We had the opportunity to discuss the value impact of CX-focused tools in healthcare with Marcus Garcia, the Regional VP of healthcare at NICE. Marcus’ insights led us into the intricacies of patient-provider interactions and the need for AI-led automation that does not leave out human intuition and touch in NICE CXone.

Achieving PX is a Subtle Balancing Act!

Patient experience (PX) is a relatively new dimension in healthcare, driven by rising patient expectations. Marcus explains, “Patients now expect the same ease, convenience, consistency, and transparency they experience when booking a flight or ordering a product.” While digital interactions are becoming the norm in patient-provider communication, optimizing voice interactions remains critical.

“Patients also expect a seamless experience across digital, contact center, and mobile touchpoints, even though these systems are often managed separately,” Marcus adds. This complexity creates a need for a cohesive digital interaction strategy that balances automated and personal interactions to meet patient expectations.

“For tasks like booking, rescheduling, or canceling appointments, patients want fast and easy communication options,” Marcus continues. However, when the issue is more complex, patients often prefer speaking with a human agent to have a detailed conversation. “By automating repetitive tasks like appointment scheduling, contact centers can save valuable time, allowing agents to focus on meaningful, personalized interactions with patients,” he concludes.

CXone Mpower, NICE’s flagship platform, ensures all patient interactions, whether through voice, digital messaging, chatbots or live agents, are integrated in a single unified and scalable platform. When all interactions are handled from a single place, there is no need to manage multiple tools or platforms, there are no more silos between front and back office operations so customer queries move seamlessly across departments, and the system is continuously self-optimized – learning from past interactions to fine-tune future ones with maximum effectiveness and efficiency. CXone Mpower empowers healthcare organizations to deliver personalized self-service experiences, orchestrate human and AI agents in one place with bi-directional learning, and enhance the day-to-day performance of contact center.

CXone is built on the vision of helping hospitals and healthcare providers elevate patient centricity by transforming the way healthcare services are delivered.

In summary, CXone Mpower automates straightforward, repetitive patient interactions and enhances those requiring human involvement. This approach significantly improves patient engagement and experience, reduces friction, improves agent satisfaction, and ultimately leads to better patient outcomes.

Platforms Built for Positive Healthcare Outcomes

CXone is built on the vision of helping hospitals and healthcare providers elevate patient centricity by transforming the way healthcare services are delivered. By leveraging technologies and understanding the role of stakeholder challenges, NICE helps augment experiences that translate to positive healthcare outcomes through its platforms. Marcus helped us delve into each of these facets:

1. Self-Service Tools: In today’s digital-first world, consumers expect the convenience of managing various aspects of their lives through their personal devices. This includes making or rescheduling appointments and accessing test results at their convenience. The strategic use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly reduce administrative burdens and streamline processes both before and after care. This involves offering self-service options for routine tasks such as scheduling and managing appointments, requesting referrals, refilling prescriptions, reviewing bills, and making payments. Studies suggest that 30 to 50% of interactions involve simple queries about scheduling, rescheduling, or canceling appointments—tasks that can be easily automated. By deflecting these to self-service, healthcare providers can focus on more complex interactions without the need for additional staff.
2. Proactive Customer Care: NICE’s proactive outbound AI communication engages patients early, automating their journey while addressing potential issues before they escalate into larger problems. Rather than reacting to patient calls or emails, our tools take the initiative to start conversations, anticipate questions, resolve concerns, and ensure patients enjoy a smooth and seamless experience throughout their care journey.
3. Analytics and AI: Leveraging insights from phone calls and digital interactions across all touchpoints is invaluable for any organization. It enables providers to apply analytics to understand the entire patient journey and identify areas for improvement. Combining this with post-care survey data provides a clearer picture. A comprehensive understanding of the patient journey requires a unified solution to measure and analyze customer experience and feedback data. This holistic approach helps identify opportunities for automation and self-service, further enhancing the patient experience.
4. Augmenting the Agent Experience: The agent experience is central to the patient experience. As routine tasks become automated, the skillset required for agents will evolve, emphasizing human intuition and empathy. We provide tools to augment agents’ capabilities, including real-time guidance, insights, and instant access to up-to-date knowledge articles, ensuring they always provide accurate and effective answers. Our tools also automate interaction summaries, allowing key points to be documented quickly and accurately, enabling agents to move seamlessly to the next interaction. With these tools, agents can assist patients efficiently without placing them on hold or transferring them. These insights are continuously refined as the system learns from prior interactions, driving ongoing improvements in agent efficiency and effectiveness.

One Medical’s AI and Human-led Experiences

To explain how NICE’s CXone platform addresses the challenges faced by most primary care providers, Marcus recounted One Medical, which bought the CXone platform. The customer aimed to improve the workforce, quality, performance, and after-call feedback management.

CXone tracked their inbound call volumes and call intervals. Using an IVR system, they observed trends and challenges in patient interactions. By leveraging interaction analytics, they were able to unlock insights to make their contact center services available 24/7 with the current staff and to expand their business. One Medical plans to expand with CXone and enable NICE’s GenAI capabilities with Copilot, Autopilot, and AutoSummary, all under a unified platform.

HOMELINK’s Efficient, Error-free Patient and Provider Experience

“There’s also another case study with HOMELINK. They were exploring ways to improve efficiencies to serve their customers better. They adopted NICE’s AI-driven proactive customer engagement technology,” Marcus adds. It helped their patients stay on top of their health plans with a multi-channel outreach campaign including text, calls, and email between patients and care providers for seamless communication. Previously, it involved many manual touch points with a high scope for errors, leading to no-shows and failure to follow up on patient appointments.

NICE’s proactive journey automation allowed HOMELINK to listen, identify, and start conversations while understanding when to bring in a human agent and update the data/feedback back to the systems. This resulted in improvement in efficiency and productivity for their patient engagements. “Nearly 9 in 10 users reported being able to report their updates in real time. HOMELINK also recorded a 30% increase in productivity per hour per employee,” Marcus shares.

Paving the Way Forward with PX

NICE’s platforms’ success is attributable to underlying technologies such as cloud, advanced analytics, digital tools, and AI. “It is a balancing act. NICE’s cutting-edge tools are also well-aligned with providers’ needs and recent regulatory standards.”

Behind NICE’s new product launch and product enhancement lies the company’s R&D teams’ effort, where they invested nearly $346 million and hold more than 529 patents. It proves NICE’s strong foundation in IP for leading breakthroughs across AI-driven healthcare tools, patient-centric workflows, and secure and compliant digital engagements.

Marcus also spoke about NICE’s most awaited developments in 2025, which include the latest enhancements to the AI-driven features for proactive patient outreach with reminder notifications. NICE’s strategic partnership with EPIC helps deliver seamless workflows and a centralized view of patient interactions to providers. This will help achieve the company’s goal of pushing the boundaries of what healthcare organizations can do to enhance patient experiences and outcomes.

The post NICE: Putting Patients and Providers at the Heart of Care appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

The healthcare sector is transforming with technological advancements and shifting consumer demands towards patient-centric care. However, the prescription medication industry remains outdated, forcing patients to visit pharmacies in-person and face unexpected expenses, causing medication non-compliance and increased health costs.

Today, patients confront inconsistent medication prices and access, particularly in remote areas. Meanwhile, healthcare and pharmaceutical entities struggle with demand prediction, patient interaction, and maintaining care standards.

Implementing SaaS principles in healthcare can revamp patient experiences, offering predictable costs and regular support. This paves the way for a subscription to prescription approach.

Current Gaps in the Subscription to Prescription Model:

The Subscription to Prescription concept has the potential to transform healthcare delivery by improving access and lowering costs. However, several gaps such as service scope restrictions, unequal access, concerns about care quality, and lack of regulatory oversights, must be addressed.

The breadth of services provided by subscription-based healthcare services is frequently limited as they may not offer comprehensive coverage for specialty treatments, resulting in fragmented care. Individuals with lower socio-economic status may struggle to pay subscription costs, resulting in inequities in access to care.

In subscription-based healthcare models, the emphasis on efficiency may jeopardize the quality of service provided. The rapid expansion of subscription-based healthcare services has surpassed governmental control, creating a regulatory void.

In the dynamic world of SaaS, businesses that thrive are those placing customers at the heart of their strategies.

Addressing identified gaps:

The Subscription to Prescription implementation in healthcare is marred by significant shortcomings. Strategic interventions must be designed to address these gaps.

• Contracts with specialized providers or hospitals to address the limited area of services.
• Offering tiered subscription models depending on economic levels and subsidized programs for medically underserved people.
• Concerns about the quality of care can be alleviated by implementing robust telehealth platforms that enable in-depth patient-provider interactions.
• Regular audits and compliance evaluations help guarantee that defined rules are followed, protecting the interests of patients.
• Using blockchain for patient data, medication tracking, and secure communication can increase patient-provider confidence while addressing regulatory issues.
• By incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into subscription models, providers can deliver accurate prescriptions and detect potential health risks before they become serious.

The Subscription to Prescription model has the power to transform the way healthcare is provided, but its application needs to be governed by strict ethical standards and regulations.

Ethical Considerations:

• Equity and Access: Requirements for affordable healthcare and fair access should be mandated.
• Conflict of Interest: Control financial incentives for healthcare professionals to make sure patient welfare is prioritized in medical decisions.
• Privacy and Data Security: To protect patient information and uphold confidence, robust data protection laws must be enforced.

Regulatory Framework:

• Transparency and Disclosure: Require incentives and transparent financial disclosure when making healthcare decisions.
• Enforce affordability restrictions and accessibility specifications.
• Establish guidelines and control systems for service providers.

The Subscription to Prescription model’s advantages and ethical problems must be balanced, and a clear regulatory framework is necessary to make sure that patients’ needs continue to come first in healthcare innovation.

Benefits:

The customer-centric subscription to prescription model holds many benefits for companies, patients and the government.

Companies:

• Predictability for Companies: Subscription models for prescription offer companies a predictable revenue stream, allowing for more accurate financial planning and forecasting.
• Leveraging Technology: Advanced data analytics can provide insights into patient health trends, helping companies refine their services and offer proactive care solutions.
• Targeted Research and Development: Access to aggregated health data from subscribed patients with due regard for privacy can guide pharmaceutical companies in identifying health issues and aligning their R&D efforts.
• Bundle Offerings: Patients with chronic conditions might receive a package that includes various medications and supplements they need on a routine basis.

Patients:

• Access in Rural Regions: For those in remote areas where pharmacies or clinics might be sparse, virtual consultations, routine health monitoring, and mail-order prescription services can bridge the accessibility gap.
• Predictability for Patients: Patients can budget for their healthcare costs more effectively with a set subscription fee, providing peace of mind.
• Access to New Treatments and Therapies: Subscribed patients might get early access to new treatments, medications, or therapeutic methods.
• Holistic Health Approach: Subscription models may encompass wellness programs, nutrition guidance, adherence reminders, dosage tracking apps and mental health support in addition to traditional medical care.

Government:

• Fewer Medicines Will Expire: It can enable a more accurate prediction of required stock based on the subscribed user base, reducing wastage.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Aggregated health data from these subscription services can help identify health trends, potential outbreaks, or underserved areas.
• Economic Growth: Encouraging innovation in the healthcare sector can lead to increased startups and investments, and boost the economy.
• Improved Healthcare Accessibility and Equity: By supporting and integrating tiered subscription models, especially in underserved areas, governments can ensure that citizens have access to quality healthcare services.
• Enhanced National Health Security: In times of health crises, having a system where a large segment of the population is consistently engaged with health providers can help roll out rapid response strategies.

Recommendations:

In the dynamic world of SaaS, businesses that thrive are those placing customers at the heart of their strategies. This devotion to customer-centricity offers invaluable lessons for healthcare as it explores the potential to improve the subscription to prescription model.

• Transparent Pricing: Transparent prescription subscription pricing can alleviate one of the major pain points patients face: unpredictable medical bills.

• Prioritizing User Experience (UX): User-friendly UX can help elderly and differently-abled patients be and feel more independent. A focus on enhancing this experience can lead to higher patient satisfaction and retention.

• Proactive and Digital Customer Support: Proactive and personalized patient care, such as reminders for medication, or even health tips from specialized doctors, can make patients feel valued and taken care of.

The post Subscription to Prescription: Transforming the Patient Experience appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

Hospital margins are thin if any at all. After this last year with the ongoing pandemic, hospitals and health systems have seen an erosion in their operating margins. Unfortunately, outpatient volumes have fallen short due to patients delaying care or avoiding non-emergent care. Expenses are not the same. Staffing shortages and supply chain challenges are real, and it has created the perfect storm for healthcare providers across the nation.  

Without an increase in volumes, health systems look to their revenue cycle department for improvements in net patient care revenue on existing business and volumes. Where are we missing the mark the most in healthcare? In the mid-revenue cycle. All of us in healthcare, and yes, that includes the payers, are responsible for reducing the cost of healthcare. Yet, we seem to have to keep increasing our costs to maneuver the differing payer requirements, ongoing and unnecessary denials, and complexity in getting services authorized and ultimately paid. This challenge is complex and not easily solvable due to the various players and the current environment of healthcare administration. This will likely take legislation, much like the pricing transparency requirements, to solve, as payers are unwilling to reduce the administrative burden placed on health systems to ensure payment for medically necessary services rendered to their members.

The next challenge and area of opportunity is in addressing and improving the patient’s financial experience and solving healthcare affordability. Many improvements have been made due to legislation such as No Surprise Billing, but we are not there yet. Regulatory requirements attempt to address patient pricing requires both payers and providers to post “rates”. However, most patients do not understand healthcare finance well enough to wade through all the data posted and ultimately understand how much an insured patient will owe for their visit. Not only do patients want to know how much they will owe, but they also want patient-friendly solutions that don’t end up in aggressive collection tactics. Estimates are important. Worse than not providing an estimate to a patient is providing one that is not accurate and then billing the balance to the patient. However, to get an accurate patient estimate, you must know exactly what will be performed during the visit. Outside of an office visit, orders are not always accurate or complete to get the estimate right. Many times, treatment decisions are made the same day as the office visit. Providers are not aware of the front-end financial piece that goes along with those decisions, especially in large, complex, integrated delivery systems.

By using a patient financing vendor, healthcare providers can offer their patients flexible payment plans that can be created by scanning a QR code from their statement, a text link (based on a balance file), or a link in MyChart.

One investment that organizations should make is in improving the patient’s financial experience. Providers should offer more payment flexibility for the insured, the under-insured, and uninsured patients. Patients should be able to create easy, flexible, non-interest-bearing payment plans and get the care they need when they need it. Payment plans are difficult to manage internally. Utilizing products outside of the host system for optimization often offers more functionality and flexibility. By using a patient financing vendor, healthcare providers can offer their patients flexible payment plans that can be created by scanning a QR code from their statement, a text link (based on a balance file), or a link in MyChart. This allows the patient to create flexible, interest-free payment plans based on their terms with ease, and even from their smartphone. The patient can pick their payment and the term length of their payment plan; they can add new balances and even skip a payment if needed. The flexibility and self-service option are a value add for all patients and not something that has been easily managed in host patient accounting systems. Once a payment plan is created and the first payment is made, the organization is paid the entire balance minus a fee. Cash comes in faster and no need to send to an early-out vendor or eventually to bad debt. Cash acceleration and reduced bad debt are a win for any organization. There is also the ability to issue a “credit card” specific to your organization that a patient can use for larger balances due at the time of service. This will come in handy for patients seeking non-covered services or outpatient procedures that require payment of a higher deductible and/or co-insurance. If the card is used, the organization gets paid up-front, and the vendor manages the zero-interest payment plan in a consumer-friendly manner. Whichever way a patient decides to create their payment plan, there are no additional fees or interest for the patient and it can all be completed easily from a mobile phone.

This is a big step in the journey to improve the patient’s financial experience, one of the biggest organizational challenges for many health systems across the nation. Patients want to understand what they will owe prior to scheduling service and they want flexibility in paying those balances. Considering the current state that both patients and providers are in, this is one of the best solutions that addresses pain points for both and increases cash for the organization.

There are many opportunities and options to ensure that your organization is capturing every dollar and getting reimbursement for those services, but the patient should always come first. As such, projects that address the patient’s financial experience should be prioritized. A patient financing program will also positively impact an organization’s competitive position in the market.

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I have been in healthcare IT for over half of my almost 30 years in IT. Healthcare definitely has its uniqueness compared to other industries; however, it is not unique in the fact that everything can be broken down into three key areas: people, process and technology. Cybersecurity will always be a moving target for organizations, especially healthcare. I believe that the most important thing within any organization is building an IT security and awareness culture. I have stated throughout my career that security is not something that you can simply turn on/off—it needs to be a part of every individual and organization’s DNA.

The overall objectives in building an IT security and awareness culture in healthcare comes down to three things:

1. Protecting patient, company and employee data
2. Continual risk mitigation
3. Regulatory compliance

Threats

Threats come from all sorts of directions, including everything from foreign countries, organized crime, employees, vendors, terrorists, etc. The majority of threats are primarily about financial gain or causing disruption or both. The unfortunate thing is that most threats are initiated through employees (people) who inadvertently open or click on something they shouldn’t have. People are your biggest weakness within any organization.

Technology

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on any specific IT security technology. It is critical that your organization is continually evaluating and implementing a solid IT Security Technology Stack. I believe it starts with developing a Security Scorecard against current IT security best practices. You can use the Scorecard to help build your plan of attack or strategy for continued risk mitigation. The Scorecard would include everything from Endpoint Protection and Multifactor Authentication (MFA), to Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and IT Security Awareness Training. There will always be new vulnerabilities that can be exploited accompanied by new security software that provides various protection. From my experience, it has always been about layering and finding the balance of what is “good enough” without breaking the bank. Technology is critical in taking decision points out of individuals’ hands. Simply put, you need a solid IT Security Technology Stack that attempts to provide visibility or prevent the bad things from ever happening; and if something does bad happen, allows you to minimize the damage and ultimately recover from an incident.

In healthcare, there is a lot of regulatory compliance, which does provide organizations the needed push to implement formal processes and procedures when it comes to protecting things such as PHI/PII.

Process & People

Technology is accessible compared to the process and people aspect of building an IT security awareness culture. As mentioned in the beginning, security needs to be a part of your organization’s DNA. What does that mean? It means that it has to become automatic or baked in. You want people to have an awareness and ask questions. If they are unsure of something, they need to err on the side of caution. It is important that an organization create an ongoing IT Security and Awareness Program. This includes not only providing the initial tools and knowledge when employees start working for your organization, but over the entire relationship. This should again be a layered approach, i.e., security awareness emails and training videos, etc. The frequency can vary, but one approach I have seen work is having things that are weekly, monthly and annually. You need the content to be meaningful and not just noise that individuals gloss over or ignore. Leadership needs to champion the importance of IT security to all levels of the organization—no one is above or exempt from learning. Many security incidents occur because people are moving too fast. This can be as simple as someone reviewing or opening an email message to a system administrator, forgetting to patch or make the needed security configurations when implementing changes into production. I use this saying: “You need to slowdown to move fast.” I know that sounds crazy, but it’s really about making sure that we are all being observant and making thoughtful choices and decisions no matter what we are working on.

Some key processes an organization needs to have in place to consider bricks and mortar-type things, include assuring all systems are being patched/updated, assuring all systems have end-point protection and are being updated, assuring backups are being completed and tested, and enabling Multifactor Authentication (MFA). A lot of these will be identified on your IT Security Scorecard mentioned previously. In my opinion, if you are not doing the basics, then you are setting yourself up for failure.

In healthcare, there is a lot of regulatory compliance, which does provide organizations the needed push to implement formal processes and procedures when it comes to protecting things such as PHI/PII. It’s important to find a healthy balance between regulatory requirements and operating efficiencies. Sometimes the more you over-engineer something, the more risks are introduced. Again, you need to educate individuals that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something.

It is important as part of the process to create an environment that is more educational than punishment. There is a difference between someone making a mistake and being reckless. Yes, if there is a trend of poor judgment, it needs to be addressed. Building this type of culture increases individuals to ask more questions around security/risk without fear of embarrassment or retribution.

There is no perfect or one-size-fits-all when building an IT security and awareness culture within your organization. The important thing to remember is it’s something that does require ongoing focus and dedication from everyone.

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At NYU Langone Health, we perform over 100,000 elective surgeries annually across our system. Nationwide, approximately 1 million total joint replacements (TJR), 5,000 of which we perform, are conducted annually. While patients today are spending significantly less time in the hospital after TJR surgery to recover, they also have less direct contact and instruction from their care teams. Operating surgeons and care teams also face the challenge of managing patients when a significant portion of patient instruction, evaluation and rehabilitation are delivered by health professionals often not associated with the surgeon or hospital where the procedures take place (i.e., home care). Because of this, increased communication, coordination and engagement are needed throughout the patient’s orthopedic care journey.

In NYU Langone’s IT department, our goal is to be the global leader in the digital transformation of care delivery, research, and medical education driven by innovation and integration of information and technology. With this in mind, we knew that we needed to utilize our strong foundation of digital tools to address the challenges our orthopedic patients and surgeons were facing, decrease the cost, and utilize the time that patients and caregivers spend undergoing TJR more efficiently and effectively.

Unfortunately, we discovered that we were only accomplishing part of that goal for our orthopedic patients. While they were receiving comprehensive education and instruction ahead of their surgery, they had limited touchpoints throughout the rest of their time with us. We also discovered that post-surgical instructions varied among different doctors in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, resulting in inconsistent experiences.

To address with a patient-centric approach, our IT team partnered closely with our Orthopedics, Operations, and Communications teams to develop an integrated and holistic approach to our patients’ procedural experience. Our first focus was standardizing the pre-surgery education process, to ensure all orthopedic patients received adequate preparation and instruction for their surgeries. Rather than simply translating our surgeons’ written prep instructions into a digital format, we used our digital capabilities to rework the content in a way that best resonated with patients. We developed a care plan for total joint replacement that included pre-surgery content and videos on topics like blood clot prevention, the role of physical rehabilitation, and fasting protocols. This content was developed with subject matter experts and physician leadership in our Department of Orthopedic Surgery, to increase touchpoints and engagement before surgery.

When developing digital programs, we do not improve one at the expense of the other, but rather, we design both to complement each other.

Videos introduced patients to their surgeon to help ensure they felt supported and to reinforce the importance of adhering to their care plan. Of note is that we developed a thoughtful communications strategy to ensure that patients were receiving these materials throughout the entire care journey, and at the appropriate times, to avoid information overload prior to surgery. These videos were delivered to patients through the NYU Langone Health app and they were asked to watch them as part of their care plan. Because of our ‘One Patient, One Chart’ principle, all providers across our system, from care coordinators to nurses, physician assistants, and the surgeons themselves, could see what materials were assigned and completed by their patients.

While we aimed to improve the surgical experience for patients, we also had to ensure that our clinicians’ experience wasn’t compromised. When developing digital programs, we do not improve one at the expense of the other, but rather, we design both to complement each other. To do this, we created department-specific order-sets to ensure that all clinicians within the Department of Orthopedic Surgery were following the same surgical checklist with all patients and providing a consistent experience across the system. We also transformed the pre-admission testing (PAT) process by standardizing the pre-surgical requirements and utilizing virtual visits for PAT, to save both patients’ and clinicians’ time during the pre-procedure process.

Once the patient’s surgery was completed, providing follow-up education and monitoring clinical milestones were critically important to a successful recovery. We created a series of post-surgery content, which included a six-week home exercise protocol with video and written instructions. We also delivered recurring symptom management questionnaires to assess bowel function in the first few days after surgery, monitor the incision site, and track pain scores over time.

The results of the Procedural Patient Experience implementation spoke for themselves. Among our Orthopedic Surgery patients, 75% reported that they were extremely satisfied with the educational videos provided to them through the NYU Langone Health app. 85% of those same patients also reported feeling moderately or extremely prepared for their surgeries because of the videos. All patients surveyed said that the NYU Langone Health app helped them feel more connected to their care team.

By listening to our patients and understanding their needs throughout the experience, we were able to use technology to improve their quality of care, as well as their digital journey throughout our organization. Collaboration with the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and its leadership was critical to the success of our program, and we could not have achieved what we did without their support. We have already seen the benefits that the Patient Procedural Experience has had on our orthopedic patients and we plan on continuing to roll it out department-wide to create a more seamless surgical experience for all patients and clinicians.

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Some years ago, I took a position as service excellence department leader at a large community hospital struggling with its patient experience scores. The leadership team had recently purchased an electronic rounding tool for the nurses to capture patient feedback on hospital-issued iPads. I’d not previously used anything but paper and pencil, so I had to quickly get up to speed on how it worked and how we were to use it before we went live.

Patient rounds were being designed to capture complaints and concerns, track the actions we were taking to remedy them, and include a focused set of yes/no questions on our lowest-scoring areas on the patient experience survey. By asking patients if it was quiet at night, if their doctor explained things in a way, they could understand, or if their nurse had been in every hour to check on them, we could get a better handle on where we needed to focus our attention. We were sure that a precise focus and streamlined issue resolution would surely lead to better scores.

The thought of capturing these issues and generating reports electronically instead of manually was incredibly appealing. Results could easily be tracked, the progress of issue resolution could be color-coded red, yellow, or green, and we could compare the real-time feedback with our survey scores. We were ready to dive in.

When it came time to introduce the tool to the staff, we gave out a bunch of iPads, showed the bedside nurses where to click and how to escalate an issue to leadership, and expected them to love it as much as we did. We imagined our scores would soar.

They didn’t. Patient experience decreased and staff morale plummeted.

Rather than scrap the whole project, we wanted to find out where we went wrong. Here’s what we learned before we went back and relaunched:

Always involve the end-user in the planning process.

We had so much faith in this company’s product. We didn’t think to ask the bedside nurses what ideas they had for improvement or a smooth implementation. We assumed that since the company had such impressive client testimonials and results with this tool, they’d thought of everything and our team would love it just as it was. We were wrong.

Allow the end-user to use their critical thinking skills.

When you give professionals a script to follow with no latitude to change it to suit the unique circumstances of the individual patient, you create resentment in the staff and mistrust in the patient. Patients want genuine, sincere interaction with a person, not simply to answer a set of questions that they don’t feel relevant to them. It defeats the whole purpose of improving the patient experience if they think everyone is merely reciting what they’ve been told to say. Trust your staff to capture the intent behind the question and ask it in a way that feels natural.

Offer an abundance of training opportunities and practice before you go live.

The time to learn is not when you’re in the middle of patient care. Users should feel very comfortable with the new tool, know some initial troubleshooting, and who to call for help. By doing some practice runs ahead of time, you increase the chances of a smooth implementation and reduce the anxiety many of them will feel while using a new tool.

If there’s a new piece of technology, explain it to the patients.

Patients lying in a hospital bed are afraid. They’re afraid of dying, of getting an infection, of getting the wrong medication, of being ignored; they’re even afraid of a lot of the equipment. If we’re going to be bringing in a shiny new object, even as something as common as an iPad, we must tell the patients what it is and why we’re using it. They need to know we’re not ignoring them. We may be looking down and typing, but it’s because we’re capturing what they’re telling us so we can make things better for them.

Always, always explain the why behind the what to the staff.

This might be the most important one. It’s not enough to have a cool new shiny thing. Unless the staff understands why they’re being asked to change the way they do things, they’re not going to be excited about changing. Change is hard, but when they know why it’s important and what we hope to gain by making the change, they’ll be much more likely to get behind it.

When introducing any new technology to medical professionals, it’s easy to forget some or all of these steps. We, as executives, can often get so excited about the new thing, we forget to slow down and lay the crucial groundwork that’s essential for a successful launch. Patients should be at the center of the why with staff at the center of the how.

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Over seven years ago, a group of leaders at Penn Medicine met to discuss building  a new patient pavilion on our healthcare campus in West Philadelphia. The vision was both innovative and comprehensive, with an emphasis on creating  a hospital of the future by modernizing the patient stay and their experience with the healthcare services.. The idea revolved around designing a new digital patient care facility to change the way care i delivered, and  included a robust technology plan to facilitate this effort. The sheer energy around the initiative was palpable. It was exciting to think about especially because our health system began with constructing the nation’s first hospital and first medical school. So this new facility would be an extension of this rich history and serve the community for generations to come.

Fast forward to today – the building is now less than 200 days from being patient ready. The work done over the last several years is nothing less than impressive. The collaboration of the team working together from design and concept to construction and outfitting this 1.5 million square foot building is world-class. This building will serve as the centerpiece of the West Philadelphia campus, integrating both inpatient care and advanced outpatient care.

As one can imagine, the technology footprint in a building of this scale is significant. The building is designed to provide a seamless digital experience for the patient and their families as well as the care providers. This includes comprehensive wifi coverage – both a guest wifi network for patient families and guests as well as secure wifi for patient care activities. Comprehensive wireless capability for cell phone coverage is included from all major carriers throughout the pavilion. An intelligent self-balancing antenna system carries traffic for cellular, private radio, and legacy paging devices across a single 5G capable infrastructure for future-proofing. Overhead paging and traditional auditory alerts are minimized by aggregating notifications from nurse calls, physiologic monitoring, and rapid response requests and touting them to an integrated smartphone application. This has been architected to minimize “alert fatigue” among the clinical staff. 

The building isdesigned with full resilience around all services, including critical IT connectivity requirements. End-user devices as well as individual patient rooms and operating rooms, are connected to one of two parallel network infrastructures by predetermined and well-documented criteria so that the impact of any outage, planned or unplanned, is clearly defined and minimized.  Extra network cabling capacity is built into every patient room and operating room so that new technologies within an anticipated six-year window will not require clinical or business operation impact to accommodate. Furthermore, modular patient room cabling standardizes the placement and jack numbering and documentation of every device, reducing any future troubleshooting.

The patient room is designed around patient engagement and digital capabilities to enhance their stay at Penn Medicine. In addition to the medical technology that outfits the over 500 single-occupancy patient rooms, it all starts with what we call the patient footwall. The footwall is a 75-inch television that is integrated as the centerpiece of  the room to make it easier for the patient, their family and visitors to interact with the hospital and the patient care team.

This large screen television can be used for entertainment, with a full array of channels and on-demand content for the patients and visitors. The large screen television is also fully integrated with Penn Medicine’s electronic medical record system to enable its use for patient care purposes, eliminating dry-erase boards, door flags, and other manually updated means of communication that easily become outdated. The television is also capable of delivering patient education content and helping to identify the patient care team as well as local weather and other essential information.

The patient room technology is further integrated to connect right quthin reach of the patient’s fingertips. . The patient can control the room itself from the bedside, either through a pillow speaker remote control or via a tablet device. These devices can be used to change the temperature, raise and lower the light and/or shades, and order food from the cafeteria menu. These remotes can also be used to communicate with the patient care team as well as fully control the footwall television. Each room is equipped with specialty glass that the patient or family member can engage from within the room to provide privacy. Additionally, outside of the patient room, a display is installed for additional patient care purposes to indicate if the patient is a fall risk or designate if they require isolation.

The technology also allows the patient to identify staff members as they enter the room, which is a big patient satisfier to improve their experience significantly. Some “rollback” technologies are integrated that will come into play when patients leave their room or are discharged. These controls are environmentally friendly and result in energy savings with both lighting and air handling.

One common theme with this new pavilion and the campus itself is connectivity. The need to have a patient care facility like this with advanced connectivity is evident. However, when you think about extending that connectivity beyond just IT and creating a seamless patient experience across the campus with transitions of care, you are now talking about the game-changing improvements in patient engagement and patient care.

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In 2019, I had just boarded a flight back from a vacation with my wife when we received one of those dreaded phone calls that so many of us worry about. My older sister had suffered a severe seizure and, while stable, would be having surgery in the coming days. When we landed, my wife and I visited my sister in the hospital, the first of several hospitals where we would visit her over the coming months.

In one of her rooms, I noticed an iPad hanging on the wall in a mounted holder, collecting dust. When I asked the nurse what it was for, I was told that it was for patients to use to access their records, but few were taking advantage of it. During my sister’s hospital stay, she neither picked it up, nor did any of her visitors.

When we think about integrating technology to improve the patient experience, it is essential to realize that while the opportunities are endless, it does not mean all should be pursued. Generally speaking, patient experience is notoriously difficult to improve because it is dependent on an organization’s culture. Technology can be an important catalyst for change, a critical component to ensuring a consistent patient journey, and a vital means to access care. At the same time, not all technology should necessarily be implemented. Tech still cannot substitute for essential human-to-human connections that are unique to the missions of healthcare organizations.

Thus far in Adventist HealthCare’s patient experience journey, we are using tools to better understand our patients, including psychographic factors like emotions, throughout their patient journeys. To accomplish this goal, we are utilizing AI, natural language processing, and big data.

Early on, we identified that we were over-reliant on the data from the CMS mandated HCAHPS survey. The HCAHPS survey is long, specific, and can only collect data either by phone or by traditional mail. While the HCAPHS data offers valuable insights, we knew we needed to expand our listening methods to learn more about patient preferences and what aspects of care are most important to their overall care rating.

As a supplement to the HCAHPS survey, we are the first healthcare company in the US to engage with a company called Worthix. Worthix utilizes AI and natural language processing to explore a patient’s open-text feedback and analyze the data in aggregate. We are currently sending Worthix “dialogues” to patients who receive inpatient care but are not selected in the sample to obtain the HCAHPS survey.

As we expanded beyond the HCAHPS survey, we realized we had several different data components that were not connected. We felt like we needed to find a way to collect and then analyze all our patient listening methods. We discovered that we had nearly ten sources of data where we get direct regular patient feedback, including the HCAHPS survey, Worthix dialogues, online reviews, and others. We are using a Press Ganey product called NarrativeDX, where we have connected direct feeds of unedited patient comments from these sources. NarrativeDX analyzes all the patient comments and groups them into insights that match the HCAHPS survey, which we use as outcome measures.

Once the data is collected and analyzed, visualization makes it simple and actionable. To add more impact, both NarrativeDX and Worthix allow us to share data down to the individual unit level to make it actionable for clinicians. We have also used data visualization and automation to create a scorecard and a dashboard, breaking data down to each individual’s clinical unit, department, or location.

This data enables us to solve existing problems and be intentional about designing the patient journey in any unit or specialty based on the preferences of previous and potential patients. The data allows teams to anticipate patient needs better and to plan for the future.

The challenges to implementing our data strategy have centered on survey fatigue from patients leading to low response rates. We have shortened our surveys where possible, made them accessible by text message, and arranged our system so that no patient receives more than one survey type from us. Additionally, pulling fragmented systems together for collecting patient feedback together has been challenging. This problem is a hallmark of healthcare systems and one that is ripe for an artificial intelligence solution.

Our next step in our patient experience technology journey is to find solutions that make accessing, receiving, and paying for care simpler and more reliable for our patients. From there, many of the opportunities we have identified are in care post-discharge.

One of the boundaries that we have set in using technology to improve patient experience is preserving the parts of the journey that require human compassion. There are also some areas where automation is possible but would detract from the human-to-human parts of the patient experience. For example, the technology to automate patient transport using autopilot technology from cars is here. But the transitions in care involving transportation can be especially stressful for a patient. Transporting patients to surgery or a test is often where conversations occur, during which patients discuss their emotions and are reassured or calmed down. I also do not foresee technology being used to deliver news like a cancer diagnosis. Implementing technology must be respectful of these important moments where our system lives out on our mission to, “Extend God’s care through the ministry of physical, mental, and spiritual healing.”

Technologies like AI with real-time response, natural language processing, and big data can help us know and remember our patients in ways that wouldn’t be possible without these tools, helping to customize a patient’s care. As more healthcare systems focus on patient experience, the temptation is to over-tech for standardization and consistency. Still, the future successful hospitals will know how to blend groundbreaking new tools with the human connection required in delivering compassionate, empathetic care.

When we analyze our comments, the most detailed and impactful we find are about how our team members treat our patients. Technology can be used to create intimacy with the patient so long as it is deployed next to a people-driven system for delivering consistently empathic and compassionate care.

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