Community Health Network Reduces Friction Points
Community Health Network operates more than 250 locations in central Indiana that include acute care hospitals, surgery centers, home care services and behavioral health facilities. It turned to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Dynamics 365 to improve communication with patients and gain access to data insights that can streamline the patient experience.
The goal was to eliminate friction points in the patient journey, according to Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer Dr. Patrick McGill.
In 2022, the organization decided to go with Dynamics 365 as a customer relationship management platform. Since it was already working with Microsoft, the move to Dynamics made the most sense.
“Dynamics really helps us work toward that goal of deeply knowing our patients, their preferences, when they’re interacting with the system, when they’re coming into the system, any gaps in care they might have or challenges they might experience,” McGill says.
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The platform also helps the health system with customer segmentation to understand which patients have certain conditions, such as cancer or other chronic illnesses, he says.
“How do you bring the human element back into healthcare? I think that’s what we’re really striving for with a lot of these technologies, whether it’s using data to drive clinical insights or using data to be more efficient with our business,” McGill says.
Community Health Network moved off another enterprise data warehouse platform in 2024 to join Azure Databricks, a unified open analytics platform that lets organizations build, deploy and share data. “That has really set us up for the future to leverage other advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning and some other capabilities,” he says.
The health system uses advanced data analytics in the cloud for operational reasons, such as how to predict and find gaps in financial performance, McGill says, and has built data models to help manage its workforce and predict staffing needs.
“Having all of that data in one platform will allow us to have a complete picture as we’re building some of these models – not just clinical or operational data, but really all of the data that we need to do this,” he says.
