QuestionPro has had a solid acquisition run over the past 12 months, with two recent deals centered on the healthcare vertical. In February, the company acquired Pundit Consultantz, a healthcare innovation and go-to-market consultancy. Patient Safety Group was purchased in May from Smart Patients LLC. Patient Safety Group is a technology platform that helps health systems and hospitals collect and analyze patient and employee safety insights required by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). These purchases follow the 2020 acquisition of the healthcare-focused CX platform Care Experience.
I was able to chat with Arti Bedi Pullins, Pundit’s founder and former CEO, who is now President and Chief Healthcare Officer at QuestionPro. Pullins is leading the company’s push into the healthcare vertical and the broadening capabilities of the platform to support patient experience (PX).
Increased Healthcare Focus and the Importance of Measuring Safety
“QuestionPro focuses on data, insights, and outcomes. This is critically important to the healthcare industry and we have the ability to really turn answers into patient outcomes and results that can be acted on. There is lots of data collection required in the healthcare segment, particularly in the United States, so it seemed a natural next step to expand activity in this vertical,” says Pullins.
Acquiring Patient Safety Group allows for a broadening of the current platform and is a complementary layer to what QuestionPro is already offering the healthcare segment. The data collected via this survey type includes all aspects of patient and culture safety data, such as communication, teamwork, leadership, hospital safety policies, and procedures.
“Patient safety surveys are very specific and very niche, with the targeted focus of measuring and collecting data on patient safety. They use very specific AHRQ benchmarks that are released by the federal government and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) with goals that hospitals strive to attain. We will continue to offer this solution in addition to the wide range of other survey types QuestionPro offers, such as those measuring patient and clinical satisfaction and engagement. The end goal is for all models of surveying data collection for Healthcare and hospitals to be integrated into the QuestionPro platform by the beginning of next year which will give hospitals the ability to really go deep and wide when it comes to patient feedback, employee feedback, physician, clinical feedback and or patient data collection,” says Pullins.
Patient safety can be very closely tied to employee, clinical safety, and clinical & nursing burnout, which was a problem even before the pandemic. Being able to get a picture of patient safety data can help healthcare systems find areas for improvement and make better decisions for their patients outcomes, as well as their employees and general community.
Improved Data Correlation with Broadened Capabilities
QuestionPro already offers capabilities that are necessary for robust data collection and analysis including:
- The ability to check in along multiple touchpoints
- Continuous monitoring and pulse surveying for patients clinicians, providers, and all system employees
- Messaging alerts and notifications to support real time actioning and delivering better outcomes
“The QuestionPro platform is built to do continual listening, continual collection, and then continual on demand outcome analysis. And I am excited that Patient Safety Group customers are now going to be tied into those capabilities. But what I am really excited about is the increased ability to correlate incoming data. Providers and clinicians will be able to correlate data and see the alignment. For example, data can be brought in from patient experience and reported outcomes surveys, along with clinical engagement, burnout, and safety data so that healthcare organizations can tease out what is truly causing patient and clinical satisfaction, dissatisfaction, burnout, etc.,” says Pullins.
The platform is open API, so if there is an integration that needs to happen with a particular electronic health record (EHR) or electronic medical record (EMR) provider, it can be built quickly and turned on in real time. Pullins also noted that QuestionPro is fully Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant for healthcare data collection as well as FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliant for life sciences data collection and electronic records keeping, all important to delivering trusted, safe, secure, and actionable data for the healthcare, life sciences, and pharma market.
QuestionPro has several big healthcare and life sciences customers already including the American Cancer Society, Sanofi, GoHealth, Merck, Baxter, Elsevier, and more than 130 integrated delivery networks (IDNs) like Mayo, Cleveland, and UNC Healthcare clinics. The company’s investments both in healthcare-related solutions and talent should accelerate its progress in the healthcare and life sciences segments.
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
