LAS VEGAS – Advocate Health launched a personalized digital health experience journey to support connection to and reinforce trust with patients, which is paying off. 

But it’s not just about simplifying technology and cost savings.

“You want to know that your experience program does have value for your organization,” Ed Mitchell, director of strategic partnerships at Advocate Health, said Tuesday at HIMSS25 here as he presented details about Advocate’s pediatric patient engagement use case.

“So what are the metrics that you’re keeping? What’s the score that you’re keeping? Are you winning? Are you losing?”

The non-profit health system – the third largest in the United States – chose Xealth to provide intelligent automation based on clinical workflows through its integration with its Epic electronic health records. 

Using EHR data in the rule section configuration of the patient experience platform, Mitchell said Advocate’s pediatric use case shows that integration can get the right information to the right patient at the right time – without doctors having to trigger and manage the flow of information to each patient.

That means that as the platform automates patient education based on their health history, it reduces clinical administrative burdens.

Patient experience requests are always getting pushed down on the health system’s IT wish list, noted Aaron Sheedy, chief operating officer and cofounder of Xealth, a digital health platform vendor. 

When a clinician comes up with a really good idea about how they want to take care of their patients better and engage them more and consult their organization’s technologists to get it deployed, they may often have to wait for system upgrades or the next migration, “and it ends up in the bottom of the stack,” he said.

With Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and HL7, the vendor’s patient experience tools integrate within Advocate’s patient portal, called LiveWell.

“You don’t have to go get in line” and the integration reduces IT lift, said Sheedy. 

“We’re meeting the patient where they are, but more importantly, we’re getting the information that the doctor wants them to have,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell said the program showed an increase of 30% in patient engagement – a notable rise in videos watched and patient handouts accessed.

“We want patients to start their journeys within their health system portal so that they don’t get disinformation from TikTok, or conclude that they shouldn’t get their measles vaccination,” said Sheedy.

The automated engagement is “based on triggers that are contextual to the patient journey,” which reduces the the burden on clinicians to get relevant information and education out to patients “right before, right after and during during a visit,” he said.

Working with the clinical service line leads, “we get the workflows that they want,” Sheedy said, who advised organizing a clinical team to set engagement priorities.

The platform also gives pediatricians and specialists visibility into how pediatric patients are progressing because it checks in with them on medications and progress using healthy living exercise videos and other patient education aligned to their specific health needs.

The patient portal is the “spoke in the wheel” for the program, Mitchell said. The automation kicks in once a patient arrives for a visit – an email and then a text message. 

“It’s letting you know your doctor has information that pertains to your visit,” he said. “Click on this link, and that’ll take you to your information.”

Initially, when Advocate designed the workflow, the focus was on the provider. 

“We missed the consumer aspect,” Mitchell said. “So we were originally forcing them to go directly to LiveWell, but we saw a drop off where you’re asking them to enter in their password for MyChart.”

After that, a patient needed to go to the portal menu to find digital care. 

“We needed to be able to make that easier. So, what we did was actually streamline the workflow. So, now you’re going straight to the self-portal,” he said.

Other key learnings from the use case are automating patient engagement whenever possible, enabling digital facilitation of provider-patient connections and reducing IT need.

“The more that you can take off a clinician’s to-do list, the more burden that you lift,” said Mitchell. 

“And in an environment where clinician burnout is one of the key factors that I think just about every health system in the United States is facing right now, when you’re able to work with a platform that can actually help alleviate the burden for your clinicians, that’s a win-win for everybody,” he said.

Advocate is turning on another communication channel – text. 

“Engagement rates go way up, and they go up even higher in the underserved population who respond much better to text messaging than emails,” Sheedy said. 

“As you’re trying to get an underserved population more engaged with harder and harder things for them to be thinking about, getting SMS into that channel is incredibly important.”

Advocate is also broadening the patient engagement program by developing user experience journeys from personas, and is looking to create new use cases for pre-diabetic, bariatric and physical therapy patients.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.