How Two Health Systems Leverage CRM and EHR Functionality to Create the Digital Patient Experience Consumers Expect 

// By Althea Fung //

Bon Secours Mercy Health, a 50-hospital health system spanning seven states and Ireland, was in the midst of redefining the patient journey experience when COVID hit.

“We’re one of the five largest Catholic healthcare systems in the U.S. — we have thousands of points of care and 60,000 associates. So, as you can imagine, making healthcare easy to access, from a digital perspective, it’s critically important for us,” says Morgan Griffith, vice president of digital strategy and transformation at Bon Secours Mercy Health, at a Becker’s Hospital Review 11th Annual Meeting webinar.

Morgan Griffith, vice president of digital strategy and transformation, Bon Secours Mercy Health

The plan was to offer patients an Amazon-like experience — personalizing care, no matter how patients choose to access their care. Whether a patient chooses to pick up the phone, the mobile app, or visit the website, they would receive the same level of service. With much of the groundwork laid — having conducted consumer research, defined pain points, identified solutions, and gotten buy-in — Griffith’s team was planning to roll out the new experience one market at a time.

“That very quickly changed when COVID hit. We went from doing a couple of hundred virtual visits a day to thousands of virtual visits a day. We had a need to be able to communicate personally and directly with consumers in a way that was unique to them based on their needs,” she recalled. “We had a roadmap that was very waterfall in nature that very quickly became an agile roadmap.”

Here are highlights from the webinar sponsored by Salesforce, in which Griffith and Gary Ahwah, senior vice president of information technology at the City of Hope, discussed how COVID hastened the need for a digital-first strategy and how their organizations used the customer relationship management (CRM) system to keep up with demand.

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