Speaker 1: Hey everyone, I'm John Lin, the Founder and Chief Editor at Healthcare IT Today. We're excited to bring you another in our series of interviews with top leaders in health IT. And our guest today is Dan Lillinquist, he's Chief Strategy Officer at Intermountain Health. Welcome Dan. John, good to be with you. Yeah, so excited to have a discussion. We're here at Qualtrics User Conference X4, talking about user experience. But before we dive into that topic, tell us a little bit about yourself and Intermountain Health.

Speaker 2: So, Intermountain Health is a large integrated healthcare delivery system. We've got 33 hospitals and 400 or so clinics and about 60,000 people who work with us. And I serve as the Chief Strategy Officer, been with the company about 10 years and I'm really enjoying it.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, you know, you recently announced that Intermountain Health decided to work with Qualtrics. Talk about, you know, why did you make that decision?

Speaker 2: John, look, healthcare is kind of a mess when it comes to the consumer experience. I mean, the whole industry has been built up in a siloed way and for good reason. People get sick, they come and get care. We usually were really good about, you know, getting people back to their lives, but largely healthcare has been transactional. The future of healthcare has got to be one where you build a long-term relationship with people and keep them well. And that's Intermountain's mission is to help people live the healthiest lives possible. So as we move towards that aspiration and really organize our strategy and all of our resources against that, we realized that we weren't totally situationally aware of what was happening with our patients and with our customers. And so we're excited to partner with Qualtrics because that's exactly what we hope to do. Healthcare has got to move away from just active listening with surveys to really passive listening and being aware so that we can engage in service recovery and those types of activities on a real-time basis. The complexity is high. Everything's on the line with respect to, you know, people's health. And so getting this right is important. And as we looked around at potential partners, Qualtrics really got the vision that we have and jives with theirs and we're excited to invest to figure out what this should look like because I don't think anybody's doing it really well in healthcare today.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's fair. It's a reasonable... And I say that a lot of us took it for granted for a long time because we had so many patients. We didn't have to do it. But how do you think this effort will maybe help you understand better the patient experience at Intermountain Health? It's interesting you said the passive versus active. I think that's really interesting. But, you know, what do you think is, how is this going to help you better understand that patient experience?

Speaker 2: Well, last year, just last year, we took 32 million phone calls just in our Utah market. And that's 32 million times people reached out to us. It usually wasn't because they were having a great experience. It was because something was happening and they need help. And what we realized is that gleaning the information from all those phone calls is really difficult to do. It ended up being anecdotal, not systematic. So one of the first things we're working on with the Qualtrics team is on our call center technology, our touch points, make sure that we are implementing the XM Discover Toolkit. And so we understand our learning about why people are calling us, being able to, again, be much more on the front foot about how we handle and identify and reduce friction points, really. And so we're excited for the learning there. And this is just the start of our journey.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean, how do you glean all that data? Interesting enough, my mom and dad are a few of those calls. So it matters to me that you're successful at this effort, right? You know, I think it's interesting, you know, now we've talked about surveys, we talked about calls, but, you know, how are you really going to approach all this feedback? Because, you know, through Qualtrics, you get the surveys, but you also get other feedback from social media, from websites, from your contact center, etc. How do you go through and kind of process all that and then prioritize what's in there? You know, that's a great question.

Speaker 2: And we're just learning. There are certain areas where we know we get enough feedback, where we know where the friction points are. But our office of really consumer experience, we have a vice president of consumer experience, and her job, Laura McDonough, is really to focus on three things, identifying and removing friction, journey mapping, and then helping us with one or two big kind of what we hope to be transformational initiatives at a time. And the only way to really keep track of that is to start listening, organizing that information, tying it into a longitudinal record by an individual so that you're situationally aware. And what we hope to do one day is to make sure that every one of our 60,000 caregivers, when, John, you're in front of them, they know about you, what your preferences are, what your care pathway is, what are the open care gaps we need to help you with, and essentially be able to help you in your journey regardless of who you're interfacing with. And heretofore, that's just been almost impossible. There's, again, healthcare is built up in silos. We're really good at certain journeys. If you get cancer, we're great at that. But if you are pre-diabetic or you have a concern about something, just trying to interface with the system can be difficult to do. So we're looking at every opportunity to bring together a comprehensive view of our customers. Obviously, protected information is part of HIPAA, et cetera, but the goal is that when you interface with us, we can be a trusted advisor throughout your journey. We want to keep people well, and then when they need our care, give them really cost-effective, high-quality, safe care, but really get them back to their lives. And that fits in right with Intermountain's mission to help people live the healthiest

Speaker 1: lives possible. Absolutely. You know, I think it's interesting to listen to feedback from patients, and it's another to actually do something about it, right? I mean, the fact you have someone dedicated to solving those friction points is probably more than a lot of healthcare organizations can say. How else are you looking to really kind of actualize the feedback that's given into something that's useful and implemented? How are you thinking about that, rather than just, hey, here's some reports that we give to the CEO, and he's like, oh, okay, we've improved.

Speaker 2: Well, if consumer experience is not built into the flow of your management concepts and what you track every day, it won't change. And at Intermountain, we do 3,000 huddles every day, every single business day of the week, and it rolls up, and we track experience every day. We track several things, safety, quality, experience, access, equity, stewardship, but we have metrics that we track every day. And our goal is to make sure that we are situationally aware, that we're aligned, and that we can use our great operating models, operating models that have us, we're the safest, highest quality healthcare organization when you're sick. But now we hope to take that mechanism, that continuous improvement learning cycle, and the insights around how do we do better for our customers. So we feel like we've got the operational muscles to do this. We now need the insights and our tracking systems we're building, but also our ability to move the organization, we'll use the tools that we've been effectively used for a long

Speaker 1: time. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. I think back to my high school, one of my best friends in high school, his dad was CEO of Intermountain, and it was all about quality and how do we improve the quality. I'm really excited to see what you all do with Qualtrics platform to really improve the patient experience as well. So thanks so much, Dan. And thanks, everyone, for watching and listening. If you want to find more great healthcare IT content like this, be sure to check it out at healthcareittoday.com or search for Healthcare IT Today on your favorite podcast application. Thanks, Dan. Great to be with you, John. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Take care. Bye.