SSM Health transformed their struggling digital patient experience from a fragmented system with only 10-15% success rates into a comprehensive platform that schedules over 75% of appointments as new patients. Assistant Vice President of Digital Health Aaron Powell and Digital Health Strategy Director Jeff Wester share how they eliminated dead ends by implementing strategic cross-selling that ensures patients always see available options, whether that’s a different location, a care team member, or virtual care alternatives.
The transformation required building a multi-disciplinary digital health work group that brought together clinicians, operators, IT, marketing, and ethics to create true organizational alignment. They also discovered their master data management issues were creating operational chaos, with credentialing systems, Epic, and marketing platforms all containing conflicting provider information that had to be resolved before success was possible.
The results: 16,000 additional encounters in the first six months, conversion rates jumping from 20% to nearly 80%, and mobile click-through rates increasing 36%. Their cross-sell success rate of 8% means thousands of patients who would have left the system are now being served. The session includes lessons learned about the critical importance of clean data, change management with frontline staff, and why aligning digital initiatives to system-wide KPIs proved essential.
