EP427: How Do Digital Health Vendors Deliver Patient Outcomes and Experiences? With Rik Renard

Digital health vendors and virtual care point solutions only have a reason to exist if they perform better than traditional community providers — better outcomes, better affordability, better engagement. So how are they actually doing? Rik Renard from Awell, coauthor of a survey of 235 digital health professionals conducted with Health Tech Nerds, joins Stacey Richter with an answer that's more sobering than reassuring: 84% of digital health vendors say they use standardized care flows, but only 16% base those flows on scientific evidence, and a mere 7% actually measure whether their care flows are working across the metrics that matter.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why 84% of digital health vendors report using care flows, but only 16% of those flows are actually grounded in scientific evidence

✅ Why just 7% of digital health vendors measure all four things needed for a real picture of performance: engagement and compliance metrics, financial metrics like revenue per patient, clinician-reported outcomes, and patient-reported outcomes (PROMs)

✅ What Rik Renard calls "black box care" — the inevitable result when a vendor can't measure what its care flows are actually doing, meaning it can't manage or improve them either

✅ Why a digital health vendor's different payer and purchaser customers can demand conflicting care flows that ladder up to entirely different goals, complicating any single standard of care

✅ Why employers who lack the clinical expertise to evaluate quality tend to default to evaluating vendors on cost and service alone — creating a race to the bottom where being cheap and pleasant beats being effective

WHY THIS MATTERS

Standardized, evidence-based care flows are what let a digital health vendor deliver consistent, measurable outcomes at scale instead of results that depend entirely on which clinician a patient happens to get. Right now, the vast majority of vendors either aren't building on evidence or aren't measuring the results closely enough to know if their approach is actually working — which means most employers and purchasers evaluating these vendors have no reliable way to tell genuine performance from a well-produced pitch deck. Rik Renard's advice for any employer vetting a vendor is straightforward: ask to see the actual care flows, ask if they're evidence-based, and ask exactly what gets measured.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

EP315 with Bob Matthews: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

Encore! EP392 with Emily Kagan Trenchard: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP412 with Robert Pearl, MD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

✉️ Enjoy this podcast? Subscribe to the free weekly newsletter

🫙 Support the podcast with a small donation to the Tip Jar

🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts

🎤 Listen on Spotify

📺 Subscribe to our YouTube channel

=== CONNECT WITH THE RHV TEAM ===

✭ LinkedIn ✭ Threads ✭ Bluesky ✭ X

00:00 Introduction.

09:26 Why should clinicians care about care processes and care flows?

12:05 Why do care flows and care processes have a bad reputation?

12:31 What components does a good pathway include?

14:51 Why pathways need to be looked at as a process of continuous reconfiguration.

17:15 Who did Awell survey about care processes and flows?

18:42 How many clinicians were using care flows, and what did those care flows look like?

25:45 EP315 with Bob Matthews.

26:44 EP392 with Emily Kagan Trenchard.

28:21 EP412 with Robert Pearl, MD.

30:01 "Just document something."

30:14 What was a shocking find from this care process survey?

31:06 Is AI the answer?

34:13 Why is it important to get the foundation of data correct before introducing AI?

34:51 How should employers use this information to vet vendors?