Children’s hospital makes every moment count with help from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Business challenge

Without a doubt, healthcare is complex. Patients and their families have numerous encounters with Dayton Children’s Hospital staff, in addition to digital services and content. Every visit, diagnosis, website registration, and customer call is captured in a variety of IT systems. While all clinical information is stored in the hospital’s clinical information system (EPIC), call logs are managed in Cisco, texts are managed on WELL Health’s software as a service platform, and web registrations and marketing contacts are managed in Dynamics 365.

Consequently, care teams using EPIC were lacking important information about overall communications with patients. Additionally, the marketing team wasn’t able to easily create patient segmentation tasks as needed to personalize its communications and outreach with patients. This chasm between core medical information systems and customer relationship management and marketing applications is hard to overcome because of the required blending of regulated clinical data and traditional customer engagement information.

Business use cases and scenarios

Dayton Children’s Hospital decided to implement Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to close this critical gap and establish a scalable, flexible data foundation that spans both clinical and marketing information and is also compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). For the initial phase of the implementation, the hospital decided to focus on the following high-priority use cases centered around 360-degree patient views and segmentation.

First, Dayton Children’s Hospital care team members follow up with patients who were recently released from the hospital. Team members are often unsure about how many times the hospital has already called a patient’s family, but Customer Insights is now making it easy for them to look up a patient’s 360-degree view, including the patient’s timeline. For example, a profile might show that hospital staff had called a patient’s family five times in the last two days but there were no responses. The hospital staff member might decide to wait a few more days before contacting the family again.

Second, the hospital’s marketing team wants to create a program to target adolescent female athletes in the Dayton area. Prior to Customer Insights, the marketing team would have needed to submit a special report request to the EPIC team. With Customer Insights, it now can easily create new dynamic segments based on a patient’s age, the guarantor’s address, and any historical activities that involved injuries related to sports. These segments then push to Dynamics 365 for the marketing team to execute the campaign.

Data sources and integration architecture

The hospital stores patient-related data across a variety of different IT solutions. In phase one of the implementation project, Customer Insights is used to unify patient-related data from the following sources: 

• EPIC clinical information system:
  • Demographic patient data
  • Demographic guarantor data
  • Encounter data such as Emergency Department visits, appointments, and provider names
• Cisco Call Center Accounting system:
  • Call log data
• Census tract data:
  • Guarantor’s census tract ID
    
    

The setup of map, match, and merge in Customer Insights allows the hospital’s IT team to unify patient-related information across EPIC, Cisco, and Dynamics 365. Because the Cisco Call Center Accounting system doesn’t persist patient IDs, matching of call log entries with EPIC-based patient profiles is done based on phone numbers and extensions, and the end result is a clean set of unified customer profiles. Finally, encounters, calls, and marketing interactions are modeled as activity-based entities in Customer Insights.

Given that the EPIC and Cisco call log data is stored on-premises, the data is moved daily to Azure Blob Storage containers to take advantage of one of many data connectors that Customer Insights offers. And by storing the data using Blob Storage, data at rest is automatically encrypted, helping ensure that sensitive personally identifiable information and PHS data is secure and compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2. Customer Insights jobs are scheduled to ingest Blob Storage patient and call log activity data into the map, match, and merge processes to make sure that the unified customer profiles are kept up to date.

Business value

Customer Insights was implemented at Dayton Children’s Hospital by a combined Microsoft and Slalom team within less than two months. The hospital is the first healthcare provider organization that’s using Customer Insights in production and benefitting from its ability to support compliance with HIPAA. Customer Insights is designed with a defense-in-depth approach to security to help customers facilitate their own internal governance and compliance with applicable regulatory requirements. As a business associate, Microsoft adheres to the applicable requirements of HIPAA and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act to help customers facilitate compliance with their HIPAA obligations. This includes offering a HIPAA business associate agreement to help protect the privacy and security of protected health information.

Dayton Children’s Hospital teams created five segments based on their customer profiles that focused on the following areas:

• Female Patients with Sports or Orthopedic Activities. This segment aligns the marketing team’s effort to create a campaign targeting female athletes. The segment rule includes female patients from 10 to 18 years old who had EPIC encounters that contain the “SPORTS” or “ORTHO” keywords, which could include all sports-related injuries or visitations.
• Patients with High Inbound Calls. This segment tracks how many patients have high inbound call volume. The segment rule references the Measure (Total Activities by Type, Month, and Year) to capture the total inbound calls.
• Patients with High Outbound Calls. This segment tracks patients with a large volume of outbound calls.
• Patients with Frequent Encounters. This segment tracks how many patients have a high volume of encounters.
• Dayton Patients. This segment tracks how many patients live in Dayton, Ohio.
  
  

Next steps

With the completed implementation of Customer Insights, Dayton Children’s Hospital has now become even more patient-data driven, empowering its care teams and marketing teams with a true 360-degree view of the patient, all in a highly secure and compliant manner. The hospital is already looking to extend the value of Customer Insights by bringing in more data sources, such as WELL Health text message data, taking advantage of Customer Insights enrichment capabilities and achieving a closed-loop marketing process between Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights.

Dayton Children’s Hospital understands that every moment counts when interacting with patients and their families. With Customer Insights, the hospital is now even more able to make this mission a reality and use the vast amount of data that it already has to improve the patient experience across every channel and touchpoint.

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