The mess that is healthcare data.
The promise of value-based care (VBC) is often buried under a mountain of messy, disconnected data. As those in healthcare know all too well, a patient’s health journey can be scattered across a variety of different platforms and sources, leaving a digital breadcrumb trail that requires investigative journalism to try to sift through noise, drum up insights, and decipher what a patient might need next.
For those of you who work with us, you know we’re dedicated to doing things differently at Pearl. We work hard to meet our customers where they are and provide supportive tools that enable better patient care in real time, so that we’re not just another platform amongst the numerous systems our provider partners need to interface with in their daily work.
But how do we build a VBC experience that will help our partner organizations thrive, when each has distinctive approaches, ways of working, and often unique needs when it comes to data?
The Partner-Powered Flywheel: Turning Practice Insights into VBC Success
We believe that truly effective technology can’t be built in a vacuum—it has to be co-created with the people who are living and breathing healthcare, every day. Companies that truly understand the importance of creating customer-centered experiences are better equipped to enable success for those they serve.
There’s an oft-quoted saying, incorrectly attributed to Henry Ford yet still entrenched in how many companies think about innovation: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This reflects a sentiment that customers don’t belong in the innovation conversation because they can’t envision radical changes needed to revolutionize experiences. Yet it could not be further from the truth, and anyone who believes this is asking the wrong questions. (And yes, as a social scientist, I can tell you there is such a thing as a bad question!)
At Pearl, we argue the opposite. We believe the people we partner with at healthcare organizations are best equipped, as experts in their day-to-day work, to help co-create more supportive health tech that can complement the suite of tools already at their disposal.
Our philosophy is built on a partner-powered flywheel, a continuous loop of deep listening, collaboration, innovation, feedback, and iteration. Instead of building a product based solely on intuition and our team’s combined experience in healthcare, we go directly to the source. We speak with customers on a regular basis, diving deeply into their work and paying close attention to the needs, perceptions, and everyday activities of the people who use our technology. Their insights fuel our platform’s development and evolution, resulting in a more intuitive and effective experience. In return, a better platform helps our partners deliver better, more proactive patient care, which generates even more insights for us to build upon. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle.
Through in-depth discussions, concept testing, and product feedback sessions and surveys with our customers, our Experience Design team works alongside cross-functional collaborators to develop a platform experience aligned with Pearl’s core product principles:
- patient-centric to empower healthcare providers and support patient health journeys;
- action-oriented to prioritize the highest-impact patient needs and reduce administrative burden; and,
- complexity, simplified, to distill insights from all the noisy data and requirements that exist in value-based care.
And we don’t just talk about the value of partnership; we put it into practice. For us, active listening means we take action on what we hear, making changes to positively impact users’ day-to-day experience.
A Program Built for Deep Partnership & Tangible Improvement
Inclusive partnership and co-creation have been at the center of what we do since our company’s inception. Beyond soliciting feedback from any customer willing to share the good, the bad, and the ugly with our team, we created the Insight Partner Program. We built this program to connect our team to a representative sampling of customers from diverse organizations who would be willing to provide their perspectives at a regular cadence and invested in partnering with our team to build a better experience.
Conversations with partners have enabled our team to empathize with foundational customer needs as we design and develop new features and tools to support their workflows. We then close the loop to confirm we’ve heard them correctly, and to validate that platform changes have the intended positive impact.
The power of this collaboration is evident in varied platform enhancements we’ve already made, which have been directly shaped by feedback from our Insight Partners. In the coming months, we’ll be sharing stories of how we’re evolving our product experience based on the feedback we receive from our partners.
The Heart of Our Mission
Building a great user experience isn’t about Pearl; it’s about empowering our customers and supporting their needs. And our commitment to constant improvement and collaboration is at the core of what we do. We believe that by working together, we can reduce administrative burden, provide powerful insights, and ultimately, build a more effective and supportive ecosystem for value-based care, with patient care at the center. For us, this isn’t about building technology—it’s about building partnerships that drive the future of healthcare.
