Providers Come Together to Crowdsource Healthcare Ideas

Providers Come Together to Crowdsource Healthcare Ideas

Healthcare is complicated. The system is hard for both patients and healthcare employees to navigate. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated that and brought unprecedented change to an already complex industry.

To help make the journey a little easier, Medallia recently partnered with Ipsos to launch the Healthcare Ideas Community. The new platform brings together healthcare leaders from all over — front-line nurses, doctors and other medical staff — to crowdsource ideas and collaborate on solutions to the industry’s biggest challenges. 

Enabling Collaboration with Healthcare Ideas Community

In the past, if a healthcare professional had an idea to improve the healthcare experience, that idea likely wouldn’t make it much further than their own department and organization. 

The Healthcare Ideas platform enables employees to bring issues to light so that other healthcare professionals worldwide can provide feedback and solutions. Users recommend challenges, add their own ideas for potential solutions, collaborate and vote on the best ways to tackle them.

An Idea for Improving Telehealth

One recent challenge posed within the community was called Telehealth Ideas. With the recent pandemic, telehealth has gone from being a convenience to a necessity. This was a timely subject and the challenge got a lot of responses.

One idea that generated a lot of interest came from Wes Williams, a Healthcare Ideas user, and CIO of Mental Health Center of Denver. Wes noticed that because many patients were not familiar or comfortable with telehealth, providers were spending valuable patient time troubleshooting technical challenges. 

In order to make telehealth work for the 4,000 patients they see on a weekly basis, they needed to solve this challenge. He had a simple solution: Integrate a technology readiness check with a reminder call. Staff could help the patients download software, create an account and test their settings so the patient and the doctor can be sure telehealth will work for them when they need it. 

The idea worked. As patients became comfortable with telehealth at the Mental Health Center of Denver, they saw value in it and were far less likely to miss their appointment. 

Once Wes implemented this simple solution, “no shows” decreased. That’s not all. The organization found that virtual patient visits tend to be more efficient while maintaining the same level of patient satisfaction, which allows providers the flexibility to see additional clients. 

More Healthcare Ideas to Come

By sharing these results on the Healthcare Ideas Community, other healthcare organizations can now benefit from his experiment.

As Wes shared, “Innovation doesn’t start with technology. It begins with figuring out how to make it work to benefit the people using it.” It turns out that one solution to the telehealth problem didn’t require more technology — it needed a human touch instead. 

The Healthcare Ideas Community was built by Medallia’s Crowdicity solution to inspire innovations just like this. Plan on seeing more great ideas emerge from the new community as more healthcare professionals work together to improve healthcare.

Learn more about improving access to healthcare with Medallia’s new Telemedicine Suite.