Patients have valuable feedback on their experience during their hospital stays and clinic visits. Waiting for the patient to be discharged or leave the facility, then to provide feedback after the fact, represents a common lost opportunity for follow-up and a better, more responsive care journey for that patient.

Despite a high level of digital adoption, including EMRAM 7 and regular digital transformation initiatives, Banner Health's patient feedback process remained manual. The health system wanted to act on feedback right away to improve the patient experience.

Thus was born "Text the CEO." This is an innovative system that enables hospital leadership and staff to receive and act on patient feedback during the patients' visits to a hospital or practice. By allowing any patient, loved one or visitor to reach Banner Health by texting "CEO" or scanning a QR code, the health system receives feedback that can be viewed directly by hospital leadership, including the CEO.

Amy Adashek-Pinn is supervisor, senior digital project manager, at Banner Health. She will be presenting on this subject in an educational session entitled "Improving Patients' Care Experience with a 'Text the CEO' Form" at HIMSS25 next month.

We spoke with her to get an advance look at her session.

Q. Tell us about "Sofia" and "Text the CEO."

A. At Banner Health, we're always focused on creating a great experience for our patient, who we call "Sofia." Today's patients expect and need a digital consumer experience, all the way through their healthcare journey, so it's easier for them to access and participate in their care.

My session is focused on our "Text the CEO" initiative, which digitizes the patient feedback process across our locations. The goal of the project was to move beyond an outdated pencil-and-paper comment box and give patients the opportunity to have their feedback addressed in the moment of care.

With Text the CEO, patients can scan a QR code to leave feedback that goes directly to the hospital or clinic's leadership. All feedback receives a response within the same business day. Since the project began, it's exploded from a pilot at one hospital to one of our most widely adopted digital initiatives – it's in use at more than 125 locations including hospitals, urgent care clinics, imaging locations, occupational health, home health and ambulatory clinics across the health system.

Patient feedback is part of the care experience that can often be deprioritized for seemingly higher-value initiatives, but we've found that hearing patient feedback in real time and taking action on it improves patient satisfaction, team member recognition and even patient care. Text the CEO allows us to make a difference for our patients in ways we might not have been able to before.

Q. Please discuss the technology journey to Text the CEO.

A. This initiative required technology that would support real-time feedback from patients, SMS between patients and leadership, and a centralized monitoring system. We also needed a vendor that would co-design the workflow with us and continue to optimize the workflow based on the pilot and expansion.

We used our patient engagement technology from Luma Health to power this initiative because of our past success creating new workflows together, including a QR code-based patient check-in and screening process for our mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

The Text the CEO workflow involves these steps:

1. Patients scan a QR code to open a prepopulated text message on their phone.
2. In response, the patient gets a link to a short form on their phones.
3. Submitted forms are available to the monitoring team at each location on a dashboard, and on their phones.
4. The monitoring team can send an SMS to the patient directly from the dashboard (desktop or mobile). The team lets the patient know the feedback has been received, coordinates team member recognition or issue resolution as needed, and coordinates an in-person visit from the location's leadership if the patient consents.

Q. What is one takeaway, among others, you hope HIMSS25 attendees will leave your session with and be able to apply when they return home to their organizations?

A. The success of this initiative shows that taking a fresh look at manual or outdated parts of the patient journey is worthwhile.

Adashek-Pinn's session, "Improving Patients' Care Experience with a 'Text the CEO' Form," is scheduled for Tuesday, March 4, at 12:45 p.m. at HIMSS25 in Las Vegas.

Follow Bill's HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication

WATCH NOW: Tech boosts long-term care communication and administrative processes