Patient Access and Engagement launch

Brittany Turman:

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining today's webinar introducing our new end-to-end patient engagement platform. My name is Brittany Terman with Optum, and I will be your host today. Before we begin, please note the following housekeeping items. At the bottom of your audience console are multiple application widgets that you can use to customize your viewing experience. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can click on the Q&A widget at the bottom of your screen to submit a question. We do capture all questions and we do provide follow up to questions as appropriate.

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Dave Czerwinski:

Thank you Brittany. Welcome everybody, and thank you for joining. We're excited to talk patient engagement today and give you an overview of, as Brittany mentioned, our new end-to-end patient engagement platform. We'd of course love to hear from you and partner with you in the future to help solve many of the needs and challenges of your organization as well as the broader healthcare ecosystem that we all currently face. I'm joined here today by my co-presenters. Katherine Preska, who leads product strategy here at Optum Insights. Priya Sahni who is a practice director with the Everest Group, and myself, Dave Czerwinski. I lead the patient engagement business product here at Optum Insights. A little bit about our agenda today, so just to review, I'm going to introduce the new platform, the patient access and engagement platform that we're re-imagining here at Optum Insights. Priya is going to discuss many of the trends that we're seeing in patient patient engagement industry overall in general.

Katherine will take us through some of the pressing industry needs and get your take on some of the top challenges facing your organizations. Afterwards, I will come back and present the overall solution that we've come up with from end-to-end, kind of going into each component of the platform capabilities, features, and some planned innovations beyond 2024. With that, we'll wrap up with some Q&A and we'll answer some questions. Again, you can answer Q&A or you can ask questions at any time I think in the chat. We will try to get to as many of those as we can as time allows. And so with that, let's get started.

Patient access and engagement. So what is patient access and engagement? Our solution is actually a cloud-based software as a service platform that helps providers, provider groups address the fragmented health ecosystem, which lacks a single solution or a single experience for a patient and helps optimize that patient experience overall. Within this, providers can use this tool to help attract new patients, use this to bring in existing patients as well, but give them kind of a seamless end-to-end experience. And we'll get into the components of this coming up, but just to give a preview on the left-hand side, you'll see the big buckets that we have here, which is practice growth and analytics, provider acquisition and scheduling, digital intake and check-in, and patient retention and care support.

Now that you know what the platform is, we're going to show a quick little video to just walk through and start out with what this looks like, and then we'll get into some more components here in a second. So hopefully all the tech works here, and this should play a video here.

Speaker 3:

You can delight patients, relieve staff frustrations, and grow your business. It's all possible with Optum Patient Access and Engagement. This patient-first digital platform helps you tackle big challenges like finding new patients, booking appointments, simplifying check-in, and providing ongoing appropriate care. It's designed to be health care's most comprehensive set of patient engagement solutions together in one platform, but it's also customizable and flexible. The platform helps patients find you, thanks to unique provider search and scheduling innovations. Patients enjoy the same easy to use experience across Google, Healthgrades, social media and payer and provider portals, even after hours. Algorithms let them search by location, insurance, language, gender, availability, and more. Patients match with providers based on scheduling rules to get appointments sooner and stay in network.

Patient intake is also simplified. Patients can book appointments 24/7, and before appointments, they can complete preregistration tasks, upload their ID and check in. It can even alert patients when you're ready for them. Billing is streamlined. Patients can see upfront cost estimates and make payments online. With our practice growth analytics, you can get the information you need to set strategic goals and grow your market share. It includes market insights, industry-leading clinical and consumer data, network management, and digital marketing tools. Our platform seamlessly integrates with virtually any EHR, allowing for real-time data views.

Communication tools can help keep patients engaged. They can choose email, text or both. Alerts let patients manage appointments, read reviews, and connect with staff via secure two-way chat. Plus, we are expanding targeted outreach to support ongoing care such as follow-up reminders, care coordination and referrals tailored to each patient. In short, patient access and engagement aims to provide a more streamlined experience, and we know it works. It has delivered new patients and improved time to care, lower no-show rates, more efficient payments, and operating efficiencies and exceptional ROI. Connect with us today to find out how Optum Patient Access and Engagement can help empower you to focus on what truly matters, improving patient and practice health.

Dave Czerwinski:

Great. Hopefully that worked for everybody and the video played. I think that this is a good video to give us an overview of what we're building here today at Optum, but it's really more broad in terms of we're helping address patient experience as well as the provider business needs in one platform. And the intent of the patient access and engagement solution is to actually work within the existing platforms and within your existing practice management systems. EHRs, EMRs, et cetera. We're not looking to replace those.

The intent here is that this process works around that and connects into those systems today. I'm going to actually flip to a journey here, and before I hand it over to Katherine, I'd just like to say I think we all have stories in healthcare where we've found frustrations, where we've had a hard time accessing and engaging in our own healthcare. We've tried to as proactive as we can be, try to do as much up front. There's always certain times where things can go wrong, where there's certain pain points throughout these entire journeys. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Katherine to kind of lead us through a little bit of a recent story that she went through.

Katherine Preska:

Yeah, thanks Dave. So a bit about my story. I was young and healthy living an active lifestyle, and suddenly had multiple different symptoms showing up. I got referrals to multiple types of specialists from my PCP and I had to do the work to check network coverage, get on wait lists to book my appointments all while my symptoms were getting worse. And by the time I got in to see my neurologist, my symptoms were so bad that they ordered imaging immediately and unfortunately it was on an out-of-network facility sticking me with a huge bill. My cardiologist had ordered multiple tests and a wearable device for remote patient monitoring, and with all of that, I didn't have transparency into what my total out-of-pocket costs would be. I ended up seeing numerous specialists at different offices and each time I had to fill out the same clinical assessments and other preregistration forms and there was just a complete lack of coordination between my providers. So the experience was really eye-opening and also has fueled within me this desire to fix this. Back to you, Dave.

Dave Czerwinski:

Thanks, Katherine. I think it's great to be able to share. I'm sure we all have many of these stories. As I said before, this is not a unique story. This one's probably a little bit more complex in that it required coordination with a number of specialists, but this tends to happen even in just searching for a primary care or what could be an annual visit. And so let's take a look at a patient journey, just even a little bit simpler patient journey of just going somewhere to find care. So if you don't have a provider, like many patients, you might through word of mouth have heard of something or you might do a Google search. In this particular example, Naomi is going through and she's searching for a physician using Google. Luckily within her area there's actually a number of physicians that pop up that actually are integrated with Google in terms of the Google My Business page and have the scheduling showing right then and there, and she's able to kind of click the book now.

And so once she finds the appointment that she wants, she's able to book now and take her right into the scheduling tool to pick that time and day, enter her information in terms of insurance, communications, preferences, all that kind of the backend stuff, and then ultimately is delivered an estimate of what this particular appointment is going to cost. And so the advantage there is obviously the transparency part that Katherine talked about of not being hit with some unusual bills or things that you weren't expecting. So you're obviously seeing that this is going to cost you X amount. A couple days before her actual appointment, she receives a text. That text message actually begins the registration process. So in this registration process you'll see the insurance and driver's license capture, all the pre-registration forms, HIPAA forms and compliance forms that need to be filled out as far as her upcoming appointment.

This will also then generate yet again another cost estimate and breakdown for that appointment. On the actual day of her appointment, she receives an email giving her driving directions to the actual facility and then instructions of what to do upon arrival. Now, this particular facility is using the virtual waiting room, which then allows her to actually when she arrives text message that she has arrived, and from there she's going to receive instructions on what to do next. Proceed to exam room three, for example. During the visit, she's talking to her physician. It is brought up that she potentially has some concerns or would like to potentially talk to somebody about some recent anxiety problems that she's been having. And so the physician is going to note that in the provider notes in the practice management system, and the system is actually going to pick that up. And as part of the follow-up care, Naomi will actually receive a text message within a day or so of the care recommending that here's some behavioral health specialists that she could potentially book appointment with, look at profiles and schedule that appointment.

If in this example there was no, because it was an annual wellness exam, there was no copay and there is no patient responsibility. If there was, they would also receive a text message at the end of this talking about any outstanding balance and giving her the option to pay that. So when we look at this, this is kind of an ideal solution. It's, again, branded in the common UX and UI in one format, and so it feels like a good experience. You're dealing with the same platform and the same company. From a patient perspective, it automates many of the things that we have to do manually today and makes it all available in one spot. And we'll get into more and more details as we get into this in a little bit more. But for now, I'm going to introduce Priya from Everest Group, and she's going to walk us through overall trends that Everest has seen in the patient engagement industry. And overall, I hope you find this part interesting and applicable to your organization. So, Priya.

Priya Sahni:

Sure. Thanks for setting the context, and as you mentioned, I'll start with some of the trends that we are seeing in the patient engagement industry. Generally we are seeing that the market has become very fast-evolving and growing, and the patients are expecting the kind of experience that earlier they were only expecting in retail. And it starts right from the point when a particular patient is entering into the hospital until all the time that they're actually submitting their bills, and hence there is an overall shift in the industry towards the more patient-centered care. We are also seeing that there is more demand right now for value-based care and health systems are also realizing the value of focusing on value and not just volumes if they really wish to create a unique differentiation. Because of all of this, healthcare providers have actually been nudged to focus a lot more on preventive care as well as wellness solutions.

And generally because of all of this, we've also seen the expansion of telehealth and virtual care on the rise. And it's not just about the video conferencing tools, but also about providing remote patient monitoring to the patients which can actually improve the outcomes for all of these patients. What all of these different things mean is that the overall patient engagement solutions are overall witnessing a lot more growth by the consumers. They are also seeing certain headwinds in the industry. Given the shifting regulatory environment, there could be certain hindrance to the adoption of some of these solutions.

Integration within EHR vendors remains to be a very crucial thing for these platforms because if you're not able to integrate well with your EHR systems, you can't really be driving the kind of value that you need for your enterprises, which again kind of relates to the next point that we have, which is around data interoperability. It's still a huge challenge because if you don't have any data coming from all possible sources, including your social determinants of health data, electronic health records, claims, clinical data, you're not really able to create a 360-degree view of the customers, which is part of the most important building blocks for a better patient engagement for the health systems.

Next, I also want to spend some time on what does an ideal patient engagement platform really look like. Now, almost all leading patient engagement platforms today would need to have a structure that includes functionalities, which is not just around patient administration services but also around platform performance and technology enablers. We definitely need to have the solutions around patient registration, scheduling reminders and creating personalized content. But an ideal patient engagement platform also needs to have more care management solutions. By care management, I mean consumers with span across virtual care, delivery, diagnosis, wellness and preventive care, as well as care collaboration.

Patients are actually expecting health systems to proactively provide the solutions which can actually help them improve their overall health. Finally, our robust services management layer also continues to be a very must-have feature for these platforms. And this is also something which spans across the functionalities of contact centers, chatbots and more effective channels for getting patient feedback. Lastly, more robust data management integration, modularity and cybersecurity as some of the other technology enablers that enterprises should definitely watch out for while they are choosing these technology platforms.

We've also released recently a peak matrix assessment which is focused on patient engagement platform. What we've done as a part of this assessment is we featured all relevant players that we see in this area. If I have to speak about the leaders, most of these leaders have a very comprehensive coverage of solutions which spans across patient administration, care management, services management, and most of the major contenders are mostly focused on a select few areas and not across the value chain as we saw for some of the leaders. With this, I'll also invite my colleague Katherine to probably talk about some of the work that Optum has done recently here.

Katherine Preska:

Yeah, thanks Priya. So as Priya stated, it's really interesting to hear that patient engagement platform use is growing and it's moving beyond just patient administration, really evolving into something that embraces hyper-personalization, data integration, connectivity, streamlined appointment scheduling. I'd love to share a portion of this quote from that Everest report. "Leveraging its profound understanding of the healthcare continuum, Optum utilizes robust domain and technical expertise to develop solutions spanning the patient engagement value chain. It offers a mature suite of platforms including the Patient Intake Platform and Omnichannel Payment Platform. To augment its capabilities, Optum has strategically invested in healthcare-specific acquisitions, positioning itself as a leader."

I think that's a really great summary and if you are interested in learning more, I would highly recommend checking out their full report where you can get more detail on different solutions and what's going on in the market. And later in the presentation, Dave will be reviewing specific aspects of the Optum platform, but first, I will speak a bit about some industry challenges. So we would love to get your input at this point after seeing the video, re-imagining the care journey, and hearing from Priya on the Everest Group's viewpoint of where the market is headed. We'd love to hear what you feel is currently missing from your patient engagement strategy. So go ahead and enter your submission into the poll.

It looks like some responses are starting to come in, we'll give it a little bit longer, so go ahead and submit your answer if you have not already.

Okay, we are going to close the poll, so let's take a look at the results.

Okay, interesting. Thank you so much for sharing your patient engagement challenges. There we go. So overall, when we were developing the patient access and engagement platform, we first considered market research and spoke with clients like you, and our strategy will continue to evolve based on your feedback. So we really do value that. And while this slide was shown earlier, it's worth repeating for a moment here because we believe by working together we can create a more comprehensive re-imagined patient experience while also helping to solve those provider business priorities like the ones that you just shared with us in the poll. So now we're going to take a deeper look at patient and provider challenges that we address. So first, looking at patient needs and challenges. I'm sure some of these statements on the slide may sound familiar to you. Every year, Optum conducts an annual consumer digital care access survey, and this original research tracks what's important to consumers relative to accessing medical care.

On the slide, you can see some of the major themes that persist among consumers. For example, consumers said when booking a healthcare appointment, 53% think it's very important to see information about the provider like gender, race, or ethnicity, licenses, so that the patient can truly pick a provider that's more closely matched to their preferences. And 70% stated that seeing an estimate of their out-of-pocket costs was very important, and 79% feel it's very important to get an appointment quickly. So overall, having digital tools that can meet these expectations seamlessly is clearly really imperative to patient NPS and satisfaction.

And turning our attention over to provider challenges, we've probably all seen the headlines related to the staffing crisis, heightened patient expectations and the evolving care models just to name a few. A lot of these themes that you see here on the slide probably sound, again, very familiar. But thinking about the staffing crisis, I mean shortage of healthcare professionals in general, but especially with specialty shortages, a really competitive job market, high turnover rates and aging workforce. When it comes to admin burdens, rising healthcare costs, growth in high deductible health plans, decreased insurance coverage, patient demands, that expectation for seamless integration and connectivity with user-friendly interfaces and personalized customized experiences.

Evolving care models, thinking about that shift toward patient-centered, coordinated and preventative approaches to healthcare where there's really a focus on improved outcomes. And of course, vendor fatigue. There are multiple standalone and disconnected technology solutions that are designed to address just a specific problem area and this leads to fragmented workflows, lack of interoperability, so many challenges here. So the question is, what can we do about these challenges? I'm going to hand it over to Dave now to talk about some of the possible solutions.

Dave Czerwinski:

Thanks, Katherine. As Katherine went through many of the industry challenges, I'm sure this doesn't sound new to many of you on the phone. Throughout the last year plus, Optum has been putting a lot of time and energy into building this new platform through a number of acquisitions through things that we already have in-house. And one of the main things that we did is we have been working very closely with our customers of Optum, people that are buying different parts and pieces of the solutions, and asking them what are some of the big challenges that they face.

Here's some examples of key questions that we've got that we were asked to help solve with some of our key partners. And so you'll see, I think as we built this platform, we had a lot of this in mind. But I'd love to move into just a quick questionnaire again to just get from the audience as you think about your organization today, what steps in the patient care journey have you already optimized or are planning to optimize here shortly at your organization? And again, you can check all those that apply. So I'll give you 35 seconds or so to fill this out and just hit submit when you're set.

I'll give just a few more minutes or a few more seconds here. I think we're only at about 20% response right here. Just...

Okay, I'll go ahead and close the poll and we can take a look at the results. Great, very interesting. I don't think that this is... I'm just reading through here, some of these. Offer digital intake and check-in. I think we've heard a lot of that or some EMR systems that are starting to offer pieces or components of that. Real-time availability and scheduling has been another area that some of the EMRs are focused on, so we'll get into some of those tools here as we get into the solution itself and how some of the modular components can help solve some of these things. So with that, let's take a look at the overall patient access and engagement solution itself and how we built this, and then what each component is. And we'll go into a little bit more detail on some of these key components here later on as well.

But looking at it from an end-to-end, it is a Software as a Service, SaaS-based platform that we can connect any parts of this to existing pieces. So you might already be working with somebody on patient intake and check-in. We can certainly do scheduling and things around that. We can kind of build this modular or obviously end-to-end. And there are bundled pricing packages available, especially for those looking to buy the full bundle. If we start just on the left-hand side, so provider growth and analytics, this particular suite of products and services is really around helping run more efficient and effective. So how are you performing in terms of your peers, in terms of other health systems within your market? We also offer a new patient acquisition service, so if you're looking to bring in new patients, we can run campaigns and help with many of the lists there.

As we move to patient acquisition and scheduling, obviously if you're looking to bring in new patients, you would want to have the ability to connect those patients directly for self-scheduling or connected for easy access to your call center scheduling. So we provide what we feel is a differentiator in Omnichannel approach. This allows patients to schedule where they're used to going or where they're comfortable going to find care. And then within that, once they select a provider that they're looking to schedule an appointment with, we really get into kind of the provider matching criteria. And so these are workflow questions that you are certainly in charge of and that you can set, but the intent of these provider matching questions is to make sure that this is the right appointment for both the patient and the provider. Some examples of that is certain providers might have specific requirements around how long an appointment needs to be for new patients, they maybe don't see new patients on certain days of the week.

Those are some basic examples. There's obviously more complex examples like, I don't handle sports-related injuries versus carpal tunnel or arthritis, and so we can certainly get into detailed workflow questions to make sure that both the patient and the provider are getting the right care team. Obviously the self-scheduling is available 24/7. We also empower or actually have an agent view so your own agents or your call centers can also see the same real-time view of scheduling availability as well as the workflow questions to make sure, again, that this is the right appointment for that provider available to them as well. We do offer a triage and symptom checker capability that can be turned on especially to help route patients to appropriate level of care.

In addition to that, we have a wait list. So for providers particularly in specialties, the ability to get on a wait list as Katherine showed in her example is crucial, and the sooner you can get on that the better. And then all of this is connected to a front-end financial or patient financial clearance system usually. And so in those examples at the time that the appointment is booked, once we know their insurance information, we're able to run a real-time eligibility check and provide an estimate so that both the provider and the patient see what this potential appointment could cost them.

From there as we start to move into intake and check-in and estimates and payments, again, we're running the benefits several days before the appointment. We're running their insurance benefits and eligibility. We're again presenting them with the price estimates. We also offer the payment integration, so this is where we can integrate either pre-appointment and you can pay upfront or post-appointment, you can pay on the back end any outstanding balance that you might have.

As part of the actual check-in process within a couple of days before the actual appointment, the intake forms are sent out. This is the driver's license capture, insurance information capture, etc. Basically goes through any HIPAA and any custom forms that you might have in terms of patient liabilities, etc. Things like that. We can offer this check-in process as part of the virtual waiting room. We also offer QR codes and tablets for if you're not offering a virtual waiting room and you want to have more of a kiosk or tablet approach. With those that finish it digitally, you can also get the QR code. And then clinical intake is also part of this overall intake process.

Again, this is all connected into the EMR system. So in Katherine's example where you're having to enter this information manually on multiple different forms on the back with a clipboard and then having to do it multiple times over, the system is actually capturing this and sharing this information with any other provider on that EMR system or on our platform. In 2024, we focused heavily on continued care support. We're going to continue to roll out more and more features here in 2024 on patient care support. Today we offer very robust referrals to specialty care and behavioral health, so we're working with a number of partners here to actually help with that PCP to specialist referrals. We have a large, large number of behavioral health providers already on platform. And so anytime somebody's looking to get support there, we actually have quite a bit of availability in every state that we can connect into.

As we look towards things that we're building in 2024, so continued to connection to the pharmacy and some of the Rx benefits that individuals might have. This would flag appoint prescriptions that you may be past due for, prescription compliance, things like that. In addition to that, we're looking at smart care plan. So as the care team builds a care plan and wants to send that out to the patient, these digital tools would actually be able to send that care plan as part of a post appointment approach where you'd actually see here's what your physician recommends, and then you can track to those goals and progress to that. We also have a portable health record, which is going to be able to take the information that you maybe saw with one provider and some of the lab results and test results that you got, and actually be able to bring that to another provider should you be referred to a specialist outside of the system.

Obviously this is information that today, people have to print off or bring in multiple different binders and notebooks, et cetera. This is where I was seeing before, and these were some of the test results that I got. These are things that I can actually bring with me now, more digital. And then even connection into should you need remote patient monitoring systems or any type of solution to help monitor some of your health while you're not in a facility. We can actually connect you to some of those equipment, and then that actually connects in back to the EMR and to the practice management systems where it allows you to see real-time how the vitals and the patient is progressing.

If we get into communications, obviously communications happen throughout this entire journey. And so as part of any one of these modules, you are getting patient communications. Those can be customized and turned off, turned on or off depending on what other systems you might have that are doing some certain types of communications already. But we also offer kind of an enhanced communication package. In that enhanced communication package you have full customization in terms of not just when reminders are set, the number of days that things are set before appointment, post appointment, et cetera. But really customizing the messaging, et cetera. That also turns on our bidirectional messaging so the care team and the patient can actually connect via SMS or email where it actually allows you to ask questions prior to an appointment or post appointment.

Prior to an appointment, do I need to fast for this upcoming appointment? Basic questions like that. Or you can even get into more complex questions with your care team through this process. We also offer targeted outreach campaigns. So thinking back to what we're doing in provider growth and analytics when we talk about new patient acquisition, we can do targeted outreach campaigns specific to if you're looking to bring in a subset of a population or a new group, we can target communications at those individuals. We can also do mass communications. So if your facility's under construction and you need to use alternative doors for anybody who has upcoming appointments, if you're looking to just send out mass reminders of, I haven't had a flu shot or you haven't had a flu shot this year or your past due for an annual wellness exam, things like that can also be turned on.

Next, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail on some of these key offerings. So I think if we start with the practice growth and analytics, today, we're offering two main components of this. The first is, as I've talked about it a little bit here, the consumer acquisition services. We actually have a case study of a group, a large regional health system in the Midwest that used this service. They actually used our propensity models, our data to actually pull likelihood to engage in their area, or sorry, a group of individuals that needed these types of services. Then we matched up with their likelihood to engage and were actually able to give them a targeted list that actually generated about 8.85 million of reimbursement to them, and about 7,000 unique patients.

If you compare that to the cost of what they paid for the list from us and the actual campaign, they received a 70 to one return on investment. Again, that's a great example of bringing in 7,000 new patients to a facility in a targeted campaign. We also offer a number of solutions that can help really access how are you performing, optimizing your providers, your physicians, benchmarking them against some of the network and quality of your peers. These solutions are also available. They can be turned on or off individually, but they don't have to be purchased together. Like I said, this is an entire module that you can turn off pieces and components of.

Next, we get into kind of the omnichannel access and connecting patients to providers through various entry points. I think you saw this in the video, we've talked about it a little bit. We do feel that this is a differentiator. We know that patients today do not use one single front door to find care, particularly when they're looking for new care or even when they're looking to be referred, right? In many cases, if you think about if you're looking for new care, we did a study with an organization that actually went out on our behalf. They interviewed about 1,200 consumers on how are they accessing care today, thinking about where they need to go for new care or where do they start when they're looking for care? It turns out about 40% of them are actually using their insurance or payer website to find obviously, and that makes sense, who's in network and who is my insurance cover?

So that is obviously a big connection there. Obviously the second biggest one with about 30 plus percent was provider to provider referrals. And so this is going to be I saw a PCP or I saw a provider who's actually referring me to a number of other specialists that I should go see. I think as you saw from Katherine's journey, many of these end up being I get a list or I leave my doctor with a list of people that I should go look up and find out if they're in my network, or get on their wait list and call them to get an appointment. What we're really working closely with is the ability to actually make those provider to provider referrals more real time and actually cut down that lead time and actually make it easier for the consumer to just book then and there whenever possible.

And so that makes up about 70% of where patients go. The remainder really falls into things like healthcare marketplaces. So things like Healthgrades, Google, or the actual provider sites. So should they have an existing relationship with a provider or know a provider group, they may be going to the provider site there that actually makes up some of the smaller amounts. And then social media, while it's a small amount today, about 7%, obviously that's going to be a growing channel over time. And so I think one of the key things that Optum offers is that we empower a hundred percent of these channels, including the provider to provider referrals. We're doing a number of work there. And like I talked about before, even the agent call center piece is something that we power. So the agent view and then giving them the ability to see the real-time availability to even make those connections should you choose to call in and not do this digitally.

I think as we get into now the intake check-in, intake, estimates and payments, these are examples of this process. I think we saw this a little bit in the Naomi journey, but specifically the system is going to send out a text message before an appointment allowing them to do the e-registration forms and signatures. Again, that's going to offer the estimate. And then again from the check-in process, it's going to either give you a QR code or a fast pass-type check-in that you've already completed these forms. You can also use the virtual waiting room or we have kiosks available at that as well. At the end of the appointment if there's any outstanding balances, we work with a number of payment integration solutions. So we can also connect with those to offer what is any outstanding balance and how you could potentially pay those balances.

Next, we'll get into, so this is actually not slideware in that we actually, all of this is actually in production today. We actually have a clickable demo. For purposes of time, we're not going to get into the actual clickable demo today, but there's some key screenshots here on this patient journey. If you're interested in wanting to know more, please reach out to us. We would love to walk through this clickable demo and show you this experience live and how it works end to end. But the intent here is that this UX, UI is obviously Optum branded in this example, but this entire platform is designed to offer any brand that consumers or that providers want us to use.

And so obviously this would be branded with your branding on it, and from a patient perspective it would feel like they're working directly with your organization from a look and feel in the common UX and UI perspective. So with that, I'm going to turn it back to Katherine who's just going to walk us through some of the end of 2024 and the end of 2025 future innovations that we're working on. Katherine?

Katherine Preska:

Thanks, Dave. So as we're wrapping up the solution overview, just a reminder, this is not the end of solution development. We're continually investing and innovating and we'll continue to do so with our patient access and engagement technology specifically. So what you saw today does not include some of these highlights you can see on our near-term product development roadmap, like our plans for expanding into robust provider network management and enabling that seamless provider to provider referrals for specialty care and behavioral health, as Dave kind of a alluded to. And we're also really excited about continued care support where we will have the ability to deliver coordinated care plans and help the consumer manage their personal health goals while enabling the provider to actually prescribe or recommend health programs or digital therapeutics, all while having visibility into the patient's progress between appointments.

So with those investments, by 2025, we expect to leapfrog our competitors, most of whom are really offering just pieces of the experience and perpetuating the problem of that multiple vendor management issue. It's also important to note here when we talk about competitors, we don't define EMRs like Epic and others as competitors. I think I saw a couple of questions in the chat about that. We really view them more so as partners or integration points since we integrate into those EMRs. So overall, we believe we will continue to lead in the patient engagement space given our investment in bringing to market the first truly end-to-end solution that fulfills those patient expectations we talked about, while also solving for provider business challenges.

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