As a solutions expert for healthcare at Medallia, I get to talk with customers in the industry on a daily basis. Here are my perspectives on the recent webinar featuring Atrium Health and on experience management in the healthcare industry overall. 

Healthcare is where innovation, legacy practices, and regulation collide. Provider systems subscribe to advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to predict and inform utilization, staffing levels, and imaging tools. Yet they struggle to understand the patient experience. 

Patient Feedback 

The healthcare industry has traditionally taken an academic approach to what is largely operational pain points such as finding a provider, scheduling, parking, poor communication, and billing. In addition, satisfaction with how the overall visit with the doctor went. 

Having more near real-time feedback delivered through modern methods and expanding the pool of patients surveyed ensures staff receives the right information at the right time so that intelligent actions can be taken to improve the overall patient experience – as it’s happening. Without access to this timely patient feedback for all front line workers who are actually creating the experiences, healthcare providers are not able to optimize their patient experiences. Not having and disseminating this information to the front line is akin to looking in the rear-view mirror for current and accurate insights. 

Instead, providers are left with manual reports rife with significant lag-time and a struggle to recall the specific encounter. 

Healthcare providers routinely ask what’s the best metric for success. The answer is that it’s not just the metric – it’s what you do with the feedback you receive. This process is known as service recovery.

The Meaning of Service Recovery

For a healthcare provider, the first step in the service recovery process is to collect patient feedback at scale and quickly. The second is acting equally as quick on the feedback. Service recovery means closing the loop with the patient by conducting a 1:1 follow-up and documenting how the organization is performing in the eyes of the patient, what they can do to resolve any pain points and how to prevent similar recurring issues. It’s about learning, changing and iterating. 

Atrium’s Three-Prong Approach to Service Recovery

Medallia has worked with Atrium Health’s Assistant Vice President of Patient Experience, Liz Huggins, to create a better CX. In our webinar, Liz talked to Beryl’s PX community about how Atrium implemented feedback at scale and subsequent service recovery with patients. 

1. Capture experience signals within hours of patient contact Atrium gathers within hours of the experience, and the feedback with relevant operational data, or ‘signals’ (i.e., scheduling time, provider, location, insurance plan type). 
2. Put feedback in the hands of employees that shape outcomes Atrium democratizes the data by pushing patient feedback directly to healthcare team members in real-time. Over 85% of Atrium’s provider’s log-in to Medallia at least once a week, and when they do, over 60% of them do so via Medallia’s Mobile Application. 
3.  Perform and document root cause analysis Atrium’s XYZ team documents the root cause of dissatisfaction and the action that was taken in order to arrive at a resolution. As a result, Atrium has seen returns at both the patient and operational levels. Service recovery using Medallia’s CX has driven increased patient engagement and allowed Atrium to reduce and reallocate site development costs. 

Atrium’s Results

In short, Atrium intercepts poor journeys, gets them back on track, and turns them into a better journey. However, they also perform service recovery on outstanding experiences. That may seem counterintuitive at first, but it has delivered positive results.

More than 80% of patients mentions include individual healthcare team members by name – in a positive manner! By collecting feedback at scale and following-up with happy patients, Atrium has succeeded in activating their patients. By conveying the positive feedback to the employees, Atrium is engaging and enabling its employees in a manner that their previous approach could not support. This positive feedback made visible to staff and used as a mechanism to drive patient engagement with their healthcare teams is a key factor in driving better health outcomes. Understanding the patient experience via feedback and other related signals is now the heart of Atrium’s patient focus.

As consumerism in healthcare becomes the norm, outcomes are no longer separated from experience. Instead, healthcare providers are empowered to leverage the experience as a significant influential factor in their patient outcomes.

To discover how Medallia can transform Patient Experience, click here.