I recently had the opportunity to interview Nader Mherabi, CIO at NYU Langone Health, about the importance of patient-centricity. Here are the highlights from our conversation.

NYU Langone Health is one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers. Its trifold mission — to serve, teach, and discover — is carried out within a deeply integrated, academic culture devoted to excellence in patient care, education, and research. I know firsthand as I served on faculty at the NYU School of Medicine, which is an integral part of the NYU Langone Health system.

Last year, NYU Langone launched a clinical affairs patient access center platform that streamlines and optimizes the way call center agents interact with patients. The new platform provides agents with a holistic and customized view of a patient’s electronic health record through real-time integration with Salesforce Health Cloud. 

With the new platform in place, NYU Langone has significantly improved the way patients communicate with staff, leading to a highly personalized and more seamless patient experience.

What does patient experience mean to you?

To me, patient engagement means figuring out what the patient needs and when they need it and then successfully delivering that solution in a timely and personalized manner.

How do you define patient engagement?

At NYU Langone, patient engagement means matching patients with a provider and allowing them to seamlessly booking an appointment through our Find a Doc site; it means patients can conveniently submit a co-payment through the NYU Langone MyChart App; it means patients can get ready for an upcoming procedure via a personalized, easy to understand digital prep. And it means they can use our integrated virtual urgent care service to video chat with a provider from their homes.

Whether it’s for a single episode of care or a lifetime of health maintenance, we continually develop ways to better engage our patients.

Why is patient experience important to NYU Langone? Specifically, can you talk about the importance of patient experience within the access center?

We want all of our patients to have a convenient, highly personalized experience with us. We want to provide them with the means to communicate with us that work best for them. For many of our patients, that means a phone call. Our patient access center is an important part of that interaction. By empowering our call center agents with more information about our patients — and a structured way to capture that information — we improve our ability to deliver an exceptional experience. When a patient calls our patient access center, she is greeted personally by an agent who has ready access to her information available in the Salesforce record, enabling the agent to understand the patient’s needs and preferences. That information is made available to every agent, ensuring a consistent experience for the patient.

How does focusing on patient experience position NYU Langone as a leader in the healthcare provider space?

Every consumer service that our patients interact with, whether it is booking a hotel or ordering groceries online, it is designed to be convenient and highly personalized. We know that healthcare can be the same. We also recognize that in the competitive New York healthcare environment, we must offer our patients an experience that exceeds their expectations.

NYU Langone consists of six inpatient locations. How does the patient experience differ from one campus to another?

Our patient digital experience solutions are enterprise-wide, meaning that whichever NYU Langone location you visit, you will enjoy a consistent and excellent user experience. Our solutions are also deeply integrated, helping to ensure the accuracy and availability of information and, consequently, improved clinical outcomes and clinician efficiency.

What’s next for NYU Langone in terms of digital innovation and patient experience?

We continue to explore ways to improve patient engagement with access to prescribed digital apps and educational content. We are expanding our use of video chat to even more clinical services, leveraging it for post-operative video visits and remote patient monitoring. We are redesigning the preadmission testing process to offer greater convenience to patients and efficiency for providers. Given that over ten million diagnostic images are captured at NYU Langone every year, we are improving the entire radiology experience with services like radiology-specific patient communication and access to images via the NYU Langone Health MyChart app.

We are also committed to improving our clinicians’ experience and have just launched a clinician digital experience program, in collaboration with our operational and clinical partners, to explore ways to enhance the clinician experience through digital means. By using technologies like natural language processing, we aim to empower our providers and give them greater opportunity for face-to-face interactions with patients. Finally, we want to lessen the administrative burden on our clinicians and further foster the personal relationships they have with their patients. 

To learn more, see NYU Langone Health Launches New Technology Platform to Transform Digital Patient Experience. Also, click here to explore videos on the connected patient journey.