RWJBarnabas Health

Domenico Savatta

Physician Technology Leader

Imagine designing the experience around the patient instead.

The patient first receives credible education about the problem. When appropriate, that education leads into a structured application that collects symptoms, history, previous treatments, medications and, importantly, what the patient hopes to accomplish.

Some physicians question whether patients will take the time to provide this information before an appointment. My view is that the information has to be collected sooner or later. The question is where and when we can collect it most accurately.

At home, patients often have something they rarely have in a medical office: time. They can look at their medication bottles, find previous test results, ask a spouse or family member for help and think carefully about when a symptom actually began. Instead of trying to reconstruct years of medical history from memory while sitting in an examination room, we can give patients the opportunity to provide better information before they arrive.

AI can then help organize that information, identify gaps and transform a long patient history into a structured summary that the clinician can rapidly review and verify.

The objective is not to have the physician spend less time with the patient.

It is to have the physician spend less time trying to reconstruct the patient’s story and more time understanding the person sitting in front of them.

That distinction matters.

AI should not become another layer between patients and physicians. Properly designed, it should remove layers that are already there.

Organize Healthcare Around Patient Events

The same principle should continue after the visit.

Healthcare information today is generally organized around institutions. The hospital has its record. The specialist has another system. Patients receive portal messages, emails, texts, reports and instructions from different places.

But patients do not experience healthcare as an organizational chart. They experience events.

Sometimes those events are relatively simple: a new symptom, an abnormal test or an operation. Sometimes they are among the most consequential moments a family will ever face: coordinating care after a cancer diagnosis, deciding among competing treatment options, or bringing physicians and family members together when discussing end-of-life care or hospice.

Those moments require more than access to a medical record. They require coordination around the patient.

That realization led me to build a HIPAA-compliant application around what I call LA Love. It is the idea that technology should help organize the people who care about a patient around the moments when that patient needs them most.

Within the platform, LA Connect rooms are created around a patient’s particular episode of care. With the patient’s permission, the appropriate family members and healthcare professionals can participate in the same secure environment. Messages, documents, questions, tasks and follow-up can remain connected to that event rather than being scattered across portals, text messages, emails and separate healthcare systems.

The technology itself is not the point. The relationship is.

A cancer diagnosis, for example, may involve the patient, spouse, children, urologist, medical oncologist, radiation oncologist and primary-care physician. Our traditional technology tends to separate those people according to where they work. The patient’s life does not have those boundaries.

The patient does not experience the org chart. The patient experiences the handoff.

For decades, we have asked patients and families to navigate healthcare’s architecture. We now have the technology to begin building the architecture around them.