Dive Brief:

• Qualtrics, a leader in experience management technology, and Epic, one of the largest providers of health record technology, are partnering to improve healthcare customer experiences for millions of patients, Qualtrics announced Tuesday. 
• By integrating patients’ experience data with their health information in Epic’s platform, clinicians and healthcare administrators will be provided with accessible data on patient insights to better address pain points, Qualtrics said.
• One of the first phases of the partnership will be capturing “voice of the patient” data, Qualtrics' Chief Medical Officer Dr. Adrienne Boissy told CX Dive. Qualtrics will take cues from Epic’s electronic medical records to deploy surveys at relevant points throughout a patient's journey.

Dive Insight:

It’s no secret that customer experience lags in healthcare, with adverse effects on care and costs.

The partnership between Qualtrics and Epic aims to bring more CX technology and insights to healthcare, improving the patient journeys for millions. 

Healthcare providers have a limited understanding of what customers want and need, a major pitfall to improving healthcare CX, according to Forrester. While voice of the customer is prevalent in other industries, healthcare providers have been “slow to capture, adopt and leverage” such data.

Qualtrics and Epic seek to change that. 

The idea is for Qualtrics to capture data and “push those insights back into Epic in a thoughtful way, surfacing to the right person at the right time,” Boissy said. 

She pointed to an example of a customer who is frustrated about the difficulty in making an appointment. Qualtrics can detect that frustration and flag it in Epic, where a provider or administrator can engage the patient and resolve their issue.

Key to the partnership is Qualtrics’ ability to sift through and analyze unstructured data. Boissy points to patients calling a call center trying to resolve a bill or sending messages to a care team as examples.

“Unstructured data is really not something we've dug into in healthcare in terms of emotion and effort and deeply understanding that,” Boissy said. 

“And so you can imagine times where we get that type of data from Epic from interactions, analyze it in a meaningful way and push it back into drive action with the care teams,” she said. “It sounds as though it's something we should be doing today. Yet, I would submit to you that we aren’t quite as consumer obsessed in healthcare yet.”

Such information is often recorded and only handled when an individual takes the time to do so. The partnership is meant to take the burden off individual healthcare staff and automate the processes.

“Ninety percent of data in organizations is unstructured data, which means it's coming in from comments and calls and faxes and emails,” Boissy said. “The Qualtrics platform has a tremendous opportunity and capability to analyze all that data and surface it in meaningful ways.”

Providing analytics and insight is only the first step, Judy Weader, a principal analyst at Forrester, told CX Dive in an email. It's on healthcare providers to take the next step.

"Collecting more data in a centralized place is great, but there have to be both a mechanism for taking action and resources to power the action, otherwise it won’t lead to meaningful improvements in the business-related goals the providers and systems want, like better HCAHPS ratings," she said.