The era of retrospective patient experience insights might have gone by the wayside. Now, in its place, healthcare organizations need to consider the role real-time patient feedback data might play in an industry continuously shaped by healthcare consumerism.
Healthcare executives have heard it before: healthcare consumerism is putting pressure on the industry, as patients continue to demand an experience that reflects other service sectors. That might mean patients want convenient care access and they want it now, but it also means they want healthcare to be nimble enough to address their unique needs and preferences and to remember that information for the next encounter.
"You need to be listening in real time through every channel possible," according to Adrienne Boissy, M.D., chief medical officer for Qualtrics, an experience management company that serves numerous service sectors. "Of the 20,000 brands that we serve, healthcare is just beginning to recognize maybe service and experience as a differentiating capability."
It's a tale as old as time. As patients continue to assume more of their medical expenditures, primarily due to the rise in high-deductible health plans, they're becoming more discerning consumers of healthcare.
Patients don't just want a healthcare experience that makes them feel better, although safety and quality are still the mark of a good healthcare experience. They also want a healthcare experience that reflects the experiences they have with other service sectors, like banking or travel.
Those other service sectors are savvy about personalizing the consumer experience, mostly because they have the consumer data necessary to tailor a transaction and are nimble enough to apply that information during future transactions.
Healthcare is on the precipice of this, Boissy said, and its leaders are finally tapping the patient experience surveying technology that's set up to provide real-time insights.
"Patients have actually been looking for this type of capability for years," she asserted. "We're just beginning to listen more intently and recognize that those external pressures are driving internal change into how we listen and how we act. But when it really comes down to it, patients have been hoping, expecting and wanting this, especially as they're shaped by other industries. It feels like there's just now a galvanized movement in healthcare to do something about it."
Healthcare draws on real-time insights
Historically, patient satisfaction and experience surveying have been retrospective. Healthcare organizations are required to issue certain patient experience surveys, including Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys. CAHPS surveys are important because they inform clinical quality scores and, therefore, some reimbursement, and they can also provide high-level insights about the patient experience of care.
But they do little to support a personalized patient experience, or to help a healthcare provider remedy a poor patient interaction in the moment.
"In healthcare, we are trying to live in two different worlds," Boissy noted. "I see organizations, especially in this country, having one foot in what's required for regulatory surveys and required reporting for value-based programming and rankings and ratings. And then I see them having another foot in the universe of what's possible for experience management."
Consumer experience companies like Qualtrics have had the capability to do real-time surveying for a while, Boissy pointed out, but it hasn't been until recently that healthcare has reached a tipping point for utilizing that capability. As hospitals and health systems respond to trends in healthcare consumerism and work to enhance the patient experience, these types of insights are critical and organizations are working to serve data up in clinician workflows and across the health system.
For example, a partnership between Qualtrics and EHR vendor Epic Systems announced in December 2023 aimed to integrate patient experience data into the system. The following August, the two companies unveiled further collaboration to trigger resolution workflows set up to help providers and other staff members support a better experience during the next encounter or mitigate real-time negative feedback.
"As service expectations increase for healthcare, patients are looking for not just identification or capture of a signal they may have; they're also looking for resolution of it," Boissy said.
Hospital and health system staff can zero in on a singular part of the clinical encounter. For example, patient access and intake is an area rife with patient complaints or negative sentiment. Granular insights into this part of the clinical encounter can help staff remedy existing issues and then tailor the patient intake process for that same patient the next time they visit.
Perhaps the patient didn't want to use a digital self-scheduling option. Patient feedback systems can alert the health system of this issue and give them the power to refer that patient file to a low-tech scheduling option in the future.
Or maybe the patient got mired in the bill pay process because the system didn't easily offer other language options. By collecting that experience data, the clinic might make changes to its systems to more easily offer services in multiple languages.
Of course, things can get much more personal than that, especially when patients comment on the patient-provider interaction. This adds a layer of complexity that Boissy cautions health systems not to exploit.
Pitfalls to avoid with patient experience data
In addition to her role as chief medical officer for Qualtrics, Boissy works as a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic and has far-reaching experience with the organization's patient satisfaction work.
It's that experience that helps Boissy to consider the practical application of real-time patient feedback.
As service expectations increase for healthcare, patients are looking for not just identification or capture of a signal they may have; they're also looking for resolution of it.
Adrienne Boissy, M.D.Chief medical officer, Qualtrics
"What we should all be thoughtful about is how and when we are introducing new technology or even new insights and to whom within clinical care," she said.
For example, Boissy's multiple sclerosis patients, many of whom she's treated for over 20 years, might share personal and sensitive information with her during the clinical encounter. This information might be important for their clinical care, Boissy said, but it's not important data that'll inform the patient experience. And that's not to mention the fact that patients expect Boissy to keep this information private.
As health IT companies and the healthcare providers they serve continue to integrate patient feedback platforms with the medical record, it will be essential to draw an appropriate line regarding data sharing.
"That trusted relationship is a really important concept for clinicians and technology companies to be thinking about in this space. How do we respect and honor that?" Boissy posited. "And yet also think about where patients would be willing to share different types of information. What does the call center need to know about you to make you feel valued and respect your preferences without violating deeper levels of trust?"
"I want to be really cautious as a clinician with information that patients have trusted me with," she continued. "At the same time, there's plenty of information, particularly around patient preferences, that might get captured in one piece of technology or in the electronic health record that patients expect us to know when they're touching our website or calling into a call center at a very foundational level."
Clinician burden, too, needs to be top-of-mind. Although patient experience insights are powerful for creating a personalized encounter, Boissy said systems need to be designed with the clinician user in mind. That doesn't mean simply paying lip service to providers; there needs to be a good-faith effort to consult and integrate clinician perspectives into these types of systems, or else they'll be useless.
"There have been efforts to pull insights into the EHR, and they have failed, and they have failed because we're pulling the wrong insight at the wrong time in the wrong workflow, and it doesn't change my practice," Boissy stated.
"If there's some evidence to support this, if this can make my life easier, if it will make me move faster and if it can make this interaction more meaningful, then we've got something to talk about. But if you're not nailing those items for clinicians, the traction is going to be pretty spotty."
Healthcare organizations can't afford for the traction to be spotty.
The healthcare market is competitive, and patient loyalty is on shaky ground these days as patients assess and reassess their experiences. If a patient has a bad experience, data shows they're willing to switch to another practice.
Hospitals and health systems need to leverage the patient feedback data that's at their fingertips to create the personalized experience that keeps consumers coming back when they fall ill.
"The fact that patients might not be remembered within a healthcare system hurts. It actually hurts," Boissy said. "I'm really excited about the idea that we can bring some humanity through digital tools into how we make people feel when we answer the phone, intercept them in a chatbot or deploy humans to really engage in a much more meaningful discussion."
"There's nothing worse than feeling invisible as a patient when you're navigating a serious illness," she concluded. "We have an opportunity to heal that and to bring some humanity to darker places where it isn't today."
Sara Heath has covered news related to patient engagement and health equity since 2015.
