Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Wed, 22 Jan 2025
There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling misunderstood, undervalued, or out of place in a doctor’s office. That’s exactly why Northwell Health has set a new standard for both physician and patient experience. Alyssa Scully, Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health, shares exactly how her team is transforming provider and patient experience, and their methods might surprise you… From hyperpersonalized physician referrals to patient care plans designed to bring you more fulfillment and joy — instead of simply treating symptoms of a disease — Northwell Health is redefining “care” on every level. Tune in to discover Northwell Health's innovative approaches to improving both patient and physician experiences, including data-driven metrics, annual award programs, patient experience transparency, and reducing day-to-day administrative burdens for doctors.Key Moments: 00:00 Alyssa Scully, Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health00:46 Balancing Patient Experience and Operations02:40 Supporting and Empowering Physicians04:33 The Impact of Technological Advances in Healthcare10:20 Physician Wellness Programs21:17 Training and Empowering Healthcare Teams36:15 Implementing Salesforce for Personalized Care42:31 Creating A “Third Place” For Physicians –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What is Northwell Health's approach to patient care?
this very large movement at northwell finding what matters most to the individual it's less about the disease and it's more about the fulfillment and the care for that patient and whatever problem that means the most to them we're getting away from this concept of being disease specific. And we're asking questions about what matters most to our patients, what would make their life easier.
And the answers to those questions are starting to be embedded into their care plans.
There's nothing worse than hearing someone say, we can't help you with that. And having a team activated around working together to get the person to the result that they need so that we don't have to say no to them is just such an important factor. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood.
Today, I am joined by Alyssa Scully, the Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health, to chat about New York's largest health care provider and how they are setting new standards for patient success through data-driven metrics, personalized care programs, and prioritizing the physician experience. They have a vast, vast network of hospitals and outpatient facilities.
And so we're going to really understand how Northwell Health is working to create the best possible experience for both their physicians and their patients. Alessa, wonderful to have you on the show.
Yes, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
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Chapter 2: How do you balance patient experience and operational complexity?
So something I always think about with hospitals, and I'm so glad that we have you on the show because this question, anytime I walk into a medical setting, I always wonder, how do you approach balancing the patient experience with the operational complexity of running a hospital?
It's a good question. So we are fortunate at North to be guided by some tremendously talented leaders. And one of the things that's very special is how we always take a patient-centric approach to what we do. So our operational improvement activities, our operational metrics, everything that we're thinking about by way of
advancing, growing, improving, augmenting, and modernizing is really built around the patient experience for us. So we think about really everything we do, it's around the patient. So in terms of balancing, I think having the patient in the center to begin with helps us think about ways to effectively improve but aid in that better experience for that patient point of view.
So we do that a number of ways and I work inside of our medical group practice, and we're one of the top 10 largest medical groups in the country. And we have created cultures with our physicians and partnerships with our physicians in supporting this as well.
So it's not only a balance of operational improvements, but also physician engagement in the plans that we create forward to build what is one of our strategic priorities in creating lifelong patient loyalty, we like to say. for our communities in New York here?
I'd love to dive into that because I know the physician experience can be really challenging. I mean, if we think about what these doctors are facing day in and day out in some of the most high stress and difficult situations that I think anyone can be in. How do you go about really supporting and empowering those physicians to provide that great experience while they're handling everything else?
So I am pleased to say that that has been my primary focus here at Northwell for the last seven years. So we are a physician service oriented group. Our medical group practice branded Northwell Physician Partners has 5,000 physicians. So geographically spread across 780 ambulatory sites and 21 hospitals.
And we have partnered with our service line structure and our regional structure to bring programs, for doctors and allow for those to grow and, again, do it in a way that it's designed with our physician partners at the table, in many ways also leading these. I could tell you one thing. For every one hour of patient care provided by a doctor, there's two hours of administrative work tied to that.
Wow.
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Chapter 3: What strategies support and empower physicians?
From a clinical practice perspective and just in the ambulatory setting, it could be placing follow-up referral orders. The patient has to leave and go see several subspecialty visits. They have to do all of the documentation associated with those orders. They have to close their notes within a certain period of time. Those notes have to be documented well, of course, for billing.
And then that's where things start to pile up. They're also so attentive and they want to get back to the patient's portal messages, especially if there's a lab that winds up on the portal, because now we make labs available via the patient portal that lends itself to more messaging response, you know, calls to the office.
We're doing a lot to think about how to assemble the care team around that provider. Inbox standards of practice is something that We're spending a lot of time in now. How could the RN and the medical assistants help be an extension of the physician to help reduce some of those follow-up conversations or orders that are required?
And then there's the regulatory components of the practice and the reporting requirements for us. We're part of an ACO. We're involved in CMS clinical quality improvement programs. And it's sort of e-prescribing. You know, the list can go on and on for that physician.
Yeah. How have technological advances changed the way that your providers are providing to patients? I mean, you said you've been at Northwell or at least in this position for seven years. And I'd love to understand how this is changing even in the time that you've been really working with providers.
One of the incredible pieces about Northwell is it's just willingness to continue to grow. In fact, I mentioned earlier, one of our strategic priorities, creating lifelong patient loyalty. Another strategic priority is surrounding growth and broadening our footprint and impact in our communities in our New York region. And over the last seven years, the medical group has grown in size.
When I started, it was around 3,200 physicians, and we've quickly gotten to 5,000 in just this short, less than a decade. With that requires a lot of adaptability to what we create and our services that we provide and our footprint and our distribution of services throughout the geographies and based off of certain needs of demographics.
but it also over the years allowed us to think a little bit differently about our IT infrastructure. And we are currently undergoing a major digital transformation at Northwell, which I think is incredibly timely and allowing us to move away from our current EHR platform over to Epic.
And that's gonna be done over several years, but the optimization of the provider's experience, our clinical practice workflows, and even our patients by way of the new patient portal,
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Chapter 4: How are technological advances changing healthcare delivery?
Some of the others for the other pillars include spiritual, physical health, emotional health, social and so on. But the practice environment pieces is where we've been spending the most time.
Mm hmm. Well, congratulations on that award. It definitely shows that you guys have been spending efforts in the right places. I'm curious to know, what is the impact? I mean, it sounds I can definitely think of, you know, why it is impactful to make sure that there is a strong approach to ensuring that providers are mentally well to be able to deliver on this job.
But what have you seen in terms of the impact of really prioritizing the well-being of your physicians?
I don't know if I mentioned it yet, but I think the biggest impact for me is our goal to make Northwell Health the best place to work for doctors. And we do that with the tremendous leadership of our physician executives here. And the impact in our work and our focus and our investments are, at least from where I sit, tied to create that positive experience for the doctor.
Their experience is their why. is what we tend to ask them about a lot. And we look for ways for them to get back to that, why sort of the humanism and the human service that they're providing and why they got into medicine is something that we have kind of instilled in the culture. And we lean into that when we work with our physicians and we look for ways to improve
It really always gets back to why we're here. So we're frequently starting meetings with patient stories. We have a program called the Culture of Care at Northwell, where we train team members and physicians on
components of the patient experience that support this concept of intellectual fulfillment, joy in medicine, meaning in medicine that helps to put the patient back in the center, like what I mentioned earlier, and align with the physicians in a way that they feel fulfilled in their work every day.
And, you know, it will deal with mitigating the issues on the back end, as long as they're there continuing to shine in the front.
And I can imagine from the patient perspective, having a physician that's really connected to their why in being a physician and getting into medicine in the first place, it is not an easy job. You have to be driven by purpose, I would imagine. And the patient experience, I'm just kind of thinking and playing this out, the patient experience in
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Chapter 5: What initiatives improve physician wellness?
And so those opportunities are important when we think about our group culture and the physician engagement for what we do.
Tell me a little bit more about the patient award.
We have our care provider items in the patient experience survey that's administered. It's ambulatory medical practice. So if a patient comes to an ambulatory, one of the 780 sites, and they see a physician, they'll get a survey that's administered. And we have a five-star transparency program within the medical group where patients
Those aggregated care provider score items are rated on a five point scale. And if you visit our Northwell Health website and go to our find a doctor, you'll actually see those ratings on the physician's profile. And those physicians that get to that five star over a 12 month measurement period achieve the annual patient's choice award.
I can imagine. I mean, I love this concept because it creates so much transparency. I always find it really difficult to find a good doctor. Personally, I live in California, so I unfortunately can't come to Northwell, but I always find it to be difficult in really finding a great physician. And when I do see that there is ratings, it's like, oh, okay, I can understand.
Or people can leave comments. I can start to understand a little bit more of who that physician is and are they the right fit for me? Because at the end of the day, it's such a personal experience.
And just creating that transparency, I think for anyone who's listening in any business, as much as we can create transparency of how do other people experience this experience, it also forces us to level up It forces the providers to really create an experience where five stars can be given.
And on that note, I want to talk about the employees beyond the physicians, because it is not just the physician that creates the experience. It's the front desk employees, it's the nurses. How do you go about training and empowering those teams to really provide the level of experience that you want to create within Northwell?
Yes. So I would say it starts with day one. Our president and CEO, Michael Dowling, who's just a tremendously transformational leader and globally recognized, attends Physician Beginnings and our New Beginnings program. We have orientation once a week, usually Monday or Friday, he will be there to welcome all of our new hires every week.
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Chapter 6: How does Northwell Health recognize physician achievements?
And it leads to essentially care plans that create more life fulfillment versus just a disease specific care plan. So that's a significant change in how I think traditionally health systems and providers think, but it's necessary. And I think everybody is very much on board with finding a way to action on that at scale.
These three points that you just made are so incredibly important for any business. Finding the yes, every moment matters, and really finding what matters most to that person. How can we provide value to them? Because it's different. It depends on each and every one of us.
And I think that finding the yes, I just want to highlight that one specifically because I'm sure we've all been, we've all called And, you know, I think insurance companies or there's some companies that tend to be a little harder to find that yes with where you call and they say, no, we can't help you with that. There's nothing worse than hearing someone say yes. We can't help you with that.
Sorry, try someone else or do something else. And having a team activated around working together to get the person to the result that they need so that we don't have to say no to them is just such an important factor. And I'm sure it's very difficult to do in a healthcare setting as well. I can imagine there are a lot of things that you can't always do.
So how do you guide the team to really do that?
Luckily, the digital transformation and the new applications we're bringing in will optimize those workflows to enable more of that team-based approach and sharing of tasks to create quicker connections to answer problems or requests. Patients and providers alike. We, in parallel to our EHR transformation, have also signed on with Salesforce in a meaningful way.
We are pursuing a CRM for patients and a CRM for providers. I am working on the provider side as a business partner to the project. And I can tell you that it will be a market differentiator in designing a provider PRM experience that We'll personalize how that physician appears by way of search and their specializations.
So we can connect patients directly to the right providers based off of what specifically that provider does down to the procedure level and what that patient needs. And I think those two pieces is what's going to enable personalized care for us over the next few years, which... is incredibly exciting to watch and be a part of. We like to talk all the time about how to get there.
And I think we finally have the application and features and capabilities and talent around these two methodologies we call Provider 360 and Patient 360 to get to a place where we can connect the two in a meaningful way and do allow for more to be done as a self-service. I think that's the other piece. Consumerism in healthcare is certainly here. It's all over.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of patient experience transparency?
Yes.
So I can imagine the level of care and also personalization will just be able to be exponentially better.
Yes, yes. We want to take the noise out and just make it simple and easy, like booking a flight. Can we get to that? The patient has a new diagnosis. The patient knows what type of subspecialist they want to see. They should be able to find it and then maybe use some other attributes about the provider that we can put forward. We promote culturally concordant care.
My provider looks like me, can speak my spoken language. We could start to get very personalized providers and aid in some of our other priorities around culturally concordant care, that is proven to lead to better quality outcomes as well. So the full picture when you put it together is very special and market differentiating.
Mm-hmm, completely. Well, this has been so fascinating, Alyssa. We are coming up to a close. So I'm gonna ask you a couple of our lightning round questions that we ask all of our guests. And the first is, Just think about your own personal experiences as a consumer out there in the world.
I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand or a company that really left you impressed. Tell us about that experience and why it was amazing.
Because we've been thinking so much about the provider experience and culture and connections, my quick answer to this is sort of the Starbucks experience where you kind of walk into Starbucks and it feels... It feels comfortable. It feels like you could talk to the person next to you. And there was actually a sociologist that coined the term a third place.
So it's this concept of your first place being your home, your second place being your work. where are these third places that exist for people? And I think Starbucks has nailed it in figuring out a way to create a third place. We want to emulate this in what we do with our medical group. And we're thinking about how can we create third places for physicians to guide patients
those culture and connections that we want to create among our physicians. And traditionally, years ago, before smartphones, many of your listeners may remember this, but there was doctor's lounges in hospitals. It was essentially a third place for physicians to go.
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