From unused data to improved experiences - how Trillium Health Partners put patient voices to work with Qualtrics

Healthcare is often highlighted as one of the most critical sectors in which the focus on ‘experience’ can deliver meaningful outcomes for your business and for your customers. Whilst a frustrating experience in a retail environment can dampen your day, a poor experience navigating healthcare can leave long lasting scars for a patient and their family. However, there’s also a challenge in healthcare that the ‘experience’ isn’t transactional in the same way that it is in other sectors - for obvious reasons - and often healthcare environments are dealing with challenging revenue structures, high costs and literal life and death scenarios. 

And when dealing with highly complex and often volatile situations, measuring patient experience and adapting to feedback can feel like a low priority on a very long list of priorities. Healthcare organizations often collect data, they track metrics, they put it somewhere, and then — nothing. The data sits in a repository while the moment for action passes. That’s not to place blame on anyone, it’s just the reality of a high pressure sector doing its best. 

This is a story that Trillium Health Partners knew well before March 2023. The hospital network in Mississauga, Ontario had been committing to better patient experience in every strategic plan for years. Kerry Kuluski, Research Chair in Patient and Family Centred Care at Trillium's Institute for Better Health, is honest about what that amounted to in practice. She said:

We've been saying this for decades and had no way to actually action it. 

However, an opportunity presented itself to do something different. She added: 

We moved away from a previous vendor that ended up leaving the country - which gave us a chance to rethink how we were doing things. We also had accreditation coming up, so it was an interesting moment where we had to action a new survey solution very quickly. Our larger Ontario Hospital Association, which governs and supports 150-plus hospitals across Ontario, had decided to go with Qualtrics as their vendor. 

They wanted to figure out how to quickly co-design a short-form, actionable survey that we could implement fast and generate lots of data from. 

Adam Gdyczynski joined Trillium as Senior Corporate Lead of Patient Experience, Measurement and Planning at almost exactly the same time the Qualtrics platform went live. Three years in, the transformation is a telling case study on how experience insight can drive change and how experience data can change things on the ground.

Three months to twenty-four hours

Before Qualtrics, Trillium was running paper surveys and call-center follow-ups. A manager wanting to know what patients thought about their unit might wait three to four months. By that point the feedback was stale and largely useless.

Now, a patient leaving the emergency department or an outpatient clinic gets a survey link by email within twenty-four hours. There's also a QR code option on discharge paperwork - patients can give feedback while waiting for their car or bus. Most complete it on the first email send, without reminders.

Gdyczynski said:

Our managers have live data. Basically one or two days after someone's visit, they're seeing what someone was complaining about - or highlighting - that quickly.

The shift to digital has also expanded who Trillium can actually reach. Gdyczynski describes getting responses from patients across all ages, backgrounds, and gender identities - and being able to cut the data along those dimensions for the first time. 

The human experience

An example of how this new data can drive change came from Trillium's breast cancer screening services. When the team started analyzing responses around patients reporting they weren't getting support for fears, anxieties, and worries, a cluster emerged across all three of Trillium's mammography locations. The open-text comments highlighted that patients didn't feel comfortable at registration or with their technologists. Staff were being abrupt and there was a feeling that empathy was absent.

Gdyczynski said:

We worked with those areas to develop scripts…we combined that with perspective-taking, reflective listening, and empathetic validation.

The perspective-taking piece really resonated with staff. It brought examples to staff, such as ‘during registration, imagine that's your mum walking in’ or ‘for a technologist, imagine that's a loved one in the mammography machine, would you want someone to ask if she's comfortable?’

It’s easy to frame these examples as a technology story, but that’s where Qualtrics differs in terms of what data is being brought to the forefront: about people who were coming in frightened and weren't being met with empathy. 

You can't pour from an empty cup

It’s worth stating, of course, that whilst patients are often in these environments under high stress, so are the staff. Trillium's frontline staff are under pressure - as healthcare workers across the system often are - and Kuluski doesn't pretend otherwise. She said:

If someone is completely burnt out and their cup is empty, they have nothing to give. And that will impact the patient experience.

This is where things get hard with experience data - it’s hardly ever one sided. Pushing experience data at teams who are already carrying moral distress can feel like another thing being done to them. What reads as useful insight on a dashboard may be experienced differently when you're exhausted.

Gdyczynski’s approach has been deliberately low-pressure. He monitors dashboard usage and when he spots a manager who hasn't logged in for a month, he doesn't send a compliance nudge. He pulls some positive comments from their unit and sends them over with a link. As we see more often than not, a carrot, not a stick, is what drives real change. 

Kuluski’s reflection on what she'd have done differently if working on this project again is that she would have asked earlier: what support do you actually need to engage with this data? Building the infrastructure of support into the rollout from day one, she says, would have made a real difference.

One of the more significant developments in recent months has been mapping patient experience data against employee experience data. Trillium has been on the employee experience module for around eighteen months now, and what it's finding is telling. Gdyczynski said:

We were able to look at the units where patients were saying they weren't getting support for fears, anxieties, and worries, and we noticed that employees in those same units were reporting lower rates of feeling emotionally safe at work.

You cannot ask someone to be compassionate with patients if they don't feel safe themselves. This is where Kuluski’s point about support and infrastructure comes back in - data and incentives only go so far when the people you're asking to change are feeling depleted themselves.

What's next

Trillium's Plan to 2030 sets an organization-wide target of an average score of nine out of ten or above. They're close but not there.

At the data architecture level, Kuluski is thinking bigger. Right now Trillium holds patient experience data in Qualtrics, healthcare utilization data at the provincial level, a complaints database sitting separately, and the Epic EMR. She wants them connected.

Kuluski  said:

If we could connect all of those into a larger repository, we could start doing more predictive modelling - getting ahead of what's likely to happen as someone comes through the door, so you can be more proactive in your experience approach rather than reactive.

On AI, the conversational feedback feature - where the platform asks smarter follow-up questions based on what a patient has actually written - is live and generating more detailed responses. Agentic capabilities are on the horizon, but the key is going to be keeping people front and center. Kuluski said: 

I think it could be a good direction. You don't want to lose the human connection, but escalating at the right time - and letting an AI handle the low-hanging fruit - could work really well. It'd be interesting to do a pilot.