Introducing Epic Cheers: Enhancing Patient Experiences with Innovative CRM Solutions

July 12, 2023 Written By Doug Herr, Executive Director, Epic Practice

For all the talk of hospitals providing a 'digital front door' to patients, the major EHR vendors have been playing catch up when it comes to consumer experience. 

Epic Cheers, or Cheers, Epic’s CRM solution, however, represents a major step forward in patient engagement. The platform helps healthcare organizations deliver higher quality care that results in better patient outcomes, as well as grow their community of patients by improving engagement and loyalty.

Understanding Epic Cheers CRM

Epic Cheers is a healthcare-specific CRM (customer relationship management) that helps organizations automate and personalize their current processes to increase and improve patient experiences, care, and loyalty. 

It empowers organizations to thrive in the evolving healthcare consumerism landscape. This enables enhanced patient engagement and delivers exceptional consumer experiences for all stakeholders–providers, patients, and more.

6 Ways Epic Cheers Improves Patient Care

Epic Cheers offers transformative capabilities with an unrelenting focus on patients. 

From enhancing patient engagement to reducing medical errors and promoting preventive care, Cheers empowers patients, streamlines workflows, and improves continuity of care for better patient outcomes. 

1. Enhancing Patient Engagement Through Personalization: Cheers enables healthcare providers to create personalized educational materials and communicate directly with patients through secure portals, fostering a stronger patient-provider relationship.
2. Reducing Medical Errors: With improved care coordination and accurate information sharing, Cheers helps mitigate the risk of medical errors during care transitions, leading to safer and more effective care delivery.
3. Facilitating Preventive Care: Through automated alerts and reminders, Cheers promotes preventive care measures, such as timely screenings and vaccinations, reducing the likelihood of advanced illnesses and promoting better patient outcomes.
4. Empowering Patient Self-Management: Through self-service features, patients can actively participate in their care, access their health records, and make informed decisions, resulting in improved self-management and overall well-being.
5. Streamlining Workflows: Cheers optimizes workflows by centralizing patient information, enabling efficient communication, and automating routine tasks. This saves time for healthcare providers, allowing them to focus more on direct patient care.
6. Improving Continuity of Care: With integrated care plans and seamless information exchange, Cheers ensures smooth transitions of care between different.

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5 Ways Cheers Helps Organizations Stay Competitive

Remember, patients are consumers. No longer are they only comparing their experience at one healthcare practice to their experience at another. 

Today, patients judge healthcare practices against the experiences they receive at consumer brands such as Amazon. 

That’s why it’s critical for organizations to ensure their platforms and processes provide a seamless, consumer-first experience from start to finish. 

Here’s how Epic Cheers helps healthcare leaders do just that:

1. Ability to Engage Prospective Patients. Cheers enables practices to engage with prospective patients, helping them grow their patient community and better serve the population.
2. Streamlined Contact Center Operations: Cheers provides the capability for practices to launch at-scale contact centers without having to rely on a large staff. This capability enables organizations to contact more patients while still providing a personalized, consumer-first experience.
3. Empowering Patient Self-Service: Epic has found that if you can provide a self-service channel for individuals, they are more likely to take a desired action. That’s why Cheers offers self-service channels that make it easier for patients to schedule appointments, engage with content, contact providers, and more.
4. Strategic Use of Marketing Automation: With Cheers, organizations can use pre-drafted emails and texts to proactively engage their patient population for screenings and preventive care, ensuring timely interventions and better health outcomes.
5. Consumer-First Future Enhancements: In the coming months, Cheers plans to introduce digital intake channels, including chatbots and live chat capabilities, to provide more efficient contact center operations and offer additional ways for patients to express interest in receiving care.

Key Competitive Advantages of Epic Cheers

While Cheers was announced in 2022, there have been several healthcare CRMs on the market. So, what makes Cheers stand out from its counterparts? 

In a nutshell, Cheers caters to both the clinical needs of healthcare organizations and the evolving expectations of healthcare consumers. Here’s how:

1. Comprehensive Patient Data Integration. Unlike many other CRM platforms, Epic Cheers enables the integration of marketing and consumerism tools with existing technologies rich in patient data. By offering tens of thousands of data elements–social determinants of health, treatment history, screenings, demographics, medications, and lab results–Cheers provides a holistic view of each individual's healthcare journey.
2. Seamless Integration Epic Software. Cheers is embedded directly into Epic's software suite, streamlining implementation and data integration processes. This approach eliminates the need for a separate, time-consuming data integration project typically associated with third-party CRM platforms.
3. Patient Engagement Through Trusted Channels. Cheers uses Epic's patient portal, MyChart, which patients trust and prefer over random text messages or emails from unknown senders. MyChart is also HIPAA-compliant, allowing organizations to personalize outreach messages with protected health information (PHI) securely.
4. Tailored and Personalized Outreach: Cheers enables organizations to tailor and personalize patient outreach messages using the rich patient data available. By leveraging PHI, such as the date of a patient's most recent cancer screening, organizations can deliver targeted messages that resonate with patients, encouraging them to take the necessary actions for their healthcare.

Epic Cheers Case Study

What tangible results have organizations seen since implementing Epic Cheers? Epic Product Manager Sam Seering offers a great example from Community Health Network (CHN), one of the product's inaugural customers.

CHN switched from manual processes to Epic Cheers for one of their care gaps, mammography screenings. 

Prior to using Cheers, CHN relied on manual processes, such as reports and spreadsheets to track follow-ups. The CHN team also made individual phone calls for patient engagement, appointment scheduling, and more.

CHN experienced significant positive outcomes:

• 25-fold increase in patients completing their screenings.
• 9,000 new MyChart users gained and more than 5,000 preventative care visits and new screenings scheduled.
• Hundreds of hours of manual labor eliminated and $37,000 annually saved in labor costs as per the organization’s YoY analysis.

By transforming the manual, analog process into a digital, automated one, CHN achieved improved engagement and efficiency. They continue to work with Epic to implement Cheers for other care gaps, leading to further operational savings.

Partnering with Epic Experts

Implementing an Epic CRM system can be a complex undertaking. That's where Healthcare IT Leaders comes in. Our team of Epic experts possesses extensive experience in optimizing productivity, efficiency, and patient satisfaction. 

We offer end-to-end support for your Epic implementation, integration, and project needs. Want to know more about Epic Cheers or our expertise? Contact us.

TALK TO OUR EPIC TEAM 

Doug Herr is Healthcare IT Leaders' Executive Director, Epic Practice. He draws on his 24+ years of provider and consulting experience in Operations, Information Technology, and Electronic Health Records systems.