Paying attention to patient feedback might be more important than ever right now, as health systems vie to retain loyal patients amid challenging economic conditions. Intermountain Health demonstrated its awareness of this by recently striking a partnership with experience management company Qualtrics. 

The Salt Lake City-based health system has 33 hospitals and more than 60,000 employees. Under this partnership, Intermountain will implement Qualtrics’ experience management platform across all its facilities. The platform is designed to optimize research around the customer and employee experience.

“By implementing Qualtrics, we are not only expanding and improving our system for feedback, we are building a culture of action for responding to that feedback and improving the lives of all who interact with our organization,” Dan Liljenquist, Intermountain’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.

The partnership will allow the health system to collect feedback from patients about their experiences with in-person and virtual care, as well as with Intermountain’s website and apps, contact center and digital channels. 

Intermountain will solicit feedback from patients across a variety of channels — including its app, text, email, social media, contact centers and patient portals. The experiential data that Intermountain collects will be distributed across the entire health system — to “all levels” of employees  — via real-time via alerts, interactive dashboards and reports, Qualtrics said. 

Intermountain will also use Qualtrics’ platform to learn more about its employees’ experiences across areas such as hiring, onboarding, training and day-to-day operations.

This is not Qualtrics’ first partnership with a health system seeking to optimize their patient feedback loop. Other health systems that have partnered with the company include Ascension, Stanford Medicine, Christus Health, Trinity Health and Memorial Hermann Health System.

One of the things that these health systems like about their partnerships with Qualtrics is the fact that if they receive negative feedback, they will be notified immediately so they can intervene and course correct, Qualtrics Chief Medical Officer Dr. Adrienne Boissy said in an interview.

Dr. Boissy recalled an example of this that recently occurred as part of one of Qualtrics’ health system partnerships. A woman was leaving her appointment and completing a Qualtrics survey on her medical device — she had just seen her doctor, but she felt uneasy about the visit and her provider’s inability to give her answers to the questions she had asked.

Sitting in her car, the patient commented that she didn’t feel like all of her concerns were addressed in the visit. While she was still in the car, the health system was notified. An employee was able to call the patient immediately and schedule her for an additional evaluation. The doctor who provided the second evaluation ended up diagnosing the woman with cancer, Dr. Boissy said. 

“The tool can act before you get home to drive action around what your concern was. And in medicine, that’s critically important because not only does that personalize and make people feel heard and valued, but it can actually impact health outcomes,” she declared. “That story is a perfect example of why we can’t just put feedback in a dashboard — we also have to act on everything we hear.”

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