In this FQHC Patient Experience Case Study, we’ll take a look at how some innovative FQHCs are utilizing the Feedtrail XM Platform to maximize their patient outcomes and drive their unique business outcomes.

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The Benefits of Direct Patient Communication for FQHCs

Northeast Valley Health Corporation (NEVHC) is an FQHC with more than a dozen locations in the Los Angeles area. The COVID-19 pandemic hit all healthcare organizations hard, and community health centers such as NEVHC, which depend on grants and federal funding, were affected the most. With 17 locations to manage and align, NEVHC faced the additional burden of finding new ways of communicating with their decentralized and diverse patient population without losing effectiveness. Due to the pandemic restrictions, the usual methods of communication and experience management were no longer working as well as they had.

Read the full case study here.

NEVHC’s pediatric department experienced these issues most acutely. Over the course of 20 days, NEVHC used Feedtrail to send out the ‘Pediatric Text Messaging Project’ – a personalized, direct text message to their pediatric patients (ages 0-17) and their families. This project served dual purposes: first, it allowed NEVHC to open direct lines of communication with a specific, vulnerable patient population; second, the project drove the scheduling of more in-office appointments. 

NEVHC successfully achieved both goals. Not only were pediatric patients and their families made aware that in-person appointments were safe and available, many families took the next step and actually scheduled appointments. The first week resulted in the scheduling of 22 new in-office pediatric appointments — appointments that, without the Pediatric Text Messaging Project, would otherwise have never happened.

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The Benefits of Using XM to Make Informed Business Decisions

Whitman-Walker Health, located in the Washington DC area, is an FQHC that focuses on caring for the LGBTQ+ community. Whitman-Walker wanted to understand how their patient populations would respond to the transition to telehealth. 

As an organization, Whitman-Walker wanted to find a way to further understand patient preferences and utilize them to inform the business decisions around care restructuring. Whitman-Walker used Feedtrail to ask their patients to specify for which types of procedures they were willing to have in-person appointments, and which visits they’d prefer to handle via telehealth.  

Whitman-Walker found that their patient population preferred in-person to telehealth by a 55/45% margin, and that patients were willing to come in to have blood drawn and receive testing, procedures that were priorities for 38% of their customers, whereas other procedures such as dental appointments were a priority for less than 10%. Whitman-Walker was able to make informed decisions around balancing in-person and telehealth visits and offerings, maximizing their resources. 

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The Benefits of Real-Time Patient Feedback for FQHCs

For over thirty years, CareSouth Carolina has been one of the leading FQHCs in the state of South Carolina. CareSouth’s mission is to provide its patient population with healing, caring relationships and experiences – regardless of their individual, personal circumstances. 

For CareSouth, the biggest patient experience challenge they faced was trying to meet The Joint Commission standard of collecting 10 or more feedbacks per provider per month. Ensuring proper feedback collection while attempting to personalize each patient engagement was always a challenge and was extremely time-consuming for their staff. So CareSouth deployed Feedtrail across six of their locations, streamlining their collection of patient feedback data by handing tablets loaded with a survey to patients checking out. This allowed them to not only satisfy their Joint Commission requirements but also drive up their patient engagement and provided them with more actionable feedback than ever before. 

Ultimately, CareSouth Carolina decided to expand their new patient experience strategy by rolling out the Feedtrail solution across all 10 of their outpatient locations and their 6 pharmacy locations. As a result, they are now averaging 700 unique patient feedbacks per month and the organization has retained over $300,000 in revenue from their more streamlined and efficient patient experience process.

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NEVHC, CareSouth, and Whitman-Walker are just a few examples of the patient experience strategies that are being deployed by FQHCs across the country to meet their unique business needs while driving better patient outcomes. Schedule a Feedtrail demo today to learn more about how we can help your organization thrive!

 “Experience management isn’t just about happier patients and staff. It’s about managing both patient and employee experiences in thoughtful, impactful ways. Deliberate, effective experience management can truly make all the difference for FQHCs and community or rural health centers.”