When it comes to driving innovation, pushing for leveraging more technology throughout healthcare is crucial to bringing down costs, said Meghan Joyce, COO and executive vice president of platform for Oscar.
During an episode of "Becker's Payer Issues Podcast," Ms. Joyce said Oscar has been following other industries in tapping technology to drive down menial tasks and optimize the work professionals do. Focusing on a "better options for less" mentality is central to leveraging technology to unlock value in healthcare — something the pandemic kicked up that she is now taking in stride.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast. Listen to the full interview here.
Meghan Joyce: We see that there's a real opportunity to offer better solutions even more efficiently through technology. It's not quite as obvious in some pockets of the healthcare industry as to how you actually leverage technology to achieve better outcomes, because we all know that humans and the human touch is so critically important in healthcare. What we believe is actually not that technology will substitute humans in order to drive this change, but that we can actually partner brilliant people with deep technology in order to achieve first period outcomes. Our mission is helping people do the things that they do best — true care delivery, critical thinking — and to help them do all of the lower value things — you know, the things that are not operating at the top of their license — more efficiently or in an automated way through technology.
By combining the best of what real human caregivers have to offer along with deep technology, we are able to scale better care more efficiently because we have people who are focused at the top of their license, because we are able to have people using the highest and best use of their time. So we see that shift of digitalization and the shift toward virtual as a really important one that was not only accelerated by the pandemic, but will help actually make the consumer experience better and more affordable in years to come.