This week I’ve been able to attend part of the X4 user conference that’s hosted by Qualtrics. I’m slightly biased to this conference since when I attended last year I happened to meet my wife on that trip, but that’s a story for another day. Let’s just say that my conference ratings and experience last year were off the charts. However, even if I hadn’t found the love of my life on that trip, I still love X4 because it looks at healthcare from a very different perspective than most of the other conferences out there. Part of that is that their Chief Medical Officer, Adrienne Boissy, infuses the event with empathy and connection in a unique way only she can do. However, I realized at this year’s conference that there was something more.
As I pondered the experience at the conference yesterday, I realized that at most health IT conferences we’re talking about the clinical experience. While this is extremely important, many of those conferences don’t spend much time talking about the patient experience outside of the clinical. X4 is infused with the patient perspective and more importantly data that directly reflects that patient perspective. This is reflected in the conversations that are had at the conference and the sessions that are presented.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the perspectives and insights I gleaned at the event along with some commentary on them.
Dr. Boissy is so right about the duality in healthcare. I’d take it one step further and say that there are organizations that have taken time to show that they care about the patient experience and those that haven’t. She described a scheduled lab visit where she had really long wait times in multiple locations and one person was waiting next to her with a jar of urine. The call to action was clear. We can do better. However, that duality of patient experience is real and something we have to face.
Craig Richardville offered some great leadership advice about listening first. What I love most about the advice is that it applies to leadership, but it also applies to patient experience. Patients want to be heard just like other people on your team.
It was fascinating to see the partnership between Epic and Qualtrics which really started at last year’s X4 conference show details of how it’s grown and where it’s heading. It makes sense why Epic would want to partner with Qualtrics to better engage patients as you’ll see in more of the insights below.
Sam Seering from Epic gave a lot more detail on where this partnership between Epic and Qualtrics was headed. When was the last time you heard someone from an EHR vendor talk about Service Recovery? In fact, when did you last hear Service Recovery being talked about in healthcare. It’s great to see Seering from Epic talking about leveraging Qualtrics and Epic to do just that.
This idea may have be one of the most prevalant points at the conference that needs to be communicated to many in healthcare. Ironically, I’ve seen the opposite happening in healthcare where many websites and startup companies imply quality of care when they’ve only measured the quality of the experience. Understanding the difference and what is measurable is important.
Praise Mail was one of the most interesting ideas I saw presented at the conference that was shared by Aesha Shukla from US Anesthesia Partners. Praise Mail is basically where the healthcare organization each month sends their clinicians an email with all of the praise they received from patients. It’s a simple idea that’s had a tremendous impact. They described how it helped with retention of clinicians and was particularly impactful for new hires. She also described how Praise Mail drove adoption and usage of their Qualtrics dashboards since doctors that weren’t getting as much Praise Mail wanted to know why. All of this enhanced the patient experience and even reduced calls to their call centers since patients were getting a better experience.
Another interesting example shared at the conference was how one organization used their surveys to drive MyChart usage. In every survey, they can look in Epic and see if the patient has a MyChart account and if they’re active in it. Then, based on that data they include a question that educates them on what can be done in MyChart and redirects them to sign up or engage in MyChart after the survey. You can see in the graphic above how that drove MyChart usage by their patients.
I’d never heard of the ambulance analogy applied to platforms, but it makes sense. Most healthcare organizations need a platform that can do many things effectively. They don’t need a point solution for everything just like an ambulance needs to do a lot of things for a lot of different patient scenarios.
Since Qualtrics is known for their surveys, I really loved this anecdote about a healthcare organization that wanted to do a food survey. Turns out, they had 20k responses about the food at their organization from other surveys already. I believe they used NLP to categorize the various responses so they had this information available to the food service organization. Of course, NLP applied to survey data is tough and takes committment, but when done right the data can be leveraged a lot of different ways.
Needless to say, it was great to learn from so many people that are focused on the patient. Some patients are literally screaming to be heard. It was great to see Qualtrics users leveraging technology to listen to patients and push those insights back into their organization.
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