INTRODUCTION | COVID-19 has transformed the way we live and work, provide and receive healthcare. Remember clinical transformation? The pandemic has accelerated and sharpened it overnight into the redesign of digital care. “All of a sudden we went from 40 virtual patient visits a day to more than 3,000 at our peak,” says Marc Boom, MD, president & CEO of Houston Methodist.

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Leading health systems aren’t waiting for a post-COVID telehealth-reimbursement fix to redesign digital care. Based on our interviews, dialogues and research with executives from Ascension, Providence, OSF HealthCare and Houston Methodist, systems are moving quickly to build a consumer-centric ecosystem of digital apps to transform how patients experience care so that it is as convenient, seamless, trustworthy and efficient as communications, online retail, banking and other industries. This change—which flips the traditional physician/patient relationship to a consumer-centric relationship with the health system—involves several common emergent elements including design thinking, frictionless experience and customization (see “Ten Key Takeaways” at the end of this discussion). Going one step further, Adventist Health is investing in community-wide lifestyle-optimizing environments to make the healthy choice the easy choice.

In its quest to adopt the same consumer focus as non-healthcare industries, mega health systems like Ascension, CommonSpirit, Providence and Trinity are recruiting top executives from outside healthcare and partnering with disruptors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. In that vein we begin our discussion with Eduardo Conrado, who was recruited to Ascension from Motorola Solutions, a Chicago-based mission-critical communications company where he was EVP and chief strategy and innovation officer, similar to his current post.