CERGAS Seminar "A virtuous implementation of telemedicine in rheumatology: description of change management practices and analysis of the role played by personalized experience in the patients’ answer"

Even though telemedicine has gained the greatest attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, its implementations have been the subjects of several projects and researches over the last years. One virtuous example can be found within the rheumatology ward of Niguarda Hospital in Milan, where the whole staff has been involved in experimenting with new multichannel interactions to communicate with patients for more than a decade.

During spring 2020, this experience was further enhanced to facilitate patient interaction and was characterized by three elements: remote monitoring, triage through phone calls and home delivery of medication. What are the distinctive and successful elements of the project? What can we learn from this experience, and which managerial implications we can derive from this experience? Furthermore, finally, what is the role of personalized experience in patient perception?

In order to answer these questions, we adopted mixed methods. As a first step, we deepened how the change management process has been managed by conducting semi-structured interviews and analyzing them through a framework taken from the literature. Our study enlightened the most relevant actions put into place together with the main lessons learned, acting as a tool that can be exploited by other wards to strategically and operationally design future successful experiences. As a second step, we conducted a survey to explore the patients’ perspectives on several aspects related to telemedicine, i.e., the benefits expected or perceived, the willingness to enrol in future projects, the preference for the combination of in-person/on distance services. Most interestingly, responders represent patients no matter the type of telemedicine experience they had, and this key feature enabled us to draw some conclusions on the different impacts of the telemedicine services experienced.

Given the peculiarity of the context, the seminar will present and discuss the methodologies developed to analyze the project and the preliminary results in order to gain insights and comments.

Speakers: Lucia Ferrara and Elisabetta Listorti

Lucia Ferrara, PhD, MsC is Lecturer of Government Health and Not for Profit Division at SDA Bocconi School of management and Research Fellow at CERGAS (Centre for Research on Health and Social Care Management) SDA Bocconi, Bocconi University. She completed her PhD in Evaluation of health and social policies at the University of Bari (Italy). She holds a Bachelor of Health Education from the University of Foggia (Italy), a M.Sc. in Health Economics and Health Policies from the Coripe Piemonte –Consortium for Research and Continuing Education in Economics, University of Tourin (Italy) and a M.Sc. in Sociology, Health and Social Policies from the University of Bologna (Italy).

Since 2016 she has worked in the field of healthcare management at CERGAS SDA Bocconi. Her research activities focus on population health management and clinical governance, healthcare systems financing, bundled payment, process management, healthcare system evaluation and integrated care.

Elisabetta Listorti joined CERGAS as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2019. She holds a PhD in Management Engineering from the Politecnico of Torino, when she focused on the healthcare sector by pursuing clinical objectives with managerial tools. She previously obtained both a bachelor and master degree in Management Engineering from the Politecnico of Torino, together with a Master in Health Economics and Policy from CORIPE. She recently completed a two-year Master course in Epidemiology at the University of Torino. Prior to CERGAS, she has worked for the Regional Epidemiology Unit of Piedmont on the implementation of the National Plan for Chronic Diseases.

Her main research interests include the existing relations among the organization of the health services and the population’s health conditions. Her multidisciplinary background allows her to commit to research on health topics combining health management, health economics and epidemiology’s perspectives.

Webinar link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/95410052064

Please note that participation to the webinar will be in online mode only.