"So, who are you again?"

Most of the calls I make to healthcare providers are to contacts that KLAS has never spoken to before.  Often I will first communicate via email to briefly introduce myself and KLAS, and to set up a phone call. Many times when I begin these phone calls, the first comment I get is some variation of, "So, who are you again?"  It seems a lot these individuals have heard our name, seen it in publication somewhere, or received an email from their vendor bragging that their system is "Best in KLAS" in a category.  But I find that very few of these contacts know anything about us beyond the fact that we are somehow involved in healthcare.

I love explaining who we are and what we do because most people switch from a guarded, I-really-don't-have-time-for-another-survey-person stance to a wow-you-guys-can-really-help-me-out-at-the-end-of-the-day viewpoint. Yes, we do go over a set of standardized survey questions so that we have comparable data on all the systems we rate, but beyond that we try to grasp the bigger picture of where providers are experiencing success, where they are facing the greatest challenges, and how their vendors are contributing to that.  Then we turn that knowledge back around to inform the healthcare community of detailed vendor performance, market trends, and other industry knowledge such as how they can best prepare for ever-evolving healthcare reform initiatives.

These contacts realize that KLAS is out to make their jobs easier. My favorite part of my job is calling one of those contacts back months later and hearing how the KLAS data we shared has given them greater confidence in their go-forward IT-strategy.