Joey Wahler (Host): It's changing how health systems use the feedback they obtain. So we're discussing Transforming Patient Experience Data. Our guest is Ty Allen. He's President of Patient Experience Solutions at RL Datix, which is one of ACHE's premier corporate partners. Those partners support ACHE'S vision and mission to advance Healthcare Leadership Excellence.

This is the Healthcare Executive Podcast from the American College of Healthcare Executives, providing you with insightful commentary and developments in the world of healthcare leadership. To learn more, visit ache.org. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Joey Wahler. Hi there, Ty. Welcome.

Ty Allen: Thank you, Joey. It's great to be here.

Host: Great to have you aboard. We appreciate the time. So this is interesting. First, in 2014, you suffered a spinal cord injury. Naturally, so great to see that you've recovered well and that led you to founding a healthcare marketing company called Social Climb in 2024, Social Climb is acquired by RL Datix. So what does the company do in a nutshell?

Ty Allen: Yeah. So, that experience that I had as a patient kind of opened my eyes to some frustrations that patients might experience. So I saw a bit of a gap there and, tried to fill it in two different ways. And, RL Datix has since found ways to leverage that in, I think, some new and interesting ways.

But the first of those ways is as a patient, I was frustrated in finding the right provider and getting an opportunity to use that provider and give feedback to that provider. And then I also looked at it from the provider's experience and said, providers often have ideal patient types that they want to find.

And in the modern world of digital tech and digital marketing, that should also be possible. So those were kind of the two things we set out to solve in the beginning.

Host: And so this seems to have really been a case of necessity being the mother of invention, right?

Ty Allen: Yes. It wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to have a spinal cord injury and learn to walk and learn to use my hands and arms again. But, good things came out of that.

Host: Sounds like it, indeed. So you've built this company around amplifying the patient voice. When was it during your own experiences or you know, in dealing with the healthcare system in general that you said, you know what, this could be something that I can really help to change.

Ty Allen: Honestly, it was during the rehab portion. So I spent about five and a half weeks in the hospital and in inpatient rehab, and it was during the inpatient rehab portion of my stay that I started telling my wife, I had an idea for a new company, and she told me, no, you cannot start another company until you can walk and take care of yourself and drive again. So I had some great ideas, but I had to wait a little while and I started noticing that, this is back in 2014; the real gap that I was frustrated with was that I struggled to regain the capability to use my left side, in particular, my left hand and arm.

And I went to multiple occupational therapy groups, physical therapy groups, trying to find someone who could help me solve that problem. It was the fourth one that I went to that I found an occupational therapist that was amazing. And what was contradictory to me was that therapist looked terrible online.

Like if you were just judging the different therapists that I worked with, he would've been the lowest, expectations by what you saw online. Yet he was the best, and I knew that there was a problem to be solved when I experienced that.

Host: Interesting. And by the way, the fact that your wife said no starting another company Ty until you can walk. That's what spouses are for. Right?

Ty Allen: Exactly. That's what she says. She says, yeah, I keep you grounded. I'm happy to have you start new businesses, but, you have to do first things first.

Host: That's great. So, to pick up on your last point, you said that every patient interaction contains real insight, but many systems still treat this feedback like more of a report card. Kind of like in the experience you just mentioned where there was this, what turned out to be a misleading reading that you had seen for this one therapist. So what's the cost of companies that still have that old school mindset?

Ty Allen: It's a great way to position it. What I see is data is often siloed inside of these large healthcare organizations. And when it's not shared more broadly, maybe the marketing team understands, that the message out in the marketplace is wrong and they can do some things to fix it, but that feedback is often not then presented back into the providers.

And the providers don't then learn from that feedback, adjust the way that they're interacting with patients and make improvement and vice versa. Maybe the patient feedback gets to the providers, but the marketing team is incapable of getting that back out to the marketplace. And I kind of think of that as like 1.0 software versus 2.0 software. And, I believe that the synergies that come from taking patient feedback and recognizing its value in multiple parts of the care and finding care cycle is at the heart of what needs to change going forward. And that's one of the reasons we were very excited to become part of RL Datix is we felt like we'd have a much broader reach and a much bigger opportunity to make a difference in more places by becoming part of a greater organization.

Host: So besides sort of stumbling upon that great therapist you mentioned; during your experience, was there a particular case that crystallized, if you will, the missed opportunity when organizations don't act on what patients are telling them?

Ty Allen: I as a patient, we give feedback and we don't see a change or we don't get any positive feedback. In the United States, we have all kinds of choices. So we leave, we take our business elsewhere. And, you know, that's not a hundred percent the case. Some markets are very, very insular.

And as a patient, your insurance company may route you in certain directions. But more and more in the US, we vote on who's doing a good job for us on the care that we receive, by who we choose to go to on the next go around. We also vote by what kind of feedback we post socially. So we're no longer without a voice.

We can say things on reviews, we can say things on social media, and those things really do affect future patient decisions and therefore revenue, profitability, growth opportunities for those entities. So missing out on that revenue opportunity, missing out on retaining that patient, those are right at the core of it.

But the last thing that I'm really excited about is when that patient feedback is really consumed and understood, and patterns are found, patterns are identified, and providers are learning from it; preventable issues, improvement in the care cycle, improvement in what providers and their team do, can actually happen, which helps with patient safety, with compliance, with all kinds of things that are at the core of doing a great job for patients.

Host: Now, as you well know, patient transparency can feel risky, whether it's sharing feedback with providers or surfacing it publicly, but you believe it's actually foundational to build trust and drive a culture of safety, as you just alluded to. So how have you seen that transparency shift the way teams operate and patients engage inside an organization and out in the open?

Ty Allen: I would first respond to this by saying, let's stop thinking about healthcare for just a moment. Let's think about when we are trying to make a decision on purchasing a product, and we search, we find a product, and we look at the reviews and customer feedback on that product.

When we see a product that has hundreds of reviews and every single one of them is a hundred percent positive; our typical skeptical human nature says, this is AstroTurfed. This isn't real. This is fake. And frankly, this applies in healthcare as well. We've seen for years that hospital groups and practices would publish only positive things about themselves, and they would publish it on their own website.

And as a patient, the days of going to the hospital's website, going to the practice's website, the doctor's details, reading about how this doctor has never made a patient mad, never done anything wrong, does the same thing; makes us believe that's not true. So organizations that are willing to recognize and allow data to flow in social, in reviews and other places that shares that they are human, that they have made mistakes, and then shows that they are responsive, they're apologetic, they're corrective, and they really do step up and solve issues that they may have caused; is very authentic, and you can see it in the data, that the entities that do that, get a higher response rate, get more of the patients to respond to them. They seem more authentic. They seem more real. We choose them.

Host: That's very interesting and it has me thinking about some of the reviews that I read online about products from all walks of life. But that's a whole other conversation of course. When we talk about systems that are doing this well, what you were just discussing, how are leading healthcare organizations spotting these patterns in patient feedback that actually reveal clinical or safety issues?

Ty Allen: Yeah, that is a challenge because the volume of data goes up literally every day. So when we first started seeing patients give feedback about their care with hospitals and practices and individual physicians, the volume of feedback was reasonable. A human could read it, a human could understand it, a human could even respond to it.

That is actually not the case today in many settings around the country. The volume of feedback is very high and it's on multiple platforms. So tools that have evolved that collect that data, search that data for patterns, identify that those patterns, as positive, negative, or potentially maybe middle ground and present those back to the leaders in these healthcare organizations. Sometimes it's the Doc, sometimes it's the C-level, sometimes it's the marketing team or the patient safety team. Those pattern recognition opportunities are what it really comes down to because the volume and the complexity of the responses from patients is now at a level that AI can truly be helpful in solving those things.

Host: And I am going to ask you about AI in just a moment or two, but first, of course, it's one thing to value feedback, but another to sort of operationalize it. So what are the tools or workflows that are helping teams to act on patient voice at scale, if you will?

Ty Allen: Those are kind of two categories. The team itself who's literally dealing with new patients daily, can feel overwhelmed. Like, how can I take the feedback from last week's patients and get better at it this week? That is where AI can really start to make a difference, where we can distill down the pattern that says, here are the three topics that patients over the past month have said they would love to see improvement on. And those can be presented to those team members in a very succinct way. And if you distill it down to two or three items, the team can literally deal with it. On the marketing side of things, what we see is the same kind of pattern in the marketing organization then has the opportunity to create content, create messaging, and tell their story using that same data. So we're seeing it at kind of two different levels. Obviously the most important is getting the frontline care providers with the one, two, or three topics that are most salient to helping them do a better job for patients; getting that data to them, and that is something that we're really excited about how we're helping these hospitals and these practices do that in our integration with RL Datix. So all the data that we've had over years, millions of patient feedbacks points, and all the data that RL's had about patient safety; the merging of those two things is where we see all kinds of power on that front.

Host: Couple of other things, and you sort of partially answered my next question in your previous response. As AI and machine learning and analytics continue evolving, I wanted to ask you how you see the next chapter of the patient experience unfolding there. You just talked about simplifying things, slicing things down. What's the impact of that though? Why will that make such a difference do you think?

Ty Allen: I would caveat this by saying I actually don't know. I have some theories and I'm working with a wonderful engineering team who's pushing the envelope on this, and so we believe there are some obvious things that can happen. I alluded to a couple of those, which is taking high volumes of patient feedback, even patient sentiment that can be gleaned from patient feedback and distilling it down into a few topics that can then enable those providers to make improvements. Can the providers be listened to? Can the words that the providers use, can the prescriptions, can the actual care that the providers end up giving, measured in multiple different ways; can that then also be used and assessed against outcomes so that instead of just looking at what is said by patients, can AI start to factor in long-term longitudinal analysis on did this patient get better? Did this patient's feedback get better over time? Did this patient's records show that this patient literally recovered at a level that is above average or at average or below average? And what other indicators factor into that? So basically opening the aperture, stepping back, taking in more data that includes patient records, patient outcomes, ambient interactions between patient and doctor, not just patient feedback; can all of those factors start to be brought together, analyzed and factored into making patient care better? Those are the open questions that are going to be answered over the next few years, and none of those would literally be possible if the evolving power of AI and the computing power to make it happen, were not available.

Host: And so in summary here, since you have your crystal ball out; if we were to revisit this topic again in a few years, what would you hope, Ty, that most healthcare executives have changed about the way they view and use this patient feedback?

Ty Allen: I might have a couple different layers of aspiration. Aspiration number one would be that every healthcare provider and healthcare organization would be paying more attention to patient feedback because we see it around the market today that there are still a lot that are kind of in the dark ages.

They're not really paying that much attention. So my hope is that's kind of step one, is everybody starts to recognize that value. But the next evolutionary step beyond that would be, can we start to look at actual patient results, patient outcomes, and the quality of life that our care delivers?

Can that be factored in and can those results help us do a better job on patients going forward? So, instead of thinking about, well, we got that patient completed and we got them discharged, we got paid for that, for the work we did on that patient. Now we'll move on to the next one. That's the easy short term solution that we've all had to deal with in the past.

My aspiration is that five years from now and six years from now, 10 years from now, that what we're doing as a healthcare provider infrastructure, is that we are making decisions that we know will literally improve the lives of the patients. Not guessing, but knowing that we're doing the right things and that that just gets tighter and tighter in our ability to improve lives and deliver high quality care and make it so this expensive set of services that frankly is not going to go down in costs, but could go up in quality, is delivered.

Host: I am sure those words are music to the ears of many patients joining us right now. Well, folks, we trust you are now more familiar with Transforming Patient Experience Data. Ty, keep up all your great really groundbreaking work and thanks so much again.

Ty Allen: Thank you, Joey. I really appreciate the opportunity today.

Host: Same here. And for more information, please do visit ache.org/about-ache/corporate-partners/sites/RLDatix. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social media. I'm Joey Wahler, and thanks again for being part of the Healthcare Executive Podcast from the American College of Healthcare Executives.