Nancy Ragont, CDW’s senior manager, customer insights and leader of the company’s healthcare marketing group, discusses the role of technology and best practices for creating a successful patient experience program.

How do you assess the role of technology in enhancing patient engagement/experiences?

Patient experience programs are bigger initiatives than most people think. They’re more than just how do you greet patients. They’re really about redefining the care life cycle. As such, technology is being used to create better communication from the point of initial contact to departure. One tool that has the potential to greatly enhance the lives of patients is the patient portal. Some practices and health systems are using these, but not everyone is. To get the most out of this technology and really empower patients, it’s important to realize that sometimes patients need to be shown how to use the patient portal. Not all patients engage with technology frequently, so it behooves healthcare providers to make sure their patients know how to use this tool to access their records, make appointments and communicate with their caregivers.

How do you determine the priorities for clinicians and patients when considering patient engagement initiatives?

From the clinician side these initiatives and their associated technologies have to put the patient at ease and have to be easy to use. The training, too, has to be simple. Any associated technologies need to be on all the time, be reliable and make clinicians more productive. Patients, too, want the overall experience and the technologies to be easy to use and reliable, but they also want to be able to be in control. To make their own care decisions and to be able to communicate with their caregivers on their own terms. One aspect of being able to be in control is the ability to access their healthcare and providers anywhere, anytime. The whole patient experience transformation is centered around personalizing the experience for patients. This is where technology like a patient portal works well. Ninety-five percent of patients responding to one of our patient experience surveys said that they experienced benefits by engaging through a patient portal.

How do you identify outcomes, best practices and lessons learned around patient experience initiatives?

There are so many best practices and lessons learned, but a couple stand out. It sounds corny to say this but successful patient experience initiatives really do take a village. Organizations shouldn’t just expect that hiring a chief experience is going to be enough to improve their patient experience. Buy-in from everyone in the organization is needed. And while technology is necessary to enhance the patient experience, it’s important to recognize that a great patient experience is far more than technology. It’s also about the staff and the facility – how the facility looks and how it and the staff make the patient feel when they’re in the facility. A key best practice is having an innovation training program. In such a program, people are taught what makes a good patient experience and how to identify the signs of a bad patient experience so they can jettison things that aren’t working. One of our clients feels so strongly about providing a good patient experience that they train everyone about patient experience – why it’s important and what it means to the organization and to patients.

What are some of the challenges for improving patient engagement and patient experience?

Costs and buy-in are two of the biggest challenges. With the value-based care model putting patient experience front and center, everyone recognizes they must invest in patient experience programs, but it costs money to put technology and security in and it costs money to train people and to sustain and manage the program. Without buy-in, especially from the C-suite, you won’t be able to get the funding or other supports for patient experience initiatives.

What are some of the greatest motivators for improving patient engagement and patient experience?

One of the biggest motivators is the transition to value-based care models that put patient experience in the forefront. To get paid, to reduce costs, to avoid penalties from things like readmissions and to provide the highest quality of care, health organizations see the value of investing in patient experience programs. Successful patient engagement programs create better connections and partnerships between patients and their caregivers. Patients who are comfortable and satisfied with their care and their care experience will keep coming back and will trust their care to their caregivers. If they don’t get good care or have a good care experience, they know – and their caregivers know – they can and will go somewhere else.

Visit us at booth #2761