Patient experience insights from Qualtrics’ X4 conference

This week I was able to attend part of the X4 user conference hosted by Qualtrics. I am somewhat biased about this conference as I happened to meet my wife during my visit last year, but that is a story for another day. Let’s just say my conference ratings and experience were off the charts last year. But even if I hadn’t found the love of my life on that trip, I still love X4 because it looks at healthcare from a completely different perspective than most other conferences out there. Part of that is that their Chief Medical Officer, Adrienne Boissy, infuses the event with empathy and connection in a unique way that only she can do. However, at this year’s conference I realized there was more.

As I reflected on the conference experience yesterday, I realized that at most healthcare IT conferences we talk about the clinical experience. While this is extremely important, many of these conferences do not spend much time talking about the patient experience outside of clinical practice. X4 is infused with the patient perspective and, more importantly, with data that directly reflects that patient perspective. This is reflected in the conversations held at the conference and the sessions presented.

Here’s a quick summary of some of these patient perspectives I gathered at the event, along with some commentary on them.

Dr. Boissy is absolutely right about the duality in healthcare. I would go one step further and say that there are organizations that have taken the time to demonstrate that they care about the patient experience, and those that have not. She described a planned laboratory visit during which she had very long wait times at several locations and one person was waiting next to her with a container of urine. The call to action was clear. We can do better. However, this duality in the patient experience is real and something we have to deal with.

Craig Richardville gave great leadership advice about listening first. What I like most about the advice is that it applies to leadership, but also to the patient experience. Patients want to be heard just like other people on your team.

It was fascinating to see how the collaboration between Epic and Qualtrics, which really started at last year’s X4 conference, showed details of how it has grown and where it is going. It makes sense why Epic would want to partner with Qualtrics to better engage patients, as you’ll see in more of the insights below.

Epic’s Sam Seering provided many more details about where this collaboration between Epic and Qualtrics was going. When was the last time you heard someone from an EHR vendor talk about Service Recovery? When was the last time you heard about Service Recovery in healthcare? It’s great to see Epic’s Seering talking about using Qualtrics and Epic to do just that.

This idea is perhaps one of the most common points at the conference that needs to be communicated to many in the healthcare industry. Ironically, I’ve seen the opposite happen in healthcare, where many websites and start-up companies imply quality of care when all they have measured is quality of experience. It is important to understand the difference and what is measurable.

Praise Mail was one of the most interesting ideas I saw presented at the conference. Praise Mail is basically where the healthcare organization sends their doctors an email every month with all the praise they’ve received from patients. It’s a simple idea that has had a huge impact. They described how this helped retain physicians and especially impacted new hires. She also described how Praise Mail drove adoption and use of their Qualtrics dashboards because physicians who weren’t getting as much Praise Mail wanted to know why. All of this improved the patient experience and even reduced the number of calls to their call centers because patients received a better experience.

Another interesting example shared at the conference was how one organization used their surveys to drive MyChart usage. With each survey, they can check in Epic whether the patient has a MyChart account and whether he or she is active in it. Then, based on that data, they add a question that informs them about what can be done in MyChart and directs them to sign in or participate in MyChart after the survey. You can see in the chart above how this has boosted their patients’ use of MyChart.

I’d never heard of the ambulance analogy applied to platforms, but it makes sense. Most healthcare organizations need a platform that can do many things effectively. They don’t need a one-size-fits-all solution, just like an ambulance needs to do many things for many different patient scenarios.

Since Qualtrics is known for their surveys, I really liked this anecdote about a healthcare organization that wanted to do a food survey. It turned out that they had already received 20,000 responses from other surveys about the food at their organization. I believe they used NLP to categorize the different responses so they had this information available to the food service organization. Of course, applying NLP to survey data is difficult and takes dedication, but if done right, the data can be used in many different ways.

Obviously it was great to learn from so many people who put the patient first. Some patients literally scream to be heard. It was great to see Qualtrics users using technology to listen to patients and drive those insights back into their organizations.