The US healthcare system can be a complex and overwhelming experience for many patients. They are required to interact with multiple parties such as healthcare providers, insurance companies, and pharmacies, which can often lead to frustrating loops of obstacles that make them feel ‘stuck.’ With numerous handoffs and complicated processes, there are more opportunities for people to fall through the cracks, generating a negative patient experience and creating high-risk consequences to your patients’ health – from missed appointments and refill issues to life-threatening medical emergencies.
The Eddy Effect is a proprietary AI model that is being seen as a key metric in the healthcare industry that allows organizations to better understand and monitor their patients’ experiences. By analyzing conversational data, companies can pinpoint exactly when and how customers are getting stuck in the journey, helping them to identify and address pain points more effectively.
Behind the Value of the Eddy Effect™
The patient experience is made up of four (4) essential Eddy Effect components: feeling, seeking understanding, continued confusion, and repeating the process. Often, even after speaking with specialists or staff, patients are still left with confusion and no clear understanding of why the problem occurred or what to do next.
The economic value of knowing the Eddy Effect cannot be overstated. On average, calls that include an Eddy last nearly 15 minutes and are 4.5 minutes longer than calls without an Eddy. This additional time can have a significant impact on patient satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, delays in preventable care are also reduced by the Eddy Effect, making it even more crucial for businesses that deal with healthcare. By monitoring trends over time, businesses can identify areas where the patient journey can be improved and eliminate pain points that can lead to patient churn.
By measuring patient effort against actionable ROI tactics, the Eddy Effect helps businesses establish benchmarks that can inform the best ways to improve the patient journey and eliminate current sources of friction. The Eddy Effect provides a reliable metric that encompasses the true feelings, thoughts, and actions of patients. By following four (4) practices, you can stay ahead of the curve and exceed patient expectations:
- Utilize the Eddy Effect as a ‘North Star Metric’ to set long-term goals focused on reducing customer barriers and closing frustrating obstacles
- Conduct deep dives to identify root causes behind the Eddy Effect and the impact it has on customers and the business
- Drive proactive actions and strategic initiatives based on root cause analysis, rather than reacting to problems as they arise
- Monitor progress with a single dashboard to ensure KPIs are being met and progress is goal-focused
Putting the Eddy Effect™ Scorecard to Practice
To effectively address the Eddy Effect, it’s important to understand the impact it has on both your patients and your business. Once you understand this, you can prioritize where to start and create a plan of action to tackle the issue for solutions.
When looking to address friction in your business, it can be helpful to understand the impact of each one individually. To do this, you may find it useful to utilize a scorecard to measure the severity of each obstacle. By identifying and prioritizing Eddies in this way, you can focus your efforts on the ones that represent the greatest threat to your business. When ranking the impact of each Eddy, you can assign a score of 1 to represent a lower impact up to a score of 3 to represent a higher impact. This approach can help you to address these obstacles efficiently and productively, while also improving the overall customer experience – the higher the score, the more severe.
Here is a summarized example of an accessed instance of the Eddy Effect™:
Your contact center is getting a flood of patient complaints, and new and repeat calls. As the insurance operations leader managing the contact center, you use Authenticx to investigate and analyze what patients are calling about, how agents are responding to it, why they keep calling, and call metrics to see where performance can be improved.
After using Authenticx to listen at scale and collect data, you find out customers are calling overwhelmingly about issues with copay cards. While agents are following the call guide and referring patients to existing resources to find a resolution to their copay cards not working, you find out that these resources are not up-to-date and don’t address the actual issue of the complaints. These repeat calls affect agents working with limited resources and, in turn, increase call length, patient sentiment, resolution rates, and how agents follow the given call guide and training you rolled out last quarter. You may score the Eddy Effect for this obstacle like this:
Issue: Patient copay cards are not working as expected:
- Customer Satisfaction: 3
- Percentage of Customer Calls: 3
- Call Length: 2
- Resources Needed to Resolve the Problem: 3
- Customer Attrition: 2
- Quality Scores: 1
- Compliance Scores: 1
Digging deeper into the data with full visibility in the Authenticx platform, two (2) themes are highlighted – 1.) Pharmacies are unable to see that patients are in-network within the system; 2.) These calls relate to one specific brand line. Your team finds out that there might be a bug in the system’s coding for this medication specifically.
The organization works to find a resolution with the IT department to ensure pharmacies see valid patient information. Additionally, the contact center’s performance can now be tracked month-over-month, now that agents have an updated guide and resources to reference. The contact center now has fewer calls about this brand line, improved satisfaction, and insights into metrics – all of which contribute directly to the patient experience.
Exercise: Where’s the Eddy
Since you understand the Eddy Effect, its impact on the patient experience, how to measure it, and the value of insight it can bring to organizations – can you find the Eddies? Now, it’s time to apply learning with an exercise relying on industry use cases.
Use Cases:
Finding the Eddy Effect for Providers:
A hospital system using Authenticx uncovered that the top call driver for its nurse triage team was prescription inquiries. These calls contribute about a fifth of the call volume they receive. Patients call about refills, which line to call, complaints about being stuck on hold, and a lack of clarity about if their voicemail was received for the triage team to follow up on. The team wants to understand the root causes of this patient friction. Here is what the team knows about key sources of friction:
- Scheduling refills takes too long for patients
- Incorrect pharmacy information causes delays
- Medication shortages cause patients to churn
Finding the Eddy Effect for Payers:
A national health insurer using Authenticx wants to increase CAHPS scores and Star Ratings. They use members’ conversation data insights to uncover confusion, locate barriers, and review processes that lead to friction points in the member experience. They discover that the Eddy Effect is prevalent in nearly a quarter of calls. Here is what the organization knows about the sources of member friction:
- Most calls mention processes and technology issues, such as member portal navigation
- About one-third of calls discuss delayed treatment, highlighting their health being at risk
- About one-fifth of members experience financial impact from health plan barriers
Finding the Eddy Effect for Life Sciences:
A pharmaceutical manufacturer using Authenticx wants to streamline the implementation of a new infusion therapy for elderly patients, tracking any friction points after therapy launch. Analyzing conversations from patients and caregivers to infusion site staff and support specialists, the manufacturer locates obstacles in starting therapy for at-risk patient populations. Here is what the organization knows about the sources of patient friction:
- Consent forms are difficult to complete due to an older patient population.
- Travel issues and confusion about infusion sites cause access to care issues.
- Therapy cost navigation is a growing patient concern with this new infusion therapy.
Now, apply your knowledge:
Using the Eddy Effect scorecard, can you locate a common theme? Score these friction points with how you would prioritize them and imagine how you would find resolutions to the Eddy Effect affecting this patient experience in the health system. When addressing this patient friction, keep in mind these questions:
- What outcomes do the patients need?
- What objectives does the business need to see?
- What steps would you take to proactively identify issues before they grow?
- Are there ways to tell the story of the patients that highlight the data collected directly from them?
- How can you utilize Authenticx AI to analyze patient data over time to help employees feel valued, too?
Deliver Results with the Eddy Effect™
Deliver results confidently within your organization with the top values the Eddy Effect brings to your organization; these include Eddy Accuracy, Average Conversation Length, Estimated Cost, and Change in Sentiment. Once your team can successfully understand data on how to visualize and rank specific patient friction creating a loop of obstacles, the more likely is that your patient population will benefit directly as a result of proactive measures conducted to limit future points of friction and to react to issues that arise in real-time.
While the Eddy Effect Scorecard helps prioritize identified friction, expanding into the full landscape of improving the patient journey is the next step to meet patient outcomes with business objectives. The Eddy Effect Guide is one key resource that dives into how to collect conversations, measure them, and resolve the recurring breakdowns in the journey.
Learn how to help enhance performance and improve the patient experience through satisfaction, loyalty, and utilization via core metrics that can be monitored and tracked. See the Eddy Effect model in action and how Authenticx can work within your organization to help resolve patient friction from conversation data by listening at scale.
Related Resources
The Eddy Effect™ | The Eddy Effect™ Guide | The Eddy Effect™ Dashboard | The Eddy Effect™ Calculator | The Top Driver of Bad Customer Experience
About Authenticx
Authenticx is the new standard for humanizing conversational intelligence in healthcare by analyzing millions of customer interactions (like voice, chat, or emails) to surface immersive and intelligent insights at scale. Authenticx was founded to aggregate, analyze and activate customer interaction data to surface transformational opportunities in healthcare. Using existing data that’s likely being stored and ignored in your organization, Authenticx reveals hidden barriers, motivators, and strategies so healthcare organizations can make confident, data-backed decisions. In 2023, Authenticx was ranked No. 349 on the Inc. 5000 recognized as one of America and Indiana’s fastest-growing private companies.
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