Health systems have spent years building care navigation programs, contact centers and disease-specific patient journeys — and most leaders know these efforts haven’t added up to a unified experience. The missing piece, increasingly, is orchestration: connecting fragmented data, workflows and engagement tools so that patients receive a coherent, continuous experience across every service line.
During a featured session sponsored by Salesforce at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting, speakers examined how health systems can move from siloed programs to enterprise-wide experience orchestration and what gets in the way. The session featured two leaders from Salesforce, Sophia Saleem, MD, chief health officer, and Ben Seyden, healthcare strategy executive, alongside Lakesha Holloway, associate vice president of consumer data and relationship management at Advocate Health in Charlotte, N.C
Below are four takeaways from their conversation.
Note: Quotes have been edited lightly for length and clarity.
1. Fragmentation is a design problem, not a technology gap
Health systems haven’t failed to connect patient experiences because they lack data or tools; they’ve failed because the systems were deliberately built in silos. Mr. Seyden noted that healthcare has intentionally separated access, communication, follow-up and billing into disconnected functions, and that layering on additional point solutions only compounds the problem.
“The organizations that win aren’t going to be the ones with the most tools,” he said. “They’ll be the ones that orchestrate experiences the best.”
Ms. Holloway described this dynamic firsthand at Advocate Health, a 69-hospital system that was formed through the merger of Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health. With multiple instances of its core clinical and marketing platforms running in parallel across the merged organization, her team has seen patients discharged from a hospital only to receive 22 messages in 24 hours — each sent by a different team deploying campaigns independently, drawing on the same underlying data but with no shared view of what the patient had already received.
“That is crazy land,” Ms. Holloway said. “It is not a good experience for our consumers — and they will complain.”
2. Every gap has a cost
The business case for orchestration isn’t abstract. Mr. Seyden argued that every experience gap in a health system carries a direct operational cost: underutilized scheduling capacity, staff absorbing patient frustration, workforces burning out under the weight of friction they didn’t create. “It’s your staff that has to deal with all of that,” he said. “That is one of the reasons why we have a workforce shortage in healthcare.”
Dr. Saleem brought a clinical lens to the same argument. As a practicing ophthalmologist who frequently referred patients to rheumatology and pulmonology, she described the downstream consequences when referral coordination breaks down — patients remaining in active disease longer, clinical context lost in translation and physicians spending time managing logistics that should be automated. The data to complete the referral existed in the system; what was missing was the orchestration layer to act on it.
3. Data governance and technology governance have to move together
Ms. Holloway identified two root causes behind Advocate’s fragmentation: data integrity issues that made teams distrust enterprise-wide campaigns, and a proliferation of tools that outpaced the organization’s ability to govern them. Her team has since implemented a committee-based approval process that intercepts technology purchases before they duplicate existing capabilities — and an internal principle of asking before buying. “If somebody wants to deploy a new technology and we already have it, somebody’s going to catch it and somebody’s going to say, ‘pause,'” she said.
The governance lesson extends beyond procurement. Ms. Holloway described convening marketing, IT, the employer group and other stakeholders at Salesforce’s Chicago tower for a full-day session on the future of consumer experience at Advocate — an effort to replace what she described as parallel “kingdoms” with a shared roadmap. The goal wasn’t to eliminate specialized teams but to align them around a unified view of the consumer.
4. Start with one problem, prove value, then scale
The panelists closed with practical guidance for health system leaders trying to find a starting point. Mr. Seyden recommended a three-step sequence: name the specific problem, audit what connective infrastructure already exists and stop adding point solutions before understanding what current platforms can already do. Then start with one well-defined use case, demonstrate measurable value and scale from there.
Dr. Saleem pointed to her experience at a previous health system as a proof of concept: a two-year effort to build a single source of truth for provider services and scheduling data ultimately enabled patients to find and book services they discovered online without hitting dead ends at the call center.
“Once we had that single source of truth and we started to leverage it for all of our downstream activities, it really opened the doors,” she said.
The strategic implication
The conversation between leaders at Advocate and Salesforce illustrates a shift in how leading health systems think about consumer strategy — from managing individual touchpoints to orchestrating the full relationship.
As Mr. Seyden put it, patients already know their health system has their data, and they expect it to be used to improve their care. Health systems that treat orchestration as an enterprise priority, rather than a marketing initiative, will be better positioned to meet that expectation and capture the financial returns that come with it.
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