Authenticx Chief Evangelist, Leslie Pagel, and Rachelle Tardy, Director of Clinical Outcomes & Care Integration for Eskenazi Health recently joined host Kathleen Wessel on the AHA Associates Bringing Value Podcast.
Their discussion centered on building a superior patient experience by starting with the hospital workforce. Providing employees with the needed tools, training, and resources can have an enormous impact. This podcast explains the power of listening to employee and patient voices and how these insights can be leveraged for enhancing the patient experience strategy.
Listen to the podcast here and view highlights from the discussion below.
The Patient Experience Challenge in Today’s Environment
There can be confusion around which aspect of the patient’s journey is causing disruption due to various facets at play: care, various touchpoints, perceptions, and expectations. If we consider the patient experience as the sum of all interactions and we look at it from a strategic perspective, action remains a top-of-mind challenge.
This is a challenge because healthcare organizations are using methods, such as survey data and operational data to drive their experience strategy. While survey data sources are effective at pointing the businesses in the right direction, these sources lack the context and clarity that business leaders need to prioritize where focus is needed to meet the changing demands of a patient base and ways to best support employees.
Eskenazi recognized this missing piece and has done tremendous work to activate their customer interactions.
The Power of Activating Customer Voices
By using the call center as a place where the patient journey starts, Eskenazi acted to truly understand what patients were experiencing and needing, particularly when facing a rising volume of calls – patients had a ton of questions, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the help of Authenticx, Eskenazi Health found things in listening they would not have found otherwise. By utilizing their contact center as a data source, their teams were able to assess customer needs as well as barriers to care that were impacting the community they serve. These insights brought more depth and understanding, which informed how to best serve teams and implement new processes that enabled the organization to holistically serve their patients and empower their employees.
“Listening to these conversations has really opened new channels of insights for our team, as I’ve shared, we have had the ability to take action and empower and equip employees so that they actually have the needed resources and tools to really serve our patient population. This has provided opportunities to enact change which is so very exciting in healthcare.”
Rachelle Tardy, Director of Clinical Outcomes & Care Integration for Eskenazi Health
Some examples shared by Rachelle from her role at Eskenazi in Indianapolis included:
- Creating a plan to optimize their IVR process to help patients get to the right resource at the right time. There was a recognition that employees didn’t have all of the resources needed to fully answer patient questions, and training was adjusted to empower them.
- Analyzing barriers that impacted the ability for patients to make their appointments. This provided an opportunity to pinpoint the intersection between personal livelihood and the clinical service and care to better understand social factors impacting their community.
- Empowering employees to share information with Social Services to help better serve their population holistically.
Why These Conversations Matter
A core component in building a superior patient experience program is your employees. How your contact center agents, nurses, and staff address patients can separate average experiences from exceptional ones.
Service and empathetic problem-solving play a large role in brand perception and have wide-reaching insights on the organization as a whole. Providing employees with tools, training, and resources that best equip scenarios they may face can have an enormous impact. Every day, health systems engage and interact with patients, so it’s critical those voices have a presence and are amplified to support and fulfill a health system’s purpose and mission. This drives positive outcomes for both patient and employee experiences.
“The power in listening is that it is a renewable source that is not depleted when used. The interactions we have with our patients are infinite. No one interaction or experience is identical to another. So when we harness these insights and put them to use for the organization we are able to drive positive outcomes for our patients, to drive positive experiences for our patients, and to drive improvements in the workforce.”
Leslie Pagel, Chief Evangelist
About Eskenazi Health
For over 160 years, Eskenazi Health has offered high-quality, cost-effective and patient-focused health care to the residents of Marion County and Central Indiana. As one of America’s largest essential health care systems, Eskenazi Health provides treatment and services through more than 1 million outpatient visits each year.
About AHA Associates Bringing Value Podcast Series
In each episode, the American Hospital Association is joined by AHA Associate Program participants who connect members with best-in-class strategies and solutions that can turn challenges into opportunities—from the impact of market and digital disruption to new technologies that can effectively improve outcomes while cutting costs.
About Authenticx
Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes.
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