CHRISTUS + QUALTRICS

Every patient matters at CHRISTUS Health. The health system implemented a closed loop ticketing system to ensure they follow up directly with any patient who has a negative experience at a medical practice location. Using Qualtrics, CHRISTUS team members are assigned tickets and automatically prompted to reach out to patients who gave a likelihood to recommend score of 0-6 out of 10 in a post-visit survey. The goal is to resolve any issues, ensure patients feel heard and understood and identify opportunities for improvement across the organization.

The pilot program began with one primary care clinic. After three months of success, six more clinics went live. From then on, CHRISTUS rolled out 25 sites every month until all clinics utilized closed loop ticketing. During each roll-out, the patient experience leaders would systematically train clinic leaders and ticket group members on service recovery and the Qualtrics platform to ensure that each ticket was completed correctly. In just a year and a half, CHRISTUS has implemented this program across 230 medical practice sites, and is closing an average of 80 tickets a day.

“The closed loop program has been a continuous learning opportunity for our team and has allowed us to truly hear the voice of our patients,” said Katie Lebleu, Director of Patient Experience for Northeast Texas and Louisiana, CHRISTUS Trinity Clinic.

CHRISTUS wanted to go a step further to quantify the impact they were having on patients and ensure their investment in the program was paying off. They implemented a final three-question survey post follow-up to find out if the system was working well, ticketing agents were providing valuable help and patient needs were being met. They discovered the program was having an even greater effect than they imagined.

For the 432 patients alone who completed this follow-up survey in 2023, CHRISTUS’s efforts to resolve their pain points resulted in this group continuing to spend an average of $250 per month with CHRISTUS. That’s an additional $108,000 per month in revenue that would have been lost had these patients switched providers.

Among people who initially reported a negative experience, the likelihood to recommend score increased from an average of 3.8 to a 6.8. CHRISTUS observed a trend where even when a patient’s situation couldn’t be fully remedied, having someone reach out to express concern improved their likelihood to recommend score. Overall, 74% of patients who received follow-up reported feeling heard and understood.

The follow-up survey unlocked a bevy of data that was otherwise unactionable. Now, the team can evaluate results based on the location and ticket owner, in order to hone in on what’s working and what’s not. In addition, CHRISTUS can see the root cause for each ticket and tie that back to likelihood to recommend. They can quickly determine if people are experiencing a common problem – like trouble resetting the password on their account — or if there’s an issue ticket owners are not equipped to resolve that needs attention.

“This is a game changer,” said Jeff Borcherding, Director of Patient Experience for South Texas, CHRISTUS Trinity Clinic. “By gathering experiences through our service recovery conversations with actual patients, we can identify key touch points in the patient journey and begin to close care gaps that otherwise may have gone unrecognized.”