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Patient & Consumer Innovation Summit 2023
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2024

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Patient & Consumer Innovation Summit 2025 Patient & Consumer Innovation Summit 2025
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Patient & Consumer Innovation Summit 2025

author - Adam Cherrington
Author
Adam Cherrington
author - Spencer Snyder
Author
Spencer Snyder
 
June 5, 2025 | Read Time: 13  minutes

In April 2025, KLAS hosted the fourth Patient and Consumer Innovation (PCI) Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. This event brought together a diverse group of thought leaders from health systems and healthcare IT (HIT) vendors as well as patient representatives, who are at the heart of this summit. During the event, attendees engaged in meaningful discussions about what it means for healthcare to be patient-centric. This summit overview summarizes insights gathered from pre-summit surveys conducted by KLAS as well as the event’s panels and keynote addresses.

The KLAS Playbook for Patient-Centric Care

The 2025 PCI Summit also resulted in the creation of the first-ever KLAS Playbook for Patient-Centric Care, which is built on feedback gathered via the pre-summit surveys, ideas shared in the summit discussions, and insights from previous KLAS events. While healthcare organizations are striving to be patient-centric, many feel there isn’t a structured framework to guide decisions across leadership, clinical teams, technology design, and patient communications. The KLAS Playbook for Patient-Centric Care provides strategies that can help organizations deliver a seamless, patient-centric experience across the care continuum. The playbook examines barriers to patient-centric care as well as proven innovations and “plays” organizations can implement to address those barriers and empower patients in their care journeys. To learn more, see the full playbook.

PRE-SUMMIT SURVEY

KLAS conducted two pre-summit surveys: one that was given to summit attendees and one that was available to the general public. The following charts draw from feedback given in the survey available to the general public. The survey given to summit attendees was used to provide additional data and context for the small-group discussions during the summit as well as to inform insights shared in the Playbook for Patient-Centric Care.

non healthcare technologies that improve consumer experiences
commonly reported patient pain points
is your organization involving  the patient persepctive in future plans

SUMMIT PANELS

The Voice of the Patient

KLAS intentionally kicked off the summit by listening to patients’ voices to ensure they were the foundation of the summit.

Key Takeaways:

  • Technology often fails to meet patients’ real needs: During the panel, patient representatives shared how fragmented systems, inaccessible portals, and confusing test result displays create unnecessary burdens and emotional stress, especially during vulnerable moments.
  • Human connection and communication matter most: Although having digital access to healthcare is important, the patient representatives emphasized the importance of human connection when receiving diagnoses—e.g., in-person explanations, clear language, and listening clinicians. Some shared traumatic experiences of receiving serious diagnoses through impersonal channels.
  • AI and personalization show promise: The panelists expressed cautious optimism about AI, highlighting its value in organizing health information, summarizing test results, and tailoring support. However, they emphasized that AI needs to be grounded in trusted data and guided by clinicians.
  • Patient portal usability and education need improvement: Patient portals are often underutilized because patients aren’t shown how to effectively use them. To improve patient adoption of portals, organizations should implement strategies like in-app tutorials, on-demand education, and simplified test labeling.
  • Healthcare organizations should learn from consumer experiences: The patient representatives highlighted how care experiences often pale in comparison to experiences with companies like Apple or Disney. They urged healthcare organizations to adopt similar personalization strategies and create seamless care experiences.
the voice of the patient panel headshots moderator traci hartman, panelists aaron bently ami cragun erica olenski

Provider Organizations Practicing Patient Centricity

In this panel, provider representatives were asked to share examples of patient centricity at their organizations.

Key Takeaways:

  • Make patient voices central to healthcare digital strategies: Organizations can listen to patient voices through advisory groups or direct feedback loops. Seattle Children’s shared an example where listening to patient input led the organization to launch a Minecraft gaming environment for hospitalized children—highlighting how user-driven design enhances care and engagement.
  • Break down barriers to patient equity and access: The panelists reported making significant strides toward engaging Medicaid patients and non-English-speaking populations by leveraging bilingual navigators, digital literacy support programs, and community health workers. Several organizations have also seen substantial increases in patient portal adoption among previously hard-to-reach groups.
  • Prioritize governance and communication: The panelists shared concerns about patient overload due to fragmented digital touchpoints; for example, patients sometimes receive about 30 messages post-discharge. Organizations should prioritize governance structures to unify patient messaging across platforms and ensure patient-centric communication.
  • Healthcare organizations need true vendor partners: Being a true vendor partner means being deeply embedded into clinical workflows, being open to integration, and collaborating to solve systemic issues. Seattle Children’s partnered with Google to build AI-powered clinical pathway tools, which have led to more accurate and informed clinical decisions.
  • Use AI for efficiency, safety, and equity: The panelists discussed early AI use cases (e.g., enhancing call center triage, streamlining communications) that have demonstrated meaningful clinical and operational outcomes. ROI from AI must be measured by clinical benefit, staff efficiency, and health equity—not just cost savings.
provider organizations practicing patient centricity panel headshots moderator rebecca hammond panelists anshu abha md mph facp chelsea landon mha pmp timothy shiuh md facep zafar chaudry md ms mis mba

SUMMIT KEYNOTE ADDRESSESS

Beyond the Playbook—The Value of an Innovation Mindset in Healthcare

Key Takeaways:

  • Start with people, not products: Rather than beginning with technology, healthcare innovation should begin with an understanding of patients’ real-life needs and challenges. Design technology solutions with patients.
  • See patients as team members: Patients are not spectators in healthcare—they are essential players on the team and must be included from strategy to execution.
  • Break down barriers to success through collaboration: In football, success requires every role, from coach to player, to be coordinated. In healthcare, the same trust and collaboration are needed across all stakeholders to achieve better patient outcomes.
  • Be persistent and resilient: To see innovation in healthcare, stakeholders need to tenaciously challenge the status quo and push through systemic barriers.
speaker headshot kristy dickinson

Beauty Lies in the Eyes of the Beholder

Key Takeaways:

  • Know the whole patient, not just their chart: Clinicians need to know patients beyond what is in their medical records—look at patients’ family histories, lifestyles, genetics, and social determinants of health.
  • Missed opportunities undermine care: Disconnected systems, communication breakdowns, and logistical oversights (e.g., lack of transportation or patient education) can lead to preventable medical errors and poor patient experiences.
  • AI must be humanized: Dr. Rab called healthcare organizations to use AI in more empathetic, intelligent ways, such as to anticipate patient needs, simplify workflows, and support clinicians.
  • Design systems that support simplicity and user dignity: From appointment reminders to bathroom logistics, overlooked operational details can compound patient stress. Patient-centric systems consider basic comforts, cultural sensitivities, and clarity.
  • Collaboration is core to patient care: Great care is built on trust, communication, and teamwork. Healthcare leaders and HIT vendors should exist in a collaborative ecosystem, not in silos, and design innovations that serve both their purpose and patients.
speaker headshot shafiq rab

Confluence Health & the KLAS Patient Voice Collaborative

confluence health and the klas patient voice collaborative headshots moderator tommy rowley panelists dr becket mahnke josh wood

Dr. Becket Mahnke and Josh Wood presented on Confluence Health’s initiative to redesign care delivery through increased digital patient engagement. The initiative was guided partly by insights from KLAS’ reports and Patient Voice Collaborative as well as by a patient experience survey. The organization received about 8,000 survey responses, which highlighted Confluence’s strengths (e.g., usable tools) and opportunities (e.g., telehealth, cost estimates, provider search). Additionally, to better understand the complexity of and variability in patient experiences, Confluence created three relatable fictional personas:

Emily: A healthy, tech-savvy mother

Simon: An immigrant father with language and financial barriers

Martina: An elderly widow with chronic conditions

Now, when making care decisions, Confluence’s clinicians can use these personas to help them think beyond general demographic categories and create personalized care plans that will improve the specific patient’s engagement and health outcomes. Further, Confluence has found that by asking patients to take on more digital tasks (e.g., self-check-in, post-care management), patients feel more engaged and feel the technology has improved their health outcomes. Going forward, the organization will continue to focus on engaging underrepresented groups and measuring the impact of digital patient engagement.

KLAS SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS

During the summit, KLAS held two breakout discussions that featured our in-house subject matter experts, whose expertise ranges from established areas like value-based care to emerging topics like ambient speech. See below for summaries of topics discussed, including current challenges and goals for the future state.

Current Challenges

Patient engagement is still fragmented: Once a buzzword, patient engagement is now a strategic accelerator, but many organizations still lack a unified, cross-departmental strategy. Tools like CRMs and patient portals are often underused due to insufficient infrastructure and fragmented ownership, which can lead to an inconsistent user experience. The next phase of patient engagement requires coordinated governance and integration across clinical, financial, and marketing functions.

Misaligned value-based care and SDOH strategies: Despite growing momentum, adoption of value-based care and social determinants of health (SDOH) strategies is often stalled by misaligned incentives, difficulty quantifying ROI, and inconsistent reimbursement models. Success in these areas requires visionary leadership, a rethinking of ROI, and better alignment between payer and clinical strategies.

Difficulty closing the loop for patients: While community-based programs (e.g., food banks, transportation services, remote care) show promise, healthcare organizations still struggle to close the loop and ensure patients can access those programs and have their needs met. Clinicians and other healthcare teams need to be better educated about these programs and build stronger partnerships with community-based organizations.

AI is ubiquitous but under-operationalized: AI is at the forefront of conversations across healthcare specialties. However, many use cases remain in “pilot purgatory” as stakeholders are concerned about scaling due to infrastructure gaps, siloed strategies, or lack of operational support. Organizations need to push beyond the promise of AI to achieve tangible outcomes for patients, clinicians, and operations.

Challenges achieving proactive, integrated, equitable care: There is a future where patient engagement is amplified by gamified health education, data-sharing incentives, predictive outreach, and voice-first technology. However, challenges such as privacy concerns, difficulty building trust, and unethical uses of AI must be addressed before unlocking the technology’s full potential.


Future State

Evolving approaches to patient/member engagement: Health plans are beginning to leverage AI to re-engage transient or hard-to-reach members, and organizations are also empowering pharmacists to close care gaps. As strategies for patient engagement continue to evolve, they should still emphasize the importance of meeting patients where they are—physically, emotionally, and digitally—and be personalized, data-driven, and rooted in real-time patient communication channels.

Increased patient financial engagement: Integrating services (e.g., pre-service estimates, payment plans, test-to-pay models) that increase financial transparency within the patient care journey can simplify the billing process and reduce surprise costs. Payer organizations should also be actively involved in the financial conversation to align incentives and improve trust in cost estimates.

Ambient documentation: This transformative technology, powered by generative AI, has streamlined clinicians’ documentation, enabling them to engage more meaningfully with patients and feel less burned out. Notably, AI-generated notes—which can be translated into a patient’s language and reading level—are enhancing health literacy and patient empowerment, especially for underserved populations. (For a look at vendor performance in this space, see KLAS’ recent Ambient Speech report.)

Consumer-grade, proactive, and collaborative healthcare: KLAS’ subject matter experts called for a transformation in the healthcare digital experience. Ideally, the healthcare digital experience would be as seamless as booking travel and built on proactive, personalized outreach, clearer service options (especially in imaging), and greater cross-system collaboration.

Global patient engagement models: Internationally, family members often act as primary caregivers, driving the adoption of care coordination tools that accommodate caregiver access to patient portals. This contrasts with Western models and emphasizes culturally attuned patient centricity, including shared decision-making with family networks.


A Fireside Chat About the Patient Experience

a fireside chat about the patient experience headshots interviewer kent gale interviewees christopher ross edward marx

During this fireside chat, Christopher Ross and Edward Marx shared their personal cancer journeys, noting that becoming patients exposed them to the emotional intensity and structural deficiencies of healthcare. They also stressed that true understanding of the patient experience often comes only through firsthand experience. Most patients don’t know that they have the right to ask questions and get second opinions. Patients need to be better educated in order to take charge of their own care.

Ross and Marx share more about their healthcare experiences in their book, Diagnosed: An Insider’s Guide for Your Healthcare Journey.

VENDOR PRESENTATIONS

Successful Examples of Patient Centricity

Representatives from Epic, eVisit, PerfectServe, Tegria, Upfront, and Vital presented on how they have worked to implement patient centricity in their solutions.

Key Takeaways:

  • Personalization and access: Tools like Epic MyChart, Upfront, and Vital can be tailored to an individual patient’s communication preferences and behaviors. Vendors should provide self-service capabilities, mobile capabilities, and multilingual accessibility.
  • quity and inclusion: Presentations from Tegria and eVisit stressed that understanding a patient’s broader situation (e.g., social, emotional) is essential for true personalization. The representatives advocated for knowing patients through empathetic data use and design that bridges access barriers.
  • Technology that serves patients and clinicians: The speakers repeatedly noted that technology needs to ease burdens, not add to them. In order to make patient-centric care scalable, vendor solutions should enable clinicians to focus on patient interactions rather than the administrative burden.
successful examples of patient centricity vendor presentations headshots amy lee justin schrager kelly conklin margaret enright taylor seale tye cook

Thank You to Healthcare Experts & Influencers

KLAS thanks the following industry leaders for providing short video responses, which were played during the summit. These responses shared the leaders’ perspectives on patient-centric technologies as well as examples of consumer-friendly technologies from outside healthcare that they want to see implemented.

  • Adam Turinas
  • Britt Berrett
  • Caroline D. Brown
  • Colin Hung
  • Dr. Geeta Nayyar, MD, MBA
  • Jared Jeffery, MBA, FACHDM
  • Jared Johnson
  • Laura Cooley, PhD
  • Mike Mosquito, CHCIO, MBA, PMP, CDH-E

We Need to Listen to Patients

The summit attendees made a unified and passionate call for healthcare transformation to begin, not end, with patients and caregivers. Specifically, they highlighted the transformative power of truly listening to patients—validating their experiences and involving them meaningfully in solution design. Patients are the experts in their own lives and thus are essential teammates in the care field. To truly change the game in healthcare, organizations and patients must work together, centering change around the human experience and reimagining what is possible. For guidance on how to accomplish this, KLAS encourages all to read the KLAS Playbook for Patient-Centric Care, which is intended as a companion resource to this summit overview.

SUMMIT ATTENDEES

Healthcare Organizations

Angella Herrman, Systems Informatics Manager, University of Kansas Health System

Dr. Anshu Abhat, Director of Patient Engagement, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services 

Becket Mahnke, CMIO, Confluence Health Bert Compton, Director of Digital Strategy, University of Utah Health

Britney Klaetsch-Gravell, Digital Transformation Program Manager, University of Utah Health

Chelsea Landon, Director of Health System Emerging Strategies, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Christy Benson, Associate Director of Information Technology Services, University of Utah Health

Cindy Whitehead, Senior VP of IT, Apps, Data Integrations, and Partnerships, Premise Health

Craig Norquist, CMIO, Honor Health

Dianne Novak, VP of Consumer Experience and Digital Health, Atrium Health

Dustin Boreson, Marketing Department Manager, Confluence Health

Eduardo Bier de Araujo Correa, President, Hospital Moinhos de Vento

Emily Kapszukiewicz, CX and Innovation Advisor, Centra Health (Advisor)

Jane Sims, Manager of Patient Education, Intermountain Health

Dr. John Joe, Director, St. Luke’s Health

Josh Wood, VP of Digital Engagement, Confluence Health

Kevin Sowti, Medical Director of Hospital Medicine, Penn Medicine

Kimberly Lane, Executive Director of Home Health and Hospice, Banner Health

Kristina Belk, Director of Performance Management Strategy Office, Gillette Children’s

Laura Marquez, Senior Director of Digital Transformation, University of Utah Health

Mari Ransco, Senior Director of Patient Experience, University of Utah Health

Mark Rhodes, IT AVP of Consumer Technology, Atrium Health

Megan Sandin, Project Manager, Gillette Children’s

Mohamed Payeq Parrini Mutlaq, CEO, Hospital Moinhos de Vento

Natasha Bartz, Senior Patient Access Educator, Gillette Children’s

Novlet Mattis, CDIO, Orlando Health

Rita Ogden, Executive Director of Patient Services, UCSF Health

Shafiq Rab, EVP, Chief Digital Information Officer & System CIO, Tufts Medicine

Sri Bharadwaj, COO/CIO, Longevity Health Plan

Dr. Steve Schiebel, CMIO, Allegro Pediatrics

Dr. Timothy Shiuh, Chief Health Information Officer and VP of Digital Clinical Transformation, ChristianaCare

Travis Gregory, Associate Chief of Applications Offices, University of Utah Health

Zafar Chaudry, Senior VP, Chief of Digital and AI, CIO, Seattle Children’s


Vendors

Alexandra Lincoln, VP of Digital Acquisition and Retention, Nordic

Amy Lee, VP, Head of Marketing, eVisit

Brian Van Wyk, Patient Experience, Epic

Dan Mowery, Director of Marketing, IKS Health

Justin Schrager, Chief Medical Officer and Co-founder, Vital

Katie Byrd , Director of CareSignal Client Success, Lightbeam Health Solutions

Kelly Conklin, Chief Clinical and Chief Customer Officer, PerfectServe

Kristal Wittmann, Director of Access and Experience, Tegria

Maggie Stack, Product Informatics, Epic

Margaret Enright, VP of Consumer Experience and Strategy, Upfront by Health Catalyst

Nate Allen, Senior Director of Customer Success, eVisit

Sarah Bennight, Senior VP of Marketing, IKS Health

Spencer Adams, Vice President, Lightbeam Health Solutions

Taylor Seale, Software Developer, Epic

Tye Cook, Head of Strategic Business Development, Tegria


Patient & Industry Leaders

Aaron Bentley, CIO, Salt Lake City

Ami Cragun, Patient Leader

Christopher Ross, Senior Advisor, Insight Partners

Edward Marx, CEO, Marx Advisory

Erica Olenski, AVP, FINN Partners

Kristy Dickinson, Principal, Kristy Dickinson Consulting


author - Natalie Hopkins
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Natalie Hopkins
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Nikki Christensen
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This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2025 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.