Experts of Experience - Redefining Care: How Northwell Health Is Redefining Care For Both Patients & Providers

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling misunderstood, undervalued, or out of place in a doctor’s office. That’s exactly why Northwell Health has set a new standard for both physician and patient experience.  Alyssa Scully, Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health, shares exactly how her team is transforming provider and patient experience, and their methods might surprise you… From hyperpersonalized physician referrals to patient care plans designed to bring you more fulfillment and joy — instead of simply treating symptoms of a disease — Northwell Health is redefining “care” on every level. Tune in to discover Northwell Health's innovative approaches to improving both patient and physician experiences, including data-driven metrics, annual award programs, patient experience transparency, and reducing day-to-day administrative burdens for doctors.Key Moments:  00:00 Alyssa Scully, Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health00:46 Balancing Patient Experience and Operations02:40 Supporting and Empowering Physicians04:33 The Impact of Technological Advances in Healthcare10:20 Physician Wellness Programs21:17 Training and Empowering Healthcare Teams36:15 Implementing Salesforce for Personalized Care42:31 Creating A “Third Place” For Physicians  –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their strategies with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org

this very large movement at Northwell, finding what matters most to the individual. It's less about the disease, and it's more about the fulfillment and the care for that patient and whatever problem that means the most to them. We're getting away from this concept of being disease specific,

and we're asking questions about what matters most to our patients, what would make their life easier. And the answers to those questions are starting to be embedded into their care plans. There's nothing worse than hearing someone say, we can't help you with that. And having a team activated around working together to get the person to the result that they need

so that we don't have to say no to them is just such an important factor. Hello everyone and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host Lauren Wood. Today I am joined by Alyssa Scully, the Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health, to chat about New York's largest health care provider and how they are setting new standards for patient success through data-driven metrics, personalized care programs, and prioritizing the physician experience. They have a vast, vast network of hospitals and outpatient facilities. And so we're going to really understand how Northwell Health is working to create the

best possible experience for both their physicians and their patients. Alessa, wonderful to have you on the show. Yes, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. So something I always think about with hospitals, and I'm so glad that we have you on the show, because this question anytime I walk into a medical setting, I always wonder, how do you approach balancing the patient experience with the operational complexity of running a hospital? It's a good question. So we are fortunate at North to be guided by some So we are fortunate at North to be guided by some tremendously talented leaders. And one of the things that's very special is how we always take a patient-centric approach

to what we do. So our operational improvement activities, our operational metrics, everything that we're thinking about by way of advancing, growing, improving, augmenting, and modernizing is really built around the patient experience for us. We think about really everything we do, it's around the patient. In terms of balancing, I think having the patient in the center to begin with,

helps us think about ways to effectively improve, but aid in that bit better experience for that patient point of view. So we do that a number of ways and I work inside of our medical group practice and we're one of the top 10 largest medical groups in the country and we have created cultures with our physicians and partnerships with our physicians in supporting this as well So it's not only a balance of operational improvements But also physician engagement in the plans that we create forward to build

What is one of our strategic priorities in creating lifelong patient loyalty? We like to say for our communities in New York here I'd love to dive into that because I know the physician experience we like to say, for our communities in New York here. I'd love to dive into that because I know the physician experience can be really challenging. I mean, if we think about what these doctors are facing day in and day out in some of the most high stress and difficult situations that I think anyone can be in, How do you go about really supporting and empowering those physicians to provide that great experience while they're handling everything else? So I am pleased to say that that has been my primary focus here at Northwell for the

last seven years. So we are a physician service oriented group. Our medical group practice, Branded Northwell Physician Partners, has 5,000 physicians, so geographically spread across 780 ambulatory sites and 21 hospitals. And we have partnered with our service line structure and our regional structure to bring programs for doctors and allow for those to grow. And again, do it in a way that it's designed with our physician partners at the table in many ways also leading these. I could tell you one thing for every one hour of patient care provided by a doctor.

There's two hours of administrative work tied to that for a physician. Wow. Yes. Really? And we call that the practice environment and we work very hard at Northwell to address that because what we want to sustain is the human connection between a patient and a provider and especially within the experience of the encounter, we're looking at ways to promote and mitigate those administrative burdens imposed on our doctors today by way of the EHR, documentation requirements. It's sort of this endless list of things that they have to do once that patient leaves the room and that's where we have focused the most on the past couple of years.

There's definitely new AI tools and products that could be embedded in the EHR to promote more face time between the patient and the provider. We're actively pursuing ambient listening as one of those. And we were excited about deploying that next year, but that's what we're spending the most time thinking about is reducing that burden for the physician. about deploying that next year. But that's what we're spending the most time thinking about

is reducing that burden for the physician. Yeah. I think that's something most people don't really understand is that every doctor, every essentially minute that they send with the doctor, there's two minutes of admin. Can you tell us a little bit more of what is that admin? And then I want to understand a bit more of how technology is helping you to mitigate that.

From a clinical practice perspective and just in the ambulatory setting, it could be placing follow-up referral orders. The patient has to leave and go see several sub-specialty visits. They have to do all of the documentation associated with those orders. They have to close their notes within a certain period

of time. Those notes have to be documented well, of course, for billing. And then that's where things start to pile up. They're also so attentive. And they want to get back to the patient's portal messages, especially if there's a lab that winds up on the portal, because now we make labs available via the patient

portal that lends itself to more messaging response, lab that winds up on the portal, because now we make labs available via the patient portal that lends itself to more messaging response, you know, calls to the office. We're doing a lot to think about how to assemble the care team around that provider. Inbox standards of practice is something that we're spending a lot of time in now. How could the RN and the medical assistants help be an extension of the physician to help reduce some of those follow-up conversations or orders that are required? And then there's the regulatory components of the practice and the reporting requirements. For us, we're a part of an ACO. We're involved in CMS clinical quality improvement

programs and it's sort of e-prescribing, you know, the list can go on and on for that physician. Yeah. How have technological advances changed the way that your providers are providing to patients? I mean, you said you've been at Northwell or at least in this position for seven years. And I'd love to understand how this is changing even in the time that you've been really working with providers. One of the incredible pieces about Northwell is its willingness to continue to grow. In fact, I mentioned earlier one of our strategic priorities creating lifelong patient loyalty. Another strategic priority is surrounding growth

and broadening our footprint and impact in our communities in our New York region. And over the last seven years, the medical group has grown in size. When I started, it was around 3,200 physicians, and we've quickly gotten to 5,000 in just this short, less than a decade. With that requires a lot of adaptability

to what we create in our services that we provide in our footprint and our distribution of services throughout the geographies and based off of certain needs of demographics. But it also, over the years, allowed us to think a little bit differently about our IT infrastructure. And we are currently undergoing a major digital transformation at Northwell, which I think

is incredibly timely and allowing us to move away from our current EHR platform over to Epic. And that's going to be done over several years. But the optimization of the provider's experience, our clinical practice workflows, and even our patients by way of the new patient portal and some of the online booking workflows that we're gonna be activating via our online domain really does optimize the clinical practice and our reports as well for our quality improvement programs,

which we're just incredibly excited about and have been working on change management now for quite some time. Mm-hmm. I can only imagine that that's a massive project and also something that is so needed. I think the qualm many people have with the healthcare industry is it seems to be very outdated and antiquated in the way that it's working. And as someone who has spent my career in tech, I'm just constantly like, one, as a patient,

often frustrated, but two, I think about these doctors who are also working in these kind of slower systems. And so I think it's interesting that you're going through that digital transformation because it is necessary and also the way that technology is changing so quickly. How do you keep up with that?

Like, that's also a thing I think about is how do you make sure that your systems are matching what is actually possible from a technological standpoint? Yeah, a lot of rationale building and peer benchmarking. We have a dedicated business strategist on the team that's just looking at what's going on outside of Northwell by way of trends, pressures, policy, and bringing that internally to our executive leadership forums and really helping us react and plan forward together. And we're doing a lot of that now as we're closing out the year and thinking about how do we augment our work next year to accommodate these new pressures and trends.

And most recently, we revamped our entire health and wellbeing infrastructure for physicians in response to recognizing that we needed to get some work done to create a better strategic framework so that our physicians understand what exists for them to support their clinical practice and their experience at Northwell, we like to call it their joy in medicine. So we did that, it actually took about a year. We looked external to peer benchmark organizations. We had conversations with chief wellness officers

throughout the country, including Stanford and Osher and ChristianaCare, who were just tremendous in helping us think through, what does this look like? And we landed on a program that we now call Team Well Physicians. And it's an infrastructure of seven pillars. And each of the pillars represent different resources and are tied to key drivers of stress and burnout among our doctors as they've

reported to us. So it's based off of their measured need. And this program now is launched since April of this year, and we're looking for opportunities to continue to measure within our seven pillars to look for continued opportunities for new program development to address other things that are now coming up that's new in response to those pressures and ever-changing environments to which our physicians are operating in.

So the strategic framework is important. It's sort of the concrete footing to everything now that we can create on top of it. So Team Well is sort of the version of the program for our employee base at Northwell, which is 88,000 individuals. And Team Well physicians is the recognition that physicians are unique, and they do have stress stressors that we can address together with this new foundation. What are some of the components or even what's your favorite part of that new wellness program? That's a great question.

So I kind of alluded to it earlier. I'm spending the most time activating interventions in what we call the environmental pillar, which speaks to the doctor's environment, whether it be the EHR, the practice environment, their resources, really within the four walls of their clinical practice setting is what we're after. And we learn what has to be done from the physician themselves because they're reporting their stressors.

And we have created a close partnership with the American Medical Association, the AMA. In fact, we just achieved one of their recent Joy of Medicine Health System Recognition Awards this year at the silver level. And that is in recognition of the work we do within the practice environment. Some of the others for the other pillars include spiritual, physical health, emotional health, social, and so on. But the practice environment piece is where we've been spending the most time.

Well, congratulations on that award. It definitely shows that you guys have been spending efforts in the right places. I'm curious to know, what is the impact? I mean, it sounds, I can definitely think of, you know, why it is impactful to make sure that there is a strong approach to ensuring that providers are mentally well to be able to deliver on this job.

But what have you seen in terms of the impact of really prioritizing the well-being of your physicians? I don't know if I mentioned it yet, but I think the biggest impact for me is our goal to make Northwell Health the best place to work for doctors. And we do that with the tremendous leadership of our physician executives here. And the impact in our work and our focus and our investments are, at least from where I sit, tied to create that positive experience for the doctor. Their experiences, their why is what we tend to ask them about a lot.

And we look for ways for them to get back to that, why sort of the humanism and the human service that they're providing and why they got into medicine is something that we have kind of instilled in the culture. And we lean into that when we work with our physicians and we look for ways to improve. It really always gets back to why we're here. So we're frequently starting meetings with patient stories.

We have a program called the Culture of Care at Northwell where we train team members and physicians on components of the patient experience that support this concept of intellectual fulfillment, joy in medicine, meaning in medicine that helps to put the patient back in the center like what I mentioned earlier and align with the physicians in a way that they feel fulfilled in their work every day. And, you know, we'll deal with mitigating

the issues on the back end as long as they're there continuing to shine in the front. And I can imagine from the patient perspective, having a physician that's really connected to their why and being a physician and getting into medicine in the first place. It is not an easy job. You have to be driven by purpose, I would imagine. And the patient experience, I'm just kind of thinking and playing this out, the patient experience in being provided to by a doctor that is really connected to that why, is really passionate about the work they do versus a doctor that is really connected to that why is really passionate about the work they do versus a physician that is maybe bogged down by a lot of processes

and doesn't really feel like their well-being is taken care of, it just seems like it's night and day. And I'm speaking from my own personal experiences of working with physicians or being a patient of a physician who's really in and others who are really out. And so I think when we tie it back to that loyalty conversation of how do you create lifetime patient loyalty, the physician loyalty is critical to that. Yes, and their experience, their level of engagement,

especially as we pursue so much change, their willingness to participate in the change. It all ties together. And then that's why sort of our group is so important to the organization as a vehicle to create opportunities for physicians to raise their voice. So we have a governance structure

of our medical group practice, and we engage 300 physicians through committees where they're actively participating in certain system initiatives like the digital transformation and other significant programs. We have a dedicated committee on patient experience as well as the physician experience. And the ideas that come out of these groups we put into action. In fact, in 2019, the group decided within themselves, led a physician-oriented team, got together and wanted to reimagine what does recognition look like

for doctors at Northwell. And we pursued a tremendous new awards program that now runs annually and we touch one in four physicians every year through it. So one in four physicians every year through it. So one in four doctors are nominated and then it kind of goes through a whole process. We have a big celebration at the end, but it's a peer nomination process.

So hundreds of different job titles throughout the organization take a moment every March around Doctors' Day to nominate a physician and tell a story about the doctor that we then reshare back with them. And it's just sort of another opportunity to raise their experience and take pause in what they do and give thanks.

So that's very special. We also actually have a Patients' Choice Award. So we have a Truly Awards program for peer nomination and recognition of our doctors. And then we also look at our patient experience scores. And for our physicians that for over a 12-month period of time are rated five out of five stars, which is a tremendous achievement, get a Patients Choice Award.

And we're up to hundreds of physicians now in that sort of bracket of excellence when it comes to patient experience, which we honor every year as well. So those opportunities are important when we think about our group culture and the physician engagement for what we do. Tell me a little bit more about the patient award. We have our care provider items in the patient experience survey that's administered.

It's ambulatory medical practice. So if a patient comes to an ambulatory, one of the 780 sites, and they see a physician, they'll get a survey that's administered. And we have a five-star transparency program within the medical group where those aggregated care provider score items are rated on a five-point scale. And if you visit our Northwell Health website and go to our Find a Doctor,

you'll actually see those ratings on the physician's profile. And those physicians that get to that five star over a 12-month measurement period achieve the annual patient's choice award. I can imagine, I mean I love this concept because it creates so much transparency. I always find it really difficult to find a good doctor, like personally I live in California so I unfortunately can't come to Northwell. But I always find it to be difficult in really finding a great physician. And when I do see that there is ratings, it's like, oh, okay, I can understand, or people

can leave comments. I can start to understand a little bit more of who that physician is and are they the right fit for me? Because at the end of the day, it's such a personal experience. And just creating that transparency, I think, for anyone who's listening in any business, as much as we can create transparency of how do other people experience this experience, it also forces us to level up. It forces the providers to really create an experience where five stars can be given. And on that note, I want to talk about the employees beyond the physicians, because it is not just the physician that creates the experience. It's the front desk employees, it's the nurses. How do you go about training and empowering those

teams to really provide the level of experience that you want to create within Northwell? Yes. I would say it starts with day one. Our president and CEO, Michael Dowling, who's just a tremendously transformational leader and globally recognized, attends Physician Beginnings and our New Beginnings Program. We have orientation once a week, usually Monday or Friday. He will be there to welcome all of our new hires every week. And he will talk about his expectations of the organization, the levels of excellence that we achieve as an organization. But it's

a product of the people. It's us here. It's coming together and creating these patient experiences and setting great examples for others. So I think that piece is the starting point for every new hire is getting to listen to him talk about the patient experience and his journey. From there, I mentioned earlier, we have the culture of CARE. So what CARE stands for is connectedness, awareness, respect, and empathy. And the module, the sort of the curricula for that is based around those four standards. And then within each of the CARE items, there's certain tools that all of our team members learn about. For example, within the connectedness module, there's something called a last model where people listen to service recovery and service standards

and get to learn and apply them. We also do a lot of work with the Barrell Institute, which is a standard of excellence with regards to the patient experience. They actually wrote the definition for patient experience that we bring into Northwell and we engage all of our employees around on an annual basis. We have a role called a culture care leader. So our culture care leaders have extra training.

Many of them are voluntarily identified, but they're in our hospitals, they're across our ambulatory regions, and they are looking out for those positive patient experiences and also supporting the training and the re-engagement of 100% of our team members in learning and understanding how to improve. From an ambulatory perspective, it's hard.

You know, there's 780 locations, so we're constantly thinking about how to bring the team members together in meaningful ways. So the culture care leaders is a great sort of federated model that we've been able to deploy across our ambulatory footprint. And we also have an ambulatory academy where our practice managers and front desk leaders participate in, which gives them a lot more hands-on training with regards to the human experience. So what I'm hearing is that there's not only the training, like the onboarding and the training, but then this ongoing support

and having people on the ground too. And tell me a little bit more about that. Is it someone who's kind of guiding and saying, oh, you didn't do that right, this is how you can do it better? Or what does that really look like in terms of that ongoing support? So it's definitely has proactive and reactive pieces to it.

So because we have our patient experience survey, there's insights coming on a daily basis by way of patient comments that can be used to create those learning moments as well as recognize those positive experiences and look for opportunities for individuals to become great role models for their local peer groups. So our culture care leaders are driving a lot of the metrics and reporting so that the transparency to the data is shared with all members of the team at the locations, at our sites. And then they're also pursuing opportunities

for recognition, training, and service, and just general engagement in local improvement programs and opportunities that are happening. So a lot of the content in the training modules speak to applying new skills. And so these individuals that are going out are working to deploy those skills and share learnings across our sites. And what about the initial training? How did you go about developing that?

I'm just curious to know, how do you even approach this type of training program? And I'm not sure if you were a part of that or not, but I'm just curious to know, how are you going about really ensuring that all of the employees have a solid foundation of knowledge and how they should be providing to the patient? Yeah, so it's a pretty cool story.

Our Chief Experience Officer, Sven Gerlinger, actually came from Ritz-Carlton, and he has brought with him into his healthcare career sort of a tremendous standard of excellence when it comes to service that we've brought not only to now his day-to-day work, but also into the training experiences that we provide to our teams. And he was involved tremendously in the launch of this recently established ambulatory academy. And it has, of course, components within the Academy that speak to those operational workflows and tools. It's sort of an endless list of things that our practice leaders are responsible for. We kind of call them CEOs of their sites, but also himself and his team and deputy had

a really great hand in designing the curricula for that experience. I have done the Ritz-Carlton customer service training or one of them, I'm not sure how many programs they offer, but I just having had that little peek into the level of focus and awareness and attention on the customer experience, I can imagine that that, I mean, is so needed in the healthcare space because I often feel like it's the polar opposite of that. And I'm just beholden to whatever I have to do

in order to get support or care from a physician. And I love that so much. And it just really piques my interest about what the experience must be like at Northwell. What would you say is a key differentiator in terms of your patient experience compared to some of the other competitors out there in the world? Good question. I think, staying on the topic of sort of that Ritz-Carlton model, one of the pieces that we instill is that finding that yes.

So you know, especially in an ambulatory practice environment where it's complicated to get an appointment, it's complicated to reach a call center, to get triage to different locations to try to get an appointment schedules with the right authorizations prior. There's many hands that takes a village. And finding the yes is acknowledging the fact that although you may not have the answer, you'll find the person that has the right answer and do that warm handoff. I think that that's important because especially as we have an aging population and there's caregivers, there's mothers and fathers dealing with their children and navigating access to care, finding the yes is sort of fundamental, it's foundational. As we think about personalizing, we have to find

the yes and then we can work on personalizing the experience. It's sort of a standard of practice to find the yes. Our experience officer also talks about something we call EMM, Every Moment Matters. And there's actually a conference that Northwell runs every year around Patient Experience Week, which is the first week in April that anyone can join and register online for. So it's the Every Moment Matters conference and just an opportunity for everyone to come and kind of see and learn about the principles and methodologies that we use at Northwell to differentiate ourselves. So that's really important to us. The other piece that I would mention, and this is kind of coming along with this very large movement at Northwell to

this very large movement at Northwell to address sort of our aging demographic is finding what matters most to the individual. We're getting away from from sort of this concept of being disease specific and we're asking questions about what matters most to our patient, what would make their life easier? And the answers to those questions are starting to be embedded into their care plans. So it's less about the disease and it's more about the fulfillment

and the care for that patient and whatever problem that means the most to them, or they would like our hand at solving more. And it leads to essentially care plans that create more life fulfillment versus just a disease specific care plan. So that's a significant change in how I think traditionally health systems

and providers think, but it's necessary. And I think everybody is very much on board with finding a way to action on that at scale. These three points that you just made are so incredibly important for any business. Finding the yes, every moment matters, and really finding what matters most to that person. How can we provide value to them? Because it's different. It depends on each and every one of us.

And I think that finding the yes, I just want to highlight that one specifically because I'm sure we've all been, we've all called someone and, you know and I think insurance companies or there's some companies that tend to be a little harder to find that yes with where you call and they say, no, we can't help you with that. There's nothing worse than hearing someone say, we can't help you with that. Sorry, try someone else or do something else. And having a team activated around working together to get the person to the result that they need

so that we don't have to say no to them is just such an important factor. And I'm sure it's very difficult to do in a healthcare setting as well. Like I can imagine there are a lot of things that you can't always do. So how do you guide the team to really do that? Luckily, the digital transformation and the new applications we're bringing in will optimize those

workflows to enable more of that team-based approach and sharing of tasks to create quicker connections to answer problems or requests. Patients and providers alike, we, in parallel to our EHR transformation, have also signed on with Salesforce in a meaningful way. We are pursuing a CRM for patients and a CRM for providers. I am working on the provider side as a business partner to the project. And I can tell you that it will be a market differentiator in designing a provider PRM

experience that will personalize how that physician appears by way of search and their specializations so we can connect patients directly to the right providers based off of what specifically that provider does down to the procedure level and what that patient needs and I think those two pieces is what's going to enable personalized care for us over the next few years, which is incredibly exciting to watch and be a part of. We like to talk all the time about how to get there. And I think we finally have the application

and features and capabilities and talent around these two methodologies we call Provider360 and Patient360 to get to a place where we can connect the two in a meaningful way and do allow for more to be done as a self-service. I think that's the other piece. Consumerism in healthcare is certainly here. It's all over. It's certainly those trends and pressures that we talked about earlier and enabling Salesforce

to come along with us in the digital transformation, setting the stage and the foundation for personalized care experiences will aid in how we respond meaningfully. As a patient myself, I'm excited for it. Yeah. I'm so glad that you brought the technology piece into it because it is so often, I think we take for granted the impact that the technology we have really contributes to the ability for our teams to provide a great experience. And having the internal tooling to help us get the right answers, to really personalize the experience for the patient enables anyone, any, it doesn't matter what business you're in,

any client facing person to really show up in the face of that customer, in this case, patient, and provide them with a great experience because they have that, in many ways, like army of resources behind them. And I'm curious to know a little bit more about how you are implementing Salesforce and how it is helping you to really enable your teams and your providers to provide that personalized experience. If you can add a little more color, I'm so curious to know. more color, I'm so curious to know. Yes, so the application that we've now branded is called ProviderNet. It's short for ProviderNetwork. And our medical group is a product of mergers and acquisitions over the years that I've at

least been here. It's grown tremendously. And now with 5,000 physicians, that doesn't include another 2000 NPs and PAs across 800 locations. We had to graduate to a more modernized platform to understand who's in our network and manage our provider data and pull it out of different silos that were legacy in nature because again the way we came together was a product of all of these partnerships over the years. Which can be really difficult to glue it all together. I've been a part of companies where we grew through M&A and it is very difficult. So I understand. And then the people side of it is we have an ambulatory footprint that the tables of organization

is not one perfect, beautiful TO. There's two dozen, and we're calling it an enterprise distributed provider data management model. What that means is we've identified roles of accountable individuals throughout our ambulatory medical practice that are responsible for certain components of the provider's profile, their specialties, their clinical focus terms, where they practice, their locations.

And by bringing those individuals into Salesforce and consolidating those roles and expectations around provider data maintenance and governance is allowing us to get to a level of sophistication and accuracy in our provider data maintenance and governance is allowing us to get to a level of sophistication and accuracy in our provider data. And oh, by the way, augment provider data with far more specialties than what we have typically in nationally thinking about what's been board certified and credentials. We have created a new set of custom specialties that is further specifying our

providers with the help of our clinical leaders at Northwell and have identified a program methodology called clinical focus terms that also allows us to get to the procedure levels and reinvigorate our search and rank of doctors, leveraging how the data is managed and maintained inside of ProviderNet. So with this sort of truly accurate picture of our provider, their specializations and where they practice, we can do really cool things. Amazing, but if I'm hearing you correctly,

I wanna just make sure I understand. In this, because of your new system with Salesforce, you're able to better refer a patient to the right doctor for them, their needs, their location, all of that. Yes. So I can imagine the level of care and also personalization will just be able to be exponentially better.

Yes, yes. We want to take the noise out and just make it simple and easy like booking a flight. You know, can we get to that? The patient has a new diagnosis, the patient knows what type of specialist they want to see. They should be able to find it and then maybe use some other attributes about the provider that we can put forward. We promote culturally concordant care. My provider looks like me, can speak my spoken language. We could start to get very personalized and aid in some of our other priorities around culturally concordant care. That is proven to lead to better quality outcomes as well. So the full picture when you put it together is very special and market differentiating.

Completely. Well, this has been so fascinating, Alyssa. We are coming up to a close, so I'm going to ask you a couple of our lightning round questions that we ask all of our guests. And the first is, just think about your own personal experiences as a consumer out there in the world. I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had

with a brand or a company that really left you impressed. Tell us about that experience and why it was amazing. Because we've been thinking so much about the provider experience in culture and connections, my quick answer to this is sort of the provider experience in culture and connections. My quick answer to this is the Starbucks experience, where you walk into Starbucks and it feels friendly, it feels comfortable, it feels like you could talk to the person next to you.

There was actually a sociologist that coined the term a third place. It's this concept of your first place being your home, your second place being your work. Where are these third places that exist for people? And I think Starbucks has nailed it in figuring out a way to create a third place. We want to emulate this in what we do with our medical group. And we're thinking about how can we create third places for physicians to guide those culture and connections that we want to create among our physicians.

And traditionally, years ago, before smartphones, many of your listeners may remember this, but there was doctors lounges in hospitals. It was essentially a third place for physicians to go. And I think over the years, at least from what I've seen, maybe they're not as frequented as much anymore because maybe doctors' schedules really can't afford that protected time. Hospitalist programs are leaving a lot of the ambulatory physicians in their office. They're less frequenting the hospital.

And within our medical group practice, we've introduced a new version of a doctor's lounge to bring physicians together and brand it as such, that common third place and using that as an opportunity to guide better relationships and connections with such a large group as trying to get to that Starbucks environment. So it's psychologically safe and comfortable and friendly and warm, sort of all the things that you feel when you visit that coffee shop.

Mm-hmm. I definitely want my physician to be able to have that type of place. I can just imagine that that creates such a better working environment, such a better mood, an ability to really show up for the patient. So I'm feeling like I need to move back to New York now. And my last question for you, Alyssa, is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Obsessed over every detail and think What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?

Obsess over every detail and think of it as a full patient experience, which means you have to think about every detail, not just one. Sometimes when you get a patient letter or you read a comment, it's a very specific experience that at times they're talking about and taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture and then obsess over every moment, I think is how you start to move the needle on renewed experience and a modernized experience and that sort of thing. So I think that's what would be my final word here.

I love that's what would be my final word here. I love that advice. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and educating us in terms of the future of the patient experience, especially in the hospital system. So really appreciate your time and all of your insights. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. An AI agent your customers actually enjoy talking to?

Salesforce has you covered. Meet Agent Force Service Agent, the AI agent that can resolve cases in conversational language anytime on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com slash agent force.