Steve Smith on Transforming Patient Access Through Automation at Inova

0:00This is where healthcare leadership comes together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago April 13th through the 16th. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aitman and former president George W. Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit Becker's Hospital Review.com and click on the events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago. This is Laura Deerda 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 ANOVA Health System. Steve is appointed to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. Now I'm excited for our conversation and I know we'll be spotlighting some of the cool things you're doing out of NOVA 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 ANOVA Health System? Well, sure. Absolutely. As you mentioned, I'm Steve Smith, Assistant Vice President of Enterprise Contact Center

1:02and Access. Added on NOVA Health here in Fairfax Virginia right outside of Washington, DC. We are a five hospital magnet accredited system with over 3 million patients served every year. Last year we were acknowledged as the 2025 press gaining hospital of a year in large part to our relationship with our patients and under the leadership of Dr. Stephen Jones. That's fascinating to hear and truly 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? 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 a game and really provide our patients seamless access to our system and provide self-service when applicable. With the digital assistant, the digital assistant integrates and interacts with the patient

2:03to route them to their preferred destination to kind of 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 want to speak to an agent that they're certainly available, the goal is to self-contain those interactions so we're not entirely dependent on waiting in a call queue or speak to a live person. In the last year, we've been able to capture about 25% of the interactions with the digital assistant and then 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. That's great to hearing. A fascinating way to tackle, I know there's some big challenges in healthcare in terms

3:04of making sure you have access and scheduling and patients are able to get where they need to go. So 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? I would say we're not to the end of the journey yet in terms of our access 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 out for our women's service line, but we need to build that out for all our specialties. 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 even at off hours when they call the digital system to be able to interact with the digital system and many instances resolve their concerns.

4:04In terms of headwinds, I would say continue to provide her team members more tools to do their job better. From my perspective, as a call center leader, provide them more support in the scheduling process, whether it's a more integrated knowledge-based system that has an AI feature, for example, within the course of the conversation, we can provide screenpops to our agents to provide them talking points and or data to provide patients with a more seamless experience and then make the allow our team members to just function at a higher level. Got it. Then it is really cool to hear, and I think especially when you're looking at how can you uplift it in support, continued growth, and development in the scheduling process, 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

5:06on board to make sure that they're integrating the technology within their workflows appropriately? That's a great question. 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'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 said or not said, and it kind of really drooled down

6:10on things potentially that are missed for development and coaching opportunities. Got it. That's hopeful 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? You know, I think it's just a remain patient, this is a journey. Definitely a marathon, not a sprint, and when we first kind of undertook this initiative, I thought, you know, just from my background and doing this before, it would go a little faster. And as we've kind of built this out, you know, you're reliant on third-party vendors, other working cross-functionally, and it's just, it's not, it's, I've had to re-prioritize my thinking, it's really a, it's a journey, and we're going to get there, but does 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,

7:12go. This really takes a lot of time and 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 this remaining patient and not, and not get ahead of ourselves. 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 of 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. And curious, before we wrap up here, what do you see has been some of the best opportunities for organizational growth? You know, from an organizational standpoint, we're going to, 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, just to really provide our team

8:18members better tools, AI, automation to do their job more seamlessly and to reduce the burden on the workforce. And if we're able to streamline our processes, if we're able to, in validate our patients more seamlessly, so we, for example, we've rolled in a customer relationship management platform or what we refer to as GRM, 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 interactions that the patients have with the system, maybe things that they're calling for based on what they previously called for and we document all that information. And this to really capture the patient journey, 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. Hello, that Steve, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

9:21This has been a really fascinating conversation. I've learned a lot and certainly it's been great to connect with you today and 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 other areas that are really going to be critical for success going forward. So thank you for your time, Steve, and I look forward to seeing you soon. Absolutely, I enjoyed our time and definitely look forward to seeing you in Chicago in the spring.