Northwell Health Takes Digital Patient Experience to New Heights

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

When the pandemic hit New York City, Northwell Health became a proving ground for new technology solutions to help mitigate the extreme challenges. Having an agile in-house team capable of creating sophisticated new solutions is “a tremendous muscle for the organization,” says Emily Kagan Trenchard.

Northwell Health’s homegrown native app, winner of a platinum award in the 2021 Annual eHealthcare Leadership Awards, was “fresh into the app store” as the pandemic was looming, says Emily Kagan Trenchard, vice president of digital and innovation strategy at Northwell Health, a major health system in the New York metropolitan area. The prior year, Northwell received a platinum award for “Best Overall Digital Patient Experience.”

The app was the latest addition to Northwell’s award-winning suite of digital solutions designed to work in concert with one another. The timing could not have been better, as New York City was about to become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

Emily Kagan Trenchard, vice president of digital and innovation strategy, Northwell Health

“If we didn’t have our own hands on the wheel of our digital infrastructure, we would have been at the mercy of how fast our vendors could have rendered solutions and offer them back for us to adopt, as opposed to us being proactive and saying, ‘Okay, what do we need? How are we going to build it?’” Kagan Trenchard says.

Mike Mangi, Northwell’s director of digital product management, adds, “The timing there helped us a great deal, because though it was not easy, the challenge we had next was scale, rather than foundational building. Without that critical foundation, it would have been a much slower response.”

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