Speaker 0: This is where health care leadership comes together. Becker's sixteenth annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago April. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former president George w Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit beckershospitalreview.com and click on the events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.

Speaker 1: This is Laura Dirda with the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Steve Smith, assistant vice president of enterprise contact center and access at Inova Health System. Steve, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: Now I'm excited for our conversation. I know we'll be spotlighting some of the cool things you're doing at Inova as well as getting your perspective on the future. But before we dive in, can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and Inova Health System?

Speaker 2: Well, sure. Absolutely. As you mentioned, I'm Steve Smith, assistant vice president of enterprise contact center and access added on Inova Health here in Fairfax, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. We are a five hospital magnet accredited system, with over 3,000,000 patients served every year. Last year, we were acknowledged as the 2025, Prest Gainey Hospital of the Year in large part to our relationship with our patients and under the leadership of doctor Steven Jones.

Speaker 1: That's fascinating to hear and, you know, truly a a great honor. Now when you think about the last year or so, what was the most important initiative that you led? What did you do, and what were the results?

Speaker 2: Sure. In the last year, we have changed to a cloud based phone system that's powered by a digital assistant. We really needed to take our technology, up again and really provide our patients, seamless access to our system and provide self-service when applicable. You know, with the digital assistant, the digital assistant integrates and interacts with the patient to route them to their preferred, destination to kinda get away from multiple transfers and gets them to their preferred destination. In instances where we can provide self-service to the patient, whether it's scheduling, rescheduling, medication refills, things of that nature.

We try to provide that integration so they don't necessarily need to speak, to a live, operator. However, if they wanna speak to an agent, they're certainly available. You know, what the goal is to self contain, those interactions where we're not entirely dependent on waiting in a call queue or speak to a live person. And within the last year, we've been able to, capture about 25% of the interactions with the digital assistant have been self contained, meaning that they've been resolved within the digital assistant space, and they haven't had to go into a call queue or speak to a live person. So that's really exciting.

Speaker 1: That's great to hear. And, you know, a a fascinating way to tackle, I know what it is, some big challenges in health care in terms of making sure you have access and scheduling and patients are able to get where they need to go. And so a a great use of technology, and it looks like great results. Now looking ahead, what are some of the big priorities and headwinds that you're focused on for 2026?

Speaker 2: I would say we're not to the end of the journey yet in terms of our access with our, with our automation. We still need to continue to build, automation with our phone system, provide more self-service across all our specialties. Right now, we have, scheduling self-service for primary care, which has gone really, really well. We're in the process of building that that out for our women's, service line, but we need to build that out for all our specialties. So we need to continue to build that infrastructure to, provide her patients more seamless access, to our system and to be able to do it, you know, even at off hours when they call the digital assistant, they're able to interact with the digital assistant and in many instances, resolve their concerns.

In terms of headwinds, I would say continue to provide our team members, more tools to do their job better. From my perspective as a call center leader, provide them more support in a scheduling process, whether, it's a more integrated knowledge based system that has an AI, feature where, for example, within the course of the conversation, we can provide screen pops to our agents to provide them talking points and or data, to provide patients just a more seamless experience and then make the, allow our team members to just function at a higher level.

Speaker 1: Got it. That is really cool to hear. And I think especially when you're looking at, you know, how can you uplift it and support continued growth and development and, the the scheduling process. I I know it's a journey, especially. So, when you are thinking through this change management process, what do you think has helped it be more efficient or effective or getting people on board to make sure that, they're integrating the technology within their workflows, appropriately?

Speaker 2: That's a great question. So change management is slow and omnipresent. We are not there yet, in terms of where we'd like to be, but providing positive results and data on the changes we've made and the growth that we've made so far, I think is crucial to kind of verify the trust. But everyone doesn't always see change as positive. It's been a journey, but we are we'd like to continue to standardize our scheduling process, provide self scheduling and automation when applicable, and then also, provide more growth opportunities and development opportunities for our agent.

And we're doing that with a workforce management platform where we're able to provide our agents, feedback in real time, be able to pull calls based on sentiment or what's said or not said. It kinda really drill down on things potentially that are missed for development and coaching opportunities.

Speaker 1: Got it. That's helpful to understand. Thank you for, digging a bit deeper there. Now what do you think the hardest thing you'll have to do in the coming year will be?

Speaker 2: You know, I think it's just to remain patient. This is a journey. It's definitely a marathon, not a sprint. And when we first kind of undertook this initiative, I thought just from my background and doing this before, it would go a little faster. And as we've kind of built this out, you're reliant on third party vendors, other, working cross functionally.

And it's just it's not it's I've had to reprioritize my thinking and it's really a it's a journey. And we're gonna get there, but just not as quite as fast as I would like. And so always kind of trying to provide that feedback to others to kind of like we're making progress, we're making incremental steps, but we just can't flip the switch and say, okay, all the automation is built. Everything is seamless. Go.

This really takes a lot of time when it's looking at data, making changes across the way. And we do have some great vendor partners, and we've learned a lot in the process. But it's really kind of just remaining patient and not and not get ahead of ourselves.

Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. You know? And it is really critical to have that type of foresight, and knowing, you know, hey. We're pushing forward change, but also understanding, you know, areas where you need to, be very mindful and, make sure you're you're being patient, as you said. I'm curious.

Before we wrap up here, what do you see as being some of the best opportunities for organizational growth?

Speaker 2: You know, from an organizational standpoint, we're gonna we're continuing to build our IT infrastructure to, provide, our patients, access to our system and to have more seamless experience to provide our team members that work on-site and remotely more access and better, efficacy in terms of their job. What I'm, really focusing on is to, like I said before, is to really provide our team members, better tools, AI, automation to do their job more seamlessly and to redo and to reduce the burden on the workforce. And if we're able to streamline our processes, if we're able to validate our patients more seamlessly, so we for example, we've rolled in a customer relationship chip management platform or what we refer to as CRM. It's through, our EMR, Epic, and, it's called Cheers. And it's really to provide a really overview of the patient journey and provides our agents really the understanding of the the interactions that the patients have with the system, maybe things that they're calling for based on what they previously called for.

We document all that information. And this to really capture the patient journey, not not only to know them better, but to get into the resolution of a call more quickly and just make that a more seamless experience.

Speaker 1: I love that. Steve, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fascinating conversation. I have learned a lot, and, certainly, it's been great to to connect with you, today. And I I know I'll be looking forward to seeing you as well at our annual meeting as a speaker, on one of our panels.

And so I'm sure we'll dig deeper into some of the things we talked about today as well as, you know, other, areas that are are really gonna be critical for success going forward. So thank you for your time, Steve, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I enjoyed our time and, definitely look forward to seeing you in Chicago in the spring.