How to connect the entire patient experience using EMR integrations

Continually design and improve the patient experience by hearing every voice along their journey with you. Understand their needs, pet peeves, and problems, while pinpointing opportunities to close gaps.

Today, healthcare providers spend significant time interfacing with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems such as Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, Athena. Most clinical data, care transactions, demographics, and financial data is stored within EMRs for easy access by a physician, nurse, and other members of the care team. Every patient within a health system now has a medical record that captures and maintains their medical history, test results, and notes from a visit or encounter.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to also understand patient perceptions, pet peeves, and preferences? Wouldn’t it be game changing to easily segment your patient population, using data stored in your EMR, for outreach, reactions, and feedback?

Making it easy for the healthcare workforce to access qualitative insights about an individual patient through their EMR will enhance communication and engender trust. Further, making data accessible through the EMR will help staff reinforce and reassure patients that they hear and understand their needs by referencing and leveraging insights from shared feedback.

EMR extracts are often used for triggering feedback about the patient experience (e.g. lists of discharged patients). IT Departments are continuously asked to create SFTP files for uploading to a distributor, and iterations, back and forth, re-dos, and tweaks are common. This process can be time consuming for both the business user trying to gain feedback and the IT professional creating the file.

We now have an integration called Health Connect that can be used with any EMR. Health Connect creates a secure, encrypted virtual private network (VPN) between a health system’s EMR and Qualtrics creating an "always-on" connection allowing the health system to trigger outreach based on HL7 segments and corresponding patient record information (diagnosis, procedure, demographics, etc.). This minimizes the burden of having IT create or modify SFTP feeds based on changing survey needs. Because the connection is live (always on), the user can determine the frequency and cadence for requesting feedback.

Imagine being able to hear every voice, including specific patient types, segmented by diagnosis, procedure, demographic, or physician. You’ll be able to conduct outreach to maternity patients, ages 35-45, who delivered healthy babies. Or all colonoscopy patients who saw a specific gastroenterologist. The granularity and specificity can be determined by the business leader without having to go back-and-forth with IT.

The Health Connect integration is also bi-directional. For example, after results are captured, the responses can be added to a patient record within the EMR, allowing all clinicians that interact with that patient to better understand preferences and expectations.

Greater interoperability between experience data and EMR operational data will enhance the overall patient experience and empower clinicians to deliver better, more compassionate care.