The Future of Patient Experience is Personal
The Future of Patient Experience is Personal
A conversation with healthcare experience expert Deb Woods
Feedtrail is re-engineering patient experience, and healthcare experience expert, Deb Woods, wants you to know the future of the patient experience is personal.
As our chief operating officer, Deb Woods is the driving force behind the latest version of Feedtrail’s powerful XM Platform. The experience management engine helps healthcare organizations gather real-time feedback on patient experiences, expectations, and preferences to personalize engagement—profitably.
Woods is an engineer by training. She’s also a patent holder, scientist, analyst, teammate, partner, mother to Logan and Morgan, and “nervous Nellie” about going to the dentist. Like each of us, she is an individual. A human with her own experiences, preferences, and physical, mental, social, and spiritual health.
And like many of us, Deb Woods is a patient without patience.
“The healthcare experience is broken,” she recently told us. “All healthcare organizations are feeling pain when it comes to attracting and retaining patients. Community health and independent medical groups continue to be hit the hardest, which only exacerbates their existing business challenges post-COVID.”
That’s why we couldn’t wait to sit down with Deb to discuss Feedtrail’s vision for the future of the patient experience.
The company’s new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics will help community health providers and group practices individualize the patient experience and gain rich insights from patient feedback to drive business decisions.
The ROI? A truly patient-centric organization with a loyal patient base, reduced clinician burnout, high-quality care, and strong patient and community satisfaction.
And the bonus? New patients, revenue growth, and a competitive edge.
Read on to hear how Deb and the Feedtrail team are personalizing the patient experience.
The patient experience should be personal.
FEEDTRAIL: Thanks for joining us, Deb! As a healthcare and consumer experience expert, how have you seen the patient experience (PX) category change in the wake of several disruptive years?
WOODS: Patient experience is at an inflection point. Over the past decade, we’ve moved from patient satisfaction to advocacy to a standardized style of patient engagement. The intentions are good, but patient satisfaction continues to decline year over year.
Consider this statistic: Nearly all patients polled in Beryl Health’s latest PX Pulse Report said having a good healthcare experience is essential. And yet, when we examined our data (2 million+ de-identified patient records, to be exact), we found 70% said their providers “lacked compassion.”
Now, consider this anecdote from one of our clients, Alan Dubovsky, the chief patient experience officer for Cedars-Sinai:
“The customer experience has evolved, and healthcare is behind. Patients want a healthcare experience where they feel heard. We often think we know what the patient wants or needs. But the reality is the data show we don’t.”
Why is the patient experience getting worse? We’re still not meeting our patients where they are.
Until now, we’ve treated the patient experience as an ancillary goal, secondary to providing exemplary clinical outcomes. In a value-based care world with choosy consumers, the two must be combined to truly impact outcomes.
The healthcare experience should be personalized, individualized, and actionable. It should also be patient-led. That’s why PX is a business imperative in tomorrow’s healthcare economy. And AI is helping us bring this vision to life.
FEEDTRAIL: What does a truly personalized and patient-centric healthcare experience look like, and how can practices and community health providers achieve this level of customer-centricity?
WOODS: It’s no secret other industries are lightyears ahead of healthcare in customer-centricity. I’ve been working in experience for decades with some of the most well-known consumer brands. They’re all leveraging customer insights and feedback to drive business decisions. Artificial intelligence will drive continued innovation, and healthcare needs to catch up.
We envision a world where a constellation of patient insights help to drive business decisions for healthcare organizations. To build a successful business, you need valuable insights about your customers—not just clinical data or a five-star Yelp review.
You need to know: What do patients truly need from your practice to be well?
Here’s the ideal: Instead of asking patients to answer a standard set of questions for a quality survey, we use the patient data to ask ourselves:
- What is the most efficient and effective way to cater to this particular individual?
- How can we engage with them to truly learn what they need and serve them better?
- How can we gain their trust, business, loyalty, and advocacy?
- How can we build a brand reflective of our patients’ and communities’ needs?
The patients’ wants and needs should drive operational decisions, not the other way around. This allows healthcare organizations to deliver patients the consistent, personalized experiences they need and want.
The intelligent, AI-enabled patient experience allows patients to be truly seen, heard, and valued.
FEEDTRAIL: How can healthcare organizations use real-time patient feedback to improve experiences and manage their reputation effectively?
WOODS: Like it or not, today’s healthcare leaders are now also marketers. Many don’t have the time, money, or training for it. (That’s where Feedtrail can help.)
Feedtrail’s XM platform allows providers to leverage real-time patient satisfaction data to pinpoint where they have experience challenges and opportunities.
We’re also taking things a step further with artificial and business intelligence capabilities to help providers understand who is experiencing the challenges, why those challenges are occurring, and what to do about them.
Case-in-point: One of our clients has strong overall Net Promoter Scores (NPS) but wanted to understand if they had opportunities to improve. Easily drilling into the data with our business intelligence tools, we identified that NPS scores were skewed. Some patient populations were consistently scoring some locations lower. Within minutes, we could see the low scores were associated with groups that reported the most significant concerns.
We also discovered why. Patients reported needing more support for health-related social needs. Language barriers, staffing issues, and long wait times also contributed to dissatisfaction.
It was eye-opening for this group. Within days, they were able to make changes to address patients’ specific concerns. Today, they continue using the XM Platform’s AI capabilities to understand patients’ needs and drive valuable operational changes.
With AI, it’s easier than ever to manage your practice’s reputation.
You can see your practice’s strengths and opportunities within seconds. You can see where you need to improve and understand what isn’t working, allowing you to continue doing the things that do and stop doing those that don’t.
The insights are eye-opening to most healthcare organizations, but they’re fundamental in an organization driven by customer-centricity. Practices must be prepared for this future.
FEEDTRAIL: How can AI-enabled patient experience tools help clinicians?
WOODS: This one’s personal for me. My daughter, Morgan, is finishing her residency to become a family physician here in our community.
On average, Dr. Morgan has eight minutes to make an impression on a patient.
Eight minutes—about half the visit, assuming everyone is on time. It’s the time it takes to brew a cup of tea or for sunlight to hit the Earth. No time at all.
In those crucial minutes, Dr. Morgan must build rapport and gather essential clinical information for assessment, diagnosis, and care planning. With such narrow margins, there’s no room for a misstep.
She adapts. She takes extra time to review a patient’s chart, trying to figure out how she can connect with them before she enters the exam room.
She considers their social history:
- What’s the patient’s age?
- Where do they live?
- What language do they speak?
Adjusting her approach—how she looks, speaks, and interacts—can significantly impact the initial connection and the overall visit. However, these are educated guesses about patient preferences. Timely and meaningful data would be invaluable.
I envision that an AI-enabled patient experience strategy could provide relief for clinicians like Dr. Morgan.
FEEDTRAIL: How can clinicians like Dr. Morgan benefit from personalized and real-time patient experience feedback?
We aim to empower clinicians and bring joy back to their work while driving practice growth.
We’re equipping physicians like Dr. Morgan to make “evidence-based” decisions about patient experiences, fostering more personalized care as data enriches over time.
Our approach is empirical, appealing directly to clinicians. With Feedtrail, they wouldn’t need to guess about patient expectations; they could be more informed about preferences and past feedback. This allows for more relevant questions and more valuable visits for both patient and provider.
For example, Dr. Morgan could receive timely feedback about her clinical interactions while they are still fresh in her mind. This would allow her to adjust her personalization approach based on what’s working well. Our clients have seen this approach improve clinician satisfaction, effectiveness, and efficiency.
Happier physicians, happier patients, and a happier practice follow. Better experiences lead to better outcomes, fostering patient loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.
When patients are treated well, everyone benefits.
FEEDTRAIL: How do practices benefit from a more data-driven and personalized patient experience approach?
Having deep and actionable insights about the patient experience is crucial for achieving customer centricity.
Feedtrail can help providers get to the root of business issues and opportunities related to patient interactions.
WOODS: Our hyper-personalized and predictive engagement surveys, questions, tools, and communication strategies are designed to help practices easily learn where they can improve. We focus on individual patient feedback rather than generic benchmarks, allowing us to predict patient behaviors.
It’s easy for practices to access and analyze data to reveal insights behind patient feedback. For example, you may discover your low wait time scores might not be due to actual wait times but rather operational issues like inadequate bathroom facilities.
These rich insights give practices better opportunities to enhance engagement, refine operations, and bolster marketing efforts. Clear trend analysis facilitates prompt corrective actions, leading to improved outcomes, reduced costs, enhanced efficiency, and increased revenue potential.
Practices can have it all.
FEEDTRAIL: Let’s wrap up with the patients. How will an AI-enabled, personalized experience benefit patients?
WOODS: A patient who feels seen, heard, and valued will advocate for life.
Here’s the meaningful difference personalization makes: Every year, my veterinarian sends me a card on the anniversary of my dog’s death. It’s a thoughtful gesture and a reminder that someone remembers and cares. I wish healthcare providers had tools that could deliver such a personalized touch.
Two years ago, I lost my son, and since then, I’ve seen dozens of doctors in my community. Not one has asked me how I’m coping after such a life-altering experience, despite research showing that individuals processing such traumas often experience concurrent physical ailments. It would mean the world to me if my healthcare provider showed this level of care. To me, it would signify having a physician who truly knows and cares about me and is committed to understanding my whole self and supporting my journey. I would go to that doctor for the rest of my life.
As a healthcare executive, patient, engineer, and mother, I urge practices to embrace AI and intelligent software to better understand and design their experience for their “customers.”
We’re all individuals making decisions based on a complex set of individual factors. It all comes back to being able to personalize and customize the experience. You’re talking to an individual. So, how do you want to connect with people?