Health systems are continuously striving for ways to boost engagement with patients, employees and patients.
During a featured session sponsored by Medallia at Becker's Patient Experience + Marketing Virtual Event, Stratis Bahaveolos, vice president of engagement at Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine, and Belinda Simmons, healthcare practice lead at Medallia, discussed how a new solution is boosting engagement across the health system.
Five takeaways:
1. Need for change. "As we approached a business need and a case for change, we were looking at getting efficient and timely feedback to help drive our improvement efforts," Mr. Bahaveolos said. Northwestern wanted a short, modern and smart solution. Ultimately, the goal for collecting this data was to provide a superior experience for patients, staff and physicians, and "have a metric that we could compare to other industries beyond healthcare," he said.
2. Flexibility. Northwestern sought a new experience management system to overcome challenges associated with paper forms for patients, which led to low response rates and made it difficult for the health system to analyze, according to Mr. Bahaveolos. Northwestern's new solution is a "highly flexible platform that enables real-time performance improvement" in line with the health system's Patients First mission, Mr. Bahaveolos said.
3. Simplicity. A lack of functionality had previously stifled engagement. "We had long survey tools with many questions. It was a blanket approach," Mr. Bahaveolos said. Patient surveys, particularly paper and email, did not allow for branching — used to create different survey routes and so respondents can skip questions not relevant to them. "One of the things we were interested in was enabling text [messaging surveys], so that it could be more convenient to get that information, and get it in real-time."
4. Modern Communication. On the patient side, Northwestern wanted all forms to be digital — web- or text-based, except where regulated by CMS. With the Medallia platform, the system reduced the number of questions from 26 to three, with each additional question based on "likelihood to recommend" score. It also improved the survey timeline, "with most surveys sent within four hours of check-in," Mr. Bahaveolos said. For physicians and staff, Northwestern shifted ongoing survey sends from annually to quarterly and reduced the number of questions from 25 to two, with extra questions based on LTR score. It also enabled ad hoc surveying, which became an effective tool during the COVID-19 pandemic.
5. Measurement. Northwestern has conducted about 250,000 patient surveys — achieving a 50 percent response increase over its previous platform — and recorded almost 190,000 patient comments, according to Mr. Bahaveolos. On average, patient surveys now take less than three minutes to complete. Additionally, its Net Promoter Score is more than 85 percent, employee response rate is over 78 percent and physician response rate is more than 60 percent.
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