< + > Improving the Patient Experience Across Access, Communication, and Continuity of Care

For the most part, the days of having no choice in your healthcare provider other than the only one in your area are gone. It’s becoming very common for people to not only have more options but to utilize them as well. If the level of care or the experience is not up to what the patient is seeking, they can and will go to a provider that can meet those needs. As such, improving the patient experience has quickly become one of the biggest priorities in the healthcare space. There are many different approaches and methods that people have been using, so today we are going to narrow our focus down to just the impact of health IT solutions.

We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — how are health IT solutions improving the patient experience across access, communication, and continuity of care? The following are their answers.

Sean Raj, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at SimonMed
There’s a fundamental shift happening in healthcare—from reactive and episodic to proactive and continuous—and AI is accelerating that change faster than most systems are designed to handle.

Imaging sits at the center of this transformation. It has the potential to detect disease earlier and create a baseline for managing health over time. But for too long, that value has been trapped in static reports that patients don’t fully understand and rarely engage with.

What we’re now seeing is a redefinition of the patient experience. Digital health platforms are translating imaging results into clear, actionable, and mobile-friendly insights paired with seamless pathways to follow-up care. In many cases, that means a patient can move from diagnosis to the next step with a single click. The biggest shift is that technology now elevates care beyond just report delivery. We are now empowering patients to stay continuously connected to and proactive about their health, rather than only engaging when something goes wrong.

Keith Herron, MHS, PA-C, Global Product Owner – Clinical Solutions at CenTrak
Health IT solutions are improving continuity of care by pulling together information from fragmented encounters and making it available in the EHR, ensuring that care providers have the information they need to make informed decisions. Some, such as RTLS software solutions, provide tools that allow better coordination of care by tracking patient progress, status, and interactions to ensure staff have better situational awareness to provide more efficient delivery of services.

Mindy Fortson, Chief Client Officer at Experian Health
While technology is helping close operational gaps, providers must still address staffing pressures that impact the patient experience. Experian Health’s 2026 State of Patient Access survey found that more than half (64%) of providers are reporting a direct impact on staffing, which is up seven percent from last year. For patients, access to practitioners remained the top challenge for the fourth year in a row. While technology cannot fully solve workforce shortages, digital tools and automation can help optimize existing resources. We are seeing providers prioritizing several initiatives to improve the patient experience with technology. Providers are focusing on faster, more automated ways for comprehensive insurance coverage review (44%), automation of authorizations (40%), and we saw a significant drop in patient dissatisfaction (18%) by delivering more accurate cost estimates and reducing surprise billing.

Jen Goldsmith, Co-Founder & CEO at Tendo
We’re seeing the rise of more consumer-oriented healthcare marketplaces, where Health IT enables pricing transparency, a pathway to understanding provider quality, and bundled episodes of care. For uninsured or underinsured populations in particular, these tools make it easier to find affordable, high-quality options and engage with the healthcare system in a way that removes friction from the care process.

Dr. Rowland Illing, Global Chief Medical Officer and Director, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Today’s health IT solutions, particularly those powered by agentic AI, are transforming the patient experience by making care easier to navigate and freeing clinicians’ time to focus on their patients.

Across the care journey, AI agents are reducing friction at every touchpoint. Patients can more easily schedule appointments with an agent, even during off-hours, and spend less time repeating the same information to multiple people before and during appointments. The result is a more transparent, user-friendly healthcare experience that meets rising patient expectations.

What’s equally important about AI agents is that they not only can perform these tasks, but also provide a personalized experience. By understanding patients from their medical records and preferences, agents can tailor interactions in a way that is both specific to a patient and easy to engage with through natural language.

At the same time, AI is reshaping provider workflows. Agentic AI solutions can now automate time-intensive administrative tasks such as medical coding and clinical documentation, while delivering pre-visit patient health summaries that ensure clinicians are better equipped for each visit. This shift allows clinicians to spend more time building trust and delivering high-quality care, ultimately driving better patient experiences.

Stephen Vaccaro, President at HHAeXchange
Delivering quality care in the home requires infrastructure that supports coordination at every touchpoint. Providers focused on maintaining continuity of care and improving the patient experience understand they can often make the biggest difference by starting with simple but impactful changes at the operational level.

Using homecare management technology for complex daily tasks — including caregiver scheduling, payroll, and billing processes — helps agencies run smoothly and reduce issues like missed visits to ensure consistent care. While in clients’ homes, that same technology helps caregivers collect visit data on mobile devices to meet electronic visit verification (EVV) requirements.

Beyond day-to-day logistics, health IT solutions tailored for homecare are bridging communication gaps between payers, agencies, and frontline caregivers. Additionally, when all of these stakeholders share a single system, information flows freely, and families and clients gain visibility into the process. This alignment strengthens outcomes and allows caregivers to build trusted relationships with the people they serve.

Ultimately, health IT solutions help keep older adults and individuals with complex care needs safe, healthy, and independent in their own homes and communities.

Conrad Gudmundson, Chief Commercial Officer at Lucem Health
Improving the patient experience starts with an earlier, faster diagnostic process. We must move beyond legacy models that wait for symptoms to appear. The future is population-level precision medicine that personalizes every interaction. By identifying risk within an entire population, we guide patients to their next step before a crisis hits. This turns engagement into a proactive, scalable capability that finally closes the gap between detection and action.

Dan McDonald, Co-Founder and CEO at 86Borders
Health IT drives human efficiency and helps make care more connected, but the real impact comes when it reduces the burden on patients. Technology can help make it easier than ever to connect with health plan members, to support, stay in touch, and avoid delays, but too many people still face barriers that technology alone cannot solve.

The biggest shift is in continuity. When information seamlessly moves across systems, care teams can better understand a patient’s situation, including needs that go beyond clinical care. That human connection solves for social determinant needs, helps close care gaps, and creates a more consistent experience. Technology works best when it drives efficiency and supports real engagement and helps guide patients through a healthcare system that can otherwise feel overwhelming.

Tij Bedi, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Patient Access and Innovation at IKS Health
Health IT must improve the patient experience where it actually matters, by reducing the friction people feel when accessing, connecting, and paying for care. The goal is to make it easier for patients to engage in their care, which leads to improved health and lower total cost of care.

To achieve this, it’s so important to put patients first and understand why they make the choices they do. Using deep technology to create an intelligence layer helps the patient and the healthcare organization. By knowing and understanding patient preferences, behaviors, patterns, and insurance architecture, it’s possible to preactively manage a patient’s care journey. With nudges for patient action, patients are more prepared, more adherent, more reliable, and more operationally predictable.

The shift toward a more behaviorally focused approach is about easing patient activation. Using advanced behavioral models, health systems can better understand what a patient knows, what might be in their way, and what motivates them to take the next step. That’s what transforms communication into real engagement, creating value for both the patient and the care team.

Dr. Nicholas Testa, Chief Clinical Officer at Sentact
The patient experience is a growing priority for most hospitals and health systems, and many are turning to solutions designed to break down fragmented systems and workflows, provide visibility into patient needs, and proactively address barriers impacting outcomes. Digital tools such as comprehensive rounding solutions create a hybrid environment that provides two key solutions.

First, they allow leaders to gain global visibility into the aggregate results of leader rounding. Second, they help hold everyone accountable by ensuring clinical teams step away from their emails and out of meetings to stand at the patient’s bedside, gaining a clearer understanding of their experience and perspective. When these solutions are combined with self-directed feedback surveys that can be accessed across various locations throughout facilities, and analytics that provide real-time insight to help streamline grievance management, health systems are better able to create seamless connections between patients and care teams.

These solutions are pivotal for capturing patient satisfaction both during and after a visit, helping health systems identify underlying risks and areas for improvement to address concerns or gaps quickly. The result is stronger patient trust in care teams and lasting insights that continuously elevate the patient experience.

Bob Farrell, CEO at mPulse
Health IT solutions focused on health experience and insights are making care more intuitive, personalized, and connected, ultimately, powering consumer centricity. Over the last year, 57% of health plan members reported worsening healthcare experiences. As members are acting more like consumers in healthcare, they’re searching for partners in navigating their complex care journeys. By pairing healthcare behavior predictions with AI-driven outreach, healthcare stakeholders can anticipate the next best step for members, and generate tailored interactions, whether that’s prompting follow-up care, surfacing options, or helping make informed decisions.

When outreach meets members in their preferred language, in the right mode, at the right time, and with information that’s useful to their specific journey, the experience feels seamless rather than fragmented. This ultimately strengthens the continuity of care. By proactively identifying and addressing gaps in care, we keep members engaged and connected, even when challenges arise, ensuring they don’t fall through the cracks, getting the care they need to orchestrate better health outcomes, higher satisfaction, and lower costs.

Branden Pearson, VP of Technology at TeleMed2U
Technology is increasingly serving as a core enabler of scalable, equitable access to care, particularly in rural communities where both primary care capacity and specialist coverage are constrained. Telemedicine, for example, offers convenient virtual visits that meet patients where they are, removing common geographic barriers to care, such as the need for reliable transportation, taking time away from work to travel long distances to appointments, and extensive wait times for available providers that can span months.

Digital resources also support care accessibility initiatives by arming patients with easy-to-navigate tools to help them connect with the clinical services they require when they are needed. By reducing traditional access friction and offering advanced communication tools like secure messaging, personalized patient follow-ups, and well-integrated clinical documentation, patients are empowered to stay better connected to their care team and adhere to their care plans, which is crucial for patients managing chronic conditions or complex needs longitudinally.

Nicole Rogas, President at RevSpring
Health IT solutions are improving the patient experience by reducing fragmentation across access, communication, and financial engagement. Self-service tools like scheduling and price transparency make it easier for patients to access care, while more intelligent, data-driven communication platforms enable timely, personalized outreach on preferred channels. When these capabilities are connected, they create continuity across the patient journey – reducing friction, increasing transparency, and building trust while driving better outcomes for both patients and providers.

Blake Richards, COO at Elucid
For technology to be widely adopted and truly improve the patient experience, it generally must simultaneously reduce the burden on the clinician. In cardiovascular care, this means moving beyond simple data collection to providing actionable insight. By using advanced AI to analyze coronary CT angiographies (the standard for non-invasive assessment), clinicians can extract precise risk data that previously required invasive cardiac catheterization.

This transition not only spares the patient from unnecessary procedures but also provides a clear, high-fidelity visualization of their disease. When a patient can actually see their health status in an understandable format, it fosters a sense of ownership, leading to higher trust and better adherence to treatment. Ultimately, the most effective health IT solutions act as a bridge, turning complex diagnostics into a clear, shared pathway for both the primary care physician and the specialist

Such great insights here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

How do you think health IT solutions are improving the patient experience across access, communication, and continuity of care? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!