How Prisma Health Used Teamwork and Data to Create a Better Patient Experience

// By Jim Samuel //

When South Carolina’s Prisma Health merged in 2017, Nick Patel, MD, the chief digital officer, was charged with creating a unified digital presence. We wrote about it in 2019, and here, Patel provides an update. Prisma Health worked with a steering committee to reach consensus on key decisions regarding its physician referrals and online scheduling platform. Through this process, the system uncovered new opportunities.

When South Carolina’s Greenville Health System merged with Palmetto Health in 2017 to create Prisma Health, the two systems did not know each other very well. They had different billing systems and different electronic health records (EHR). They even had different physician referral systems.

Nick Patel, MD, chief digital officer, Prisma Health

“We didn’t know each other, and providers didn’t know what services we had,” says Nick Patel, MD, chief digital officer (CDO) at Prisma Health. “We didn’t have unified [physician] profiles across the network.”

One of Patel’s first tasks as CDO of Prisma was to bring the disparate systems together into a unified system that would help improve patient access. “At the highest level, we wanted to improve online access, and we wanted to take a deeper dive into improving the patient experience,” he says. Prisma serves 1.2 million people in the upstate and midlands regions of South Carolina.

Patel recently joined Erin Jospe, MD, chief medical officer of Kyruus, to talk about how Prisma used data to bring the two health systems together and optimize patient access. Their conversation took place during the Society for Health Care Strategy and Market Development’s SHSMD Connections 2021 virtual conference.

Log in below to access this content: