Amy Partilla, Hackensack Meridian Health: I would say one major key obstacle is the lack of standardization, you know. As I mentioned, Hackensack Meridian Health came together as many hospitals. We have over 10 hospitals. We have over 7,000 providers, and you know everyone has been doing their thing in their own way historically, for years and years. Now, as we are working as a system. As we know, change is hard, and not everyone is accommodating. Our provider network has employed providers, affiliate providers, some providers who, you know, have special legacy contracts, and so we can’t always you know, kind of force everyone to standardize the way we want to. So that is definitely challenging, just making sure that everyone is using our tools in the same way, communicating in the same way.
Another thing that’s challenging is, of course, just the number of vendors in the ecosystem. I mean, we’ve got the EMR, of which, you know, we have Epic. Epic has lots of different tools. We’ve got the ED and cadence and uptime, and all these other modules within Epic. We also have ‘find a doctor.’ We have our online live chat, we have our CRM system…we just have so many different ways that we’re getting messages out to patients. How do we get the view of that, and make sure that we’re not like stepping over each other to you know, to be ineffective in our messaging?
David Wright, Disruptive Innovations: And building off what Amy’s saying, you have vendors that can do A, B, C, and D, vendors that can do B, C, D, and E. So how are we building the most effective full stack solution where we’re taking advantage of investments in enterprise platforms that we’re already definitely going to use minimizing points of failure, you know, taking advantage of best of breed technology where appropriate. And then on the operational side, we have access centers that grew up really really great in healthcare and operations. But as we grow to more of this like formal kind contact center operation, how are we evolving? How are we, you know, improving quality assurance performance metrics, you know, it’s complex for sure.
Chelsea Simon, Advanced Pain Care: So for us, simplicity for the patients and staff was key. We really wanted it to be user friendly. And we wanted them to be able to schedule off our website. And it actually looked like it was our website, not ZocDoc, and then bidirectional texting communication. Our patients are very needy. They’re pain patients so it’s a little bit of a different demographic. They want a person, and they want an answer now. So we really focused on the online scheduling and text messaging. To start, as you can see from the data over the last 2 years, we’ve had a 29% decrease in incoming phone calls, which allowed us to decrease our full time employees by 5. And then we’ve also had a 296% increase in automated text messages. On average, we send about 8,000 manual text messages a month responding to those patients.
And then with BlockIt, we just recently implemented that at the beginning of September, and we’ve already had a 45% increase in online scheduling, which is amazing. ZocDoc was not very user friendly. Our doctors also did not care for it. So this has been great. And then we’re still in the process of implementing Health iPass, but we’re hoping that that at least gives us the 10% reduction in wait times.
