If you can’t shop, you can’t buy.
And when it comes to health systems, the key to successful shopping is accurate provider data. But with affiliated providers potentially numbering in the thousands, not infrequently changing one element or another of their status, and not always communicating those changes, making sure consumers are viewing accurate information is a bear. And this doesn’t even take into account that, often, data about a provider is held in multiple systems, making consistent and thorough updating even more of a challenge.
Mona Baset, VP of Digital Services with Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, said managing provider data is critical. “That data helps feed so many other downstream channels,” she said. “Just thinking about the consumer-facing space, the data feeds our provider directory. It’s attached to our location listings on our website, and it feeds our business listings in Google. So it’s really important to get it right.”
Data is obviously needed for internal operations and just about every consumer experience in the digital and contact center spaces, Baset said. But she is most concerned about self-service and empowering patients to take charge of their own health journeys. “And the data has to be right for that to work, and we really only get one, maybe two chances to get that right, because, as people are choosing the digital space as their engagement channel of choice, they are not going to be very patient to wait for things to be right.”
Paul Merrild, president of Boston-based software company Kyruus Health, said Covid helped kickstart a lot of digital tool utilization, but it’s grown exponentially since. “It is becoming critical that the data is better, cleaner, more up-to-date and more real-time than ever before, because that is what our patients and our consumers expect,” he said.
The Importance of Governance
According to Merrild, there are about 115 data elements needed to provide an accurate and robust representation of a provider, or even a location. On average, that comes from anywhere between four to eight different systems. The way to get to clean data and keep it there is governance and hard work; and that effort will pay off.
“If you establish a nice baseline, and then you go through the hard work of creating a single source of truth across what is a very difficult process, what you will see is marked improvement across each one of [your] key performance indicators,” Merrild said.
Baset said Intermountain has a good governance process in place. “We’re looking at where the data goes, how it’s enriched, if there are any risks to keeping certain data – all of that,” she said, but admits it’s still a work in progress. The health system is still working on adding data from a recent merger.
Continuous improvement is key
Will Landry, SVP/CIO, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, headquartered in Baton Rouge, said consumer panels and testing are key for ensuring you have the right data and the right tools to keep consumers happy.
The only way to get there is with provider engagement, “because a lot of it is getting the providers to update the data and making sure that the data is accurate,” Landry said. “Our staff can only do so much, and our systems can only do so much, without them engaging.” The feedback from panels gets physicians’ attention.
“We actively bring info from the focus groups back to our provider leadership and our provider groups and are constantly pushing the message that this is what our consumers want, and this is what’s out there from a competitive standpoint,” Landry said.
The competition is real, according to Landry. With Amazon, Walmart and CVS getting into healthcare, or entering that digital market, providing clean data-driven service, especially with the provider directory, is imperative. The doctors are seeing that “this is getting real. The pressure is on.” Valid data “is really important for their patients and for the patients looking for them,” he said.
The battle to keep data true is real, especially with all the mergers going on today, Merrild said. “This is not a one-and-done type environment with provider data management. It is a race with no end, and you have to treat it that way. I think that’s a really important thing for people to understand.”
To view the archive of this webinar — Tackling Provider Data Challenges to Facilitate Patient Engagement and Improve the Bottom Line (Sponsored by Kyruus Health) — please click here.
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