Empathy in Action: Dr. Adrienne Boissy on Transforming Healthcare Insights at Qualtrics

Editor’s Note: Dr. Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer at Qualtrics, has a distinguished background in healthcare and patient experience, previously serving as the Chief Experience Officer at the Cleveland Clinic. With a keen interest in neurology and a passion for understanding human behavior, Dr. Boissy has made significant strides in enhancing patient care. I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Boissy at X4: The Experience Management Summit in Salt Lake City earlier this year to discuss her journey and vision.

Also, in the interview, Dr. Boissy referenced Community Health. The woman I met with was Maggie Gentry, CPXP, Director, Experience Analytics. I was grateful to sit in on an interview she conducted with Jeannie Walters! 

What inspired your transition from the Cleveland Clinic to Qualtrics?

I was chief experience officer for about seven years there. What an extraordinary organization. I’m still there as a practicing neurologist. I still take care of patients with multiple sclerosis. It is amazing and very humbling to keep a foot in that space. It’s very grounding. I also hold that with the patients I see that can’t park their car and have to pay a copay and wait 45 minutes in the waiting room. It’s still a bit of a mess out there for most patients. 

So the transition, that fire in my belly, really emerged as I was thinking about what was next. Qualtrics approached me about really building out some of their healthcare space and thought leadership there. It was one of the fastest segments of the business that was growing and that was really exciting to me. I was also really attracted by the idea that we could learn from so many other industries and also that we could teach other industries about empathy and humanity and what does that sound like and feel like in a business that may not classically use those words.

 And so I actually spent time (you may appreciate this) self-reflecting on what I wanted to do next with my career. I built something called “the joy pie” where I mapped how I want to have an impact for the next 10 years. And on that pie was doing work that reduces suffering and creates more joy. And Qualtrics was a perfect fit for that. I met the CEO and we had a two-hour conversation. His mom was a nurse and he was deeply passionate about healthcare. He asked me really hard and direct questions about how we can really create movement in this space and I sort of fell in love with the ethos of the place. I thought it had a real home for empathy and humanity. 

Can you elaborate on your concept of “empathy operationalized”?

Well, I was obsessed with this concept that I called Empathy Operationalized. Meaning, we classically think about empathy as this cute thing that goes on in a conversation, often between a doc and a patient, maybe between your partner or people you care about. And I began to see, in all the clinician communication skills training we had done, I heard people talk about empathy and yet couldn’t actually describe what empathy sounded like. So it was really interesting. It was this concept we all seem to fall in love with, but the translation of it into what do I say in this moment, how do I have a more loving statement given what somebody said, seemed to be missing.

And so that was fascinating to me. For very caring clinicians, they couldn’t identify what they were doing that was empathic. And then you take that to scale, and it was about how do we create a system that cares? How do we bake into operations of processes that organizations are already using so it doesn’t just become about communication skills training, it becomes about how we operate every day. Not having access for three months is not an empathic process when you’re imagining the fear and anxiety that people have worrying about the breast lump or the cancer their mom had, like, am I going to get it too? And so I do think those are ripe for radical rethinking. And you’re right some of us are not comfortable calling it empathy. We call it innovation, digitization.

How does Qualtrics approach the complexity of the healthcare ecosystem?

Well, I think about it a little bit more through the patient’s lens; they don’t have these silos that we do. They don’t think about the world in the silos or groupings that we do. We call it pharma, we call it payer, and sure, those are all different and often I think in many businesses or complex organizations sort of structures. However, if you come at it through the lens of a patient, they are just trying to live their life, take care of their families or their loved ones, maintain a job, hopefully care for themselves, sprinkle some meaning and purpose in, and that’s about it.

And so I think there is an ecosystem in which they operate, but we would do ourselves a favor, we would push a little more forward if we could come at it through their lens instead of ours. And so to your point, I understand the division that may be necessary but when I talk to pharma… they have lots of different customers; the clinicians are a customer, the patient’s a customer, the supply chain’s a customer, the retail stores, they have lots of different customers.

And I think organizations, including Qualtrics, help people think about who is your customer that you most need to be attending to right because it’s not just one. These days, your customer isn’t just the patients, it’s your employees. And so if we think about those fundamentals, I think you can prioritize and begin to think carefully. Go slow to go fast. Like really map out who are the customers that you serve, who are the most important segments of those customers that you need to be caring for, whether because of equity or safety or volume or how do you want to think about that? And then digging deep into where’s the biggest pain? I would argue retail is making it a lot easier than healthcare is at times.

I see payers really doubling down on pulling all their data together and breaking down a lot of the silos in almost a more advanced way than I see healthcare doing yet. So I don’t know if there’s a one-all fix-all. But I do think we are constantly remembering to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who are just trying to navigate life. It’s not even just navigating health. Health is one fraction of what people are trying to do. And if we could be expansive in the way we think about that I feel like that’s just a good starting point.

Is Qualtrics doing work on the caregiver experience?

Yeah, well. I think we recognize that piece of it that even CMS, as you know, is going to begin to listen in their regulated surveys; they’re going to allow family members to respond. They haven’t done that for all the time we’ve been collecting patient feedback. If it’s identified as from a family member, we don’t use that feedback. And so yes, but I would say Qualtrics are about more meeting people where they are, organizations are just beginning to roll this around. Some are really ready. 

You’ll meet Community Health; they’re definitely on the leading edge of thinking very provocatively around if the biggest pain points for patients are access, billing, and delays, they’re really going after patient experience through those channels and saying, “what can we do better on access and how would we measure it?”

It’s not just asking if people were satisfied; it’s growth, it’s outreach after to make sure there’s no unresolved needs. It’s really, I think, dreaming in a way that feels interesting to me. And I think we just have a role in making sure we share those stories with others who are in contemplative stages to make sure the field keeps moving. 

How do you see the maturity of experience management programs in healthcare organizations?

A tremendous amount of variability in the field, right? I see a lot of payers or pharma companies that have a voice of the customer program. And so there’s structure around that, and I think their data analytics strategy is often quite robust but often fragmented in these large complex organizations and not always at an executive level. Sometimes even patient experience suffers from end provider organizations being downstairs, around the corner, in the basement with the pink door.

And so elevating it in organizations I see as maybe the shared challenge that it needs a seat at the actual executive table where we’re making decisions that are bigger and impact our primary customers, which often are our patients and employees. And sometimes insights find out after the fact.

So to more directly answer, a lot of healthcare organizations have a patient experience department, but their connection to a data intelligence strategy is highly variable. Sometimes they have one person that they call over in business intelligence that might feed or look at their data. Sometimes they’re counting on the vendor to do that. Sometimes they have a team of 25 people who could do it. And so again, I think until it’s recognized as a profession and not a nice to do and has a seat at the table, we’ll continue to see that kind of variability, which just keeps us a little below high quality.

I think when we reach high quality and high reliability in healthcare, it’s because we’re listening to the data that we’ve been collecting through all the channels we have to inform decisions that are made at the executive level and then looking at the impact of whatever it is we choose to do. And you’ll hear that from some organizations I hope here we’re doing that really well and you’ll hear others struggling with, well, I’m just staying in my span of control.

How can insights professionals support strategic thinking in healthcare organizations?

For example, Community Health Network, once you hear from them, you should ask about their governance because they’ve also used data to drive what they do. Instead of standing at PX departments, they actually disassembled that and said data is going to drive what we do, which is brilliant.

And I think, to your point, one of the things I see organizations who are more mature on this journey thinking about is I’ve got operational data, I’ve got an access problem, and that has an experiential touch to it, and I want to grow and my brands are taking a hit and staffing is low.

These, if we can recognize these as isolated pieces, we can string them together. They’re thinking about how do I pull my experience data plus my operational data together to pull big levers, right, not small impact but to pull big levers in the organization. And again, it’s about connecting these dots at a higher level. It’s about thinking strategically, and I think that insights professionals have a critical role in supporting this work.