Meg Barron (she/her) is the former Vice President of Digital Health Strategy at the American Medical Association.

She served in product development and business development leadership roles at the AMA and was responsible for driving the roadmap of initiatives that support the AMA’s digital health and medicine strategy.

In the first part of this Stress series, Meg Barron discusses how digital health solutions can better support physicians, improve capacity, and reduce administrative burden.

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Check out these resources to help your solution or organization design solutions to improve mental health.

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In Full Health (IFH): Can you share a little bit about the digital health strategy goals in your work at the AMA?

Meg Barron: At the end of the day, the overall goal that we’re focused on for my team is, “How do we help to make technology an asset and not one more thing or one more burden on patient and physicians’ plates?” To that end, my journey to this role has really been through different product, business development, and marketing roles both at the AMA and outside of it.

We all know with the pandemic, that it really pushed technology to the main stage. At this point in time, there’s just a lot of work to be done and a lot of focus to ensure the pendulum doesn’t swing back — and that we keep progress moving forward.

A lot of that just has to do with the change management aspects of incorporating technology into workflows and creating awareness for what outcomes are being generated and by whom. And then creating best practices based on outcomes data.

IFH: Your recent work includes driving the roadmap of initiatives that support the AMA’s digital health and medicine strategy — what are some of the top challenges you are working to address?

Meg Barron: When I first joined the team, we initiated some baseline digital health research that dates back to 2016. The goal of that research was really to help get a pulse check on what technology, outside of EHR, physicians were using in practice in 2016, what they were excited about using, and then what their key requirements for adoption were.

We repeated that research in 2019 and released the results actually about a month before COVID, and then just released the latest results in 2022 in the report, “AMA Digital Health Care 2022 Study Findings.” Even dating back to 2016, there was an enthusiasm for digital health technology and specifically an enthusiasm to help physicians improve patient care and help to address the burden of administrative-related issues.

We learned that the key requirements for adoption need to be met for that to scale appropriately.

There are so many details that get in the way of new technology or solutions getting adopted, even if those first three requirements or parameters are met. For solutions to scale, you have to beat out the status quo and assume that the people adopting your solutions have only a minute of breathing room to think about the impact layering in one more solution will have. When you have physicians and care team members who are more burned out than ever, being able to introduce something new is a luxury in itself.

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IFH: When creating health solutions that address issues of stress for end users — what are some things health innovators should keep in mind?

Meg Barron: First and foremost, design for your end users — and specifically those who will need the most help to be able to use your product. Keeping those individuals in mind is incredibly important. To zoom out a bit, AMA has a whole platform and initiative focused on getting more patient and physician end-user feedback embedded into new technologies and solutions at early stages and as often as possible.

We work very closely with our colleagues in the Center for Health Equity related to this. We have a platform called Physician Innovation Network (PIN), which you can think of as a matching platform to help connect physicians and health tech companies all across the country.

There’s no cost for a company to put out a call saying, “Hey, here’s a concept I’m thinking about. Would this be helpful or hurtful? And in what ways?” or, “What end-user feedback can we incorporate” or even, “I’m looking for a board member, advisor, a full-time CMIO to come aboard.”

IFH: How can digital solutions play a role in addressing the shortage of clinicians or supporting their bandwidth needs?

Meg Barron: If you’re a solution innovator, the first step is getting as much end-user feedback as possible.

Second, is leveraging that feedback to see a more zoomed-out view of the industry and workflows. No one wants to implement ten solutions for ten different problems. If you can get to one solution that tackles those ten corresponding issues that a physician has and can help them save one minute of time, or have one more minute of virtual or in-person with their patient, that’s a win.

In the latest digital health research, we saw an increased shift in physicians saying that a motivator for them to use digital health technologies and solutions is to help them address administrative burdens that they have to experience in their day-to-day life.

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A physician might be making 4,000+ clicks in the EHR every day. While it might not seem like a lot to just open up one more portal, launch one more app, or make three more clicks — that adds up really quickly, and you need to be able to lighten that load versus adding to their strain.

Meg Barron
Former Vice President of Digital Health Strategy, American Medical Association

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IFH: How can health leaders protect their own mental health and avoid burnout?

Meg Barron: For myself, what’s keeping me motivated and energized, is that never before in my career have I seen a time when people recognize that collaboration is absolutely critical in order to address the issues that we’re looking to tackle in health care.

One of the latest reports that we put out was something called the Future of Health Report, addressing what we’ve termed the “digital health disconnect” being felt right now. We have all of these different stakeholders that may have slightly different motivations and slightly different incentives. If you think about large payers, employers, venture capitalists, and health systems — where and what are the common threads or themes that we can all agree on?

That common ground can really be used as pillars as we move towards what we’ve termed “digitally enabled care.” It’s getting in-person care and virtual care to be extremely well-coordinated, well-integrated, and as convenient and accessible as possible.

It’s from that pre-competitive lens that initiatives like In Full Health can bring the right players to the table to land on the right problem statements, and then again divide and conquer the massive kinds of big hairy problems that we’re looking to tackle here.

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