Beryl redefines focus as patient experience company

Beryl, the leader and pioneer in outsourced healthcare contact center services, announces its redefined focus as a patient experience company.  For 25 years, Beryl has focused on making it easier for patients to access information and healthcare providers, which enhances patients' interactions with healthcare systems.  While this underlying theme has always been present, redefining its focus ensures that all of Beryl's products and services are developed with a laser focus on their impact on improving the patient experience in healthcare.  

With this emphasis on the patient experience, Beryl will be better able to support the transition to accountable care organizations and other clinical integration. For Beryl, this focus on the patient experience involves the creation of a dedicated team with an expanded roster of service offerings providing customer support before hospitalization and following discharge. Steve Whitehurst, senior vice president, will lead Beryl's patient experience group. Today, the group includes 350 patient experience professionals. Plans are in place to grow the team to more than 400 local, regional and corporate-based patient experience executives.

"For the last decade or so, hospitals and physicians have focused on improving the quality of the care they offer, but the bar has been raised by the government, insurers and consumers," said Whitehurst. "Healthcare providers must now become more attuned to how they deliver care, not just the clinical results. Healthcare reform is forcing hospitals to pay attention to the patient experience because beginning October 2012, a portion of hospitals' Medicare reimbursements will be based on how hospitals perform with respect to patient experience ratings.  Beryl is positioned to help our client hospitals prepare for this market dynamic."  

"The Beryl Institute, Beryl's thought leadership entity,  defines the patient experience as the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization's culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care," said Paul Spiegelman, CEO of The Beryl Companies. "Given our work over the last 25 years, we've gained insight into how patients feel about the healthcare system.  We're going to leverage this knowledge to help hospitals and other providers improve connections and communications with patients."

Beryl serves nearly 500 hospitals across the nation, and Spiegelman anticipates they will look to Beryl to provide additional services to help hospitals along the continuum of the patient experience.