Cara Babachicos, CIO of South Shore Health in Weymouth, Mass., joined the Becker's Healthcare podcast to talk about patient experience initiatives and innovation for community health systems.
Below is an excerpt from the conversation. Click here to hear the full episode.
Question: What are you learning about your patient base and preferences based on your patient engagement and experience initiatives? What does it take to stand out in their minds when they're making a decision about where they want to start their healthcare journey?
Cara Babachicos: It really all comes down to the patient persona. To say that every patient is the same would be a mistake. But one of the things we're focusing on now is trying to make sure we're making it as easy as possible [to reach us]. How can we ensure that patients can reach us? Not just Monday through Friday, nine to five, but how can we have extenders and opportunities to reach them when patients feel sick, and in the place most convenient to them?
We aim to offer convenient services and ways to communicate with us, and offer a more holistic experience. We're thinking about how patients make specialist appointments and get care in the home and fill prescriptions.
Q: Given your focus on the patient experience and virtual care, how do you think your teams will change in the next 12 to 24 months?
CB: There's a lot of new skills the teams have been learning and we've been building our repertoire around. With anything we do in the community, patient home, or in the health system, there is a bigger and bigger push to make sure we're doing it in a secure fashion so we don't put the health system or the patient at risk. We're continuing to make sure we have great cybersecurity tools and talented staff to help us with that. It's also about making sure we have personnel that are looking at solving hard problems, not just doing tasks.
There is a lot more understanding of what the problem is we're trying to solve, our current state of workflows and how we can add technology and even process changes to make for a better experience. Some of the changes can be small additions, but make a big difference. It can be changing things like how we design our phone systems, so the wait time is not as long, or how to design efficient wait times. We also want to hire people who are skilled in other tools to enhance the patient experience, whether it's chat bots that build on our website or doing things with creative applications that can allow for another way for the patient to reach us.
Don't miss the 2021 Precision Health Virtual Summit! Click here to learn more and register.