Healthcare Organizations Learn Consumer-Friendly Lessons to Improve Patient Experiences

Traditional barriers to accessing care are eroding, and patients — especially younger ones — are demanding more convenience, better communication and improved access to services. Health systems that fail to adapt with new technologies and practices risk alienating patients, says Adam Cherrington, vice president of digital health and patient voice for KLAS.

“Healthcare must evolve because of one word: choices,” Cherrington says. “The long-standing oligarchies of healthcare are eroding quickly. Gen Xers and millennials have a lower tolerance for challenges with access and communication, and patient loyalty also decreases with younger generations. Healthcare must adapt to these changing patient expectations.”

Cherrington adds, “If we don’t put the patient at the center, we will continue to chase our tail as an industry.”

Froedtert ThedaCare Health Sees Early Results in New CX Approach

Previously, the Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network had most calls go directly to individual clinics, where staff had little visibility into the larger organization’s scheduling availability. As a result, a significant number of appointment slots are open on any given day due to cancellations, but some patients still couldn’t get a same-day appointment.

The organization centralized its contact center, sending about 200 service representatives and registered nurses home to field calls for the entire primary care organization. This not only met a demand by employees for remote work options, Basilotto says, but most importantly, expands access to physicians along with improved operating efficiency as the organization scales.

The health network adopted a number of new technologies as part of the overhaul, including Cisco Finesse for telephony, 2Ring for real-time call queue analytics, Webex for internal real-time chat, Avaamo for generative AI and Calabrio for workforce management and quality assurance software.

Patient satisfaction rates have remained high, even with the dramatic change to processes, and Basilotto says the organization is seeing improvements in overall average speed of call answer and abandonment rates.

READ MORE: Enhance the patient experience with contact center transformation.

On the day the new system launched, a patient experiencing stroke symptoms called in and was immediately connected to a triage nurse, who escalated the incident and sent an ambulance to bring the patient to the emergency room. “We have had patients talk to our new virtual assistant and say, ‘Wow, that was amazingly easily to change my appointment without even needing to speak to a human’ as this service is available 24/7/365 since going live,” he says.

Basilotto notes that improving the patient experience is not a one-time achievement but rather a never-ending process. He estimates that the Froedtert & MCW health network is still a year away from reaching maturity with its current model, and leaders are already looking at how to make further improvements, especially for patients seeking specialist care.

“The way I look at this, we just made a really big down payment toward the future,” Basilotto says.

Yale New Haven Health Transforms Operations

Yale New Haven Health, which operates five hospitals in Connecticut and Rhode Island, has an outpatient-focused effort called Access 365, aimed at decreasing wait times, personalizing treatments and improving efficiency. But Dr. Laura Pham, executive director of patient and physician access for the organization, notes that hospitals must also fine-tune their operations to improve the experience for inpatients.

“The recognition of the patient experience has gotten a lot of momentum over the past 10 years or so,” Pham says. “Before that, we were maybe not as sensitive to all the factors that contribute to the patient’s overall experience and health. That’s changed a lot, and certainly for the better.”

The organization’s Capacity Coordination Center, which colocates different operational departments to promote efficiency and improve the patient experience, moved to a larger space during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with teams in charge of bed management, room cleaning and transportation logistics. By turning rooms over more quickly, Pham says, hospitals can improve the experience of both patients who are being discharged and those in the emergency department waiting for a bed to open up.

“There are a lot of interdependencies,” Pham says. “Ten minutes here, 15 minutes there, an hour here — it all adds up, and it leads to the patient spending more time in the emergency department. We have a lot of initiatives in place to try to taper down those times and make it so that processes are done in parallel when possible.”

Data analytics tools are central to the health system’s logistics and patient experience efforts. Yale New Haven Health relies on Epic, its electronic health records system, for some analytics features and also leverages dashboards and portals from Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

One of the metrics the health system tracks is the portion of patients discharged before 11 a.m. each day. Over time, that number has risen from under 10% to more than 20%.

“Each department has its own metrics,” Pham says. “There’s a ton of data out there. It’s just a matter of making sure you don’t get lost in the noise. You need to know what you’re looking at so you can interpret it in a way that affects change.”

EXPLORE: Personalize customer experience in healthcare with data and AI.

Burrell Behavioral Health Reduces Wait Times for Patients

In addition to providing care to 60,000 clients across the Midwest, Burrell Behavioral Health operates a 988 crisis lifeline in southwest Missouri, fielding around 5,000 calls per year.

A few extra seconds of hold time could mean the difference between a patient abandoning the call or receiving the services they need, says Jarrett Newberry, Burrell’s system director for IT.

“When people are in that state of mind, you don’t know when you’re going to talk to them again or if they’re going to call back,” Newberry says. “It’s important that when they do get on the phone, they get somebody who understands, who can talk them through it, and that they don’t have to wait a long time to talk to someone.”

Burrell Behavioral Health uses Webex Contact Center to improve the patient experience, both for people calling the crisis line and for those who are simply trying to make appointments and refill their medications. The technology, Newberry says, allows patients to route themselves to the appropriate department through key presses rather than requiring them to wait in a queue to talk to an operator. As a result, patient wait times and abandoned call rates have fallen, and patient rescheduling rates have gone up.

“Before, we had people waiting on phone calls in one big queue,” Newberry says. “People might be waiting for up to a few minutes, and that’s time that is pivotal for what we need to do together to talk with that client. Now, they get directed to the right spot in a quick and efficient manner so we can serve them.”

Burrell’s crisis line has an average answer time of 8.75 seconds — about half of the statewide average of 15.75 seconds. The call answer rate for the crisis line is 95%, well above the state standard of 90%.

Next, the behavioral health system has plans to leverage artificial intelligence tools within Webex Contact Center that enable automated note taking, action-item follow-up, real-time translation and self-service.

“That’s going to streamline a lot of first-level questions — things like name and date of birth — and we’ll be able to automatically bring their prescriptions and appointment schedule up,” Newberry says. “It’s going to improve the patient experience even further.”