Advancing a Unified, Centralized Strategic Approach to Patient-Centered Communication at UCI Health and Stanford Health Care
Alignment is hard to come by in complex organizations like hospitals and health systems. But progress is possible when stakeholders come together and make decisions collaboratively.
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
It takes a lot of cooperation among disparate groups to create seamless experiences for consumers. When it comes to patient communications in traditionally siloed organizations like health systems, how do you get clinical leaders, IT, the call center, marketing, patient experience, revenue cycle, and ambulatory and inpatient operations all on the same page?
Two California health systems are cracking the code, with centralized governance groups.
Tara Nooteboom, director of Consumer Digital Strategy at UCI Health
Tara Nooteboom is director of Consumer Digital Strategy at UCI Health, Orange County’s only academic health system. “One difference that I have seen in our organization is the fact that we do have this governance group, this consumer digital decision group that includes so many parts of the organization and relatively high-level leaders. We come together and talk about what we want to achieve as an organization.”
At Stanford Health Care, an annual flu campaign became the model for creating a standardized protocol for all campaigns. In the past, individual departments had the burden of getting the word out, with patients potentially receiving multiple messages, sometimes with conflicting instructions.
Rochelle Cornell, manager of Clinical IT at Stanford Health Care
Rochelle Cornell, manager of Clinical IT, says, “We had to bring together faculty, the physician group. We had to bring together marketing, because of course Stanford Medicine, that’s a great brand — we have great affection for that brand in our area. We had to bring in the call center as well, so everybody was singing from the same songbook.”
The resulting conversions proved the value of this approach, she adds, “That worked so well, we decided we should just make this a process for any campaigns going forward.”
Here, we explore how governance groups function in these two organizations, how they work through conflicts and set priorities, and in the case of Stanford Health Care, how optimizing the process has dramatically improved conversions.