Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Eric Langshur, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of AVIA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you three specific issues that you are seeing across your client base that they address and in turn create a major impact. 

Eric Langshur: This was where I was going with the knowledge economy. We understand that information and best practices are liquid in the healthcare economy. We created a tool that brings the industry into the knowledge economy by capturing all this information on a digital platform that we make available to our members and beyond.

We democratize this important set of improved strategies. For example, we partnered with the American Hospital Association to bring in this information through the technology of AVIA Connect. It’s accessible to anyone and everywhere. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk in more depth about the Connect product. What does it do? What business problems does it solve? 

Eric Langshur: At the highest level, it makes information accessible and available to anybody everywhere in an efficient way. What is that information? It is the strategies that you employ to deliver against your business objectives. It shows the capabilities that are needed to be built against those strategies.

In addition to that, it gives you information on the solution companies that deliver those capabilities. It provides information such as other people’s experience with those solutions, companies, and implementation playbooks.

Connectivity is also another thing that it offers. You can connect to other people like yourself around the world who have thought through these problems and experiences before. You can get the benefit of their learnings and experiences.  

Sramana Mitra: Do you think it would be helpful to do use cases? 

Eric Langshur: Sure. For example in the health system, I have a strategic objective to be more consumer-focused. Every health system in the country has that strategic objective.

What does this mean? What it breaks down to is, I need to create an ability for consumers to access my services in a user-friendly way. I’m going to create a digital front door for my health system. That’s great.

We all have that strategy, but when you continue to double-click, what you see is 68 distinct capabilities lining up towards achieving that. For example, the consumer needs to be able to search and find the health system or physician.

You need to be able to understand the physician’s schedule, understand price transparency, and understand how to schedule and reschedule your appointment. You need to be able to pay your bills. Some sub-capabilities line up in the service of achieving that strategy. What we deliver with AVIA Connect is the ability to understand the landscape of a high-level strategy and then continue to double click.

Let’s continue with the example. I need to find a physician. That’s a complicated undertaking for a health system because you have different types of relationships with different types of physician groups. They might be direct employees or loosely affiliated with the health system.

In this case, you need a mechanism to create a provider directory. That varies across the different service lines which are on different enterprises largely within the health system. Within that, you know that you need to get visibility. How do you access the physician’s schedule and so forth?

There are increasing levels of complexity on any of these projects and this is one of the reasons why work is challenging within healthcare. People will make global pronouncements that healthcare is behind the tech curb.

Why can’t I schedule with my physician? I can schedule an appointment for my pet online. Why can’t I do that for my kid? There are layers of complexities that need to be worked through. That is the work that we are doing. Those are the solutions that we are making available in the most efficient way through AVIA Connect. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Eric Langshur, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of AVIA
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