Dr James Hamrick Discusses Acting on What's Valuable to Patients

James Hamrick, MD, senior medical director at Flatiron Health, discusses how to turn patient feedback on what value means to them into actionable information.

Transcript

Once you identify what is of value to patients, how do you turn this into actionable information that can be addressed by both patients and providers?

Once you begin to understand what brings value to patients, and let’s use the example of transparency with lab results, it’s really important for patients to be able to have access to their lab results because that gives them actionable information for themselves. If I’m a cancer patient on chemotherapy and I can see whether my white count is trending down, that’s going to help me know how to behave. It’s going to help me react to something like a fever or an illness that’s happened to me.

Once you have that data and you have the understanding of what the patients need from it, you have to build it in a user-friendly way. So, we think about ways we can have our design experts design interactions between the patients and their lab results in the patient portal that makes sense for patients so that you can deliver a lot of data to the patient, really quickly in an effective way for them to understand it and know what they should do or who they should contact for next steps.