” notes Tsiaras. “The patient data that is crucial to patient literacy and a sense of control — enabling them to have a voice in making critical decisions and driving their health journey forward — is greatly lacking in the traditional patient portal.”

Tsiaras clarifies that hospitals, as a whole, unfairly get the blame for these institution-centric portals, emphasizing just how supportive, empathetic, and critical the staff at Susan’s cancer center have been on her journey. The technology companies that develop these platforms continue to only meet the basic requirements set out by the government, i.e., legacy systems that haven’t seen any expansive thought or development in almost 20 years. This opens up a vital need for disruptive technologies, and StoryMD is leading the way. “People love stories, and they hate statistics” Tsiarias cracks.

Continuing on this theme, Tsiaras envisions a healthcare landscape where patients are not just informed but engaged and comforted by their health data: “Personal health literacy gives you a voice in your health journey,” he says. Stories crafted by the platform are more than mere medical narratives; the AI-driven mapping of relevant content to your behavioral and clinical information gives you a dynamic and holistic understanding of your health over time. This humanistic approach to technology promises to reshape patient care, making healthcare more human-centric and understandable, while also improving outcomes and the bottom line. As Tsiaras bookends it, “When the patient engages, everyone wins.”