EP392: When Patient Journeys Don't Fit in the EHR System, With Emily Kagan Trenchard From Northwell Health

When Patient Journeys Don't Fit in the EHR System, With Emily Kagan Trenchard From Northwell Health (EP392)

EHRs Were Built as Glorified Cash Registers—Here's What Health Systems Actually Need Instead. Episode 392.

Stacey Richter talks with Emily Kagan Trenchard, SVP and chief of consumer digital solutions at Northwell Health, about why treating the EHR as the one platform to rule them all is an outdated default—and the four technology "tentpoles" health systems actually need.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why EHRs were purpose-built to document billing-relevant patient encounters, not the full patient journey

✅ What happens to all the clinically relevant information that occurs outside a traditional patient encounter

✅ The four platform tentpoles Trenchard identifies: the EHR, a CRM, a cloud data/analytics platform, and a data exchange

✅ Why treating CRM as a philosophy of relationship-building, not just software, changes how health systems operate

✅ How friction-intolerant patients and providers increasingly compare healthcare to one-click consumer platforms

✅ Why getting the right technology chassis in place is a competitive necessity, not just an IT upgrade

WHY THIS MATTERS

Defaulting to "just build it in the EHR" leaves health systems duct-taping critical functions onto a platform that was never designed for them. Trenchard's tentpole framework gives health system leaders a way to think about technology architecture strategically instead of reactively—which matters more as tech-native competitors eye pieces of the trillion-dollar hospital market.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

No past-episode citations in this episode's timestamped chapter list.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

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00:00 Introduction.

07:55 How does customer digital solutions fit into the larger technology infrastructure in healthcare?

09:54 "Where else do you have centers of gravity that you should respect in the architecture?"

10:11 "There is a constellation of need here."

11:51 "We interact with way more than just patients."

14:28 "We have to be able to understand the network of relationships in a population."

15:11 How do EHRs and CRMs interact as two tentpoles in healthcare?

17:32 "The question is, where does a human being work?"

19:54 How are patients staying on a nonfragmented care journey in a proactive way?

23:46 "Anybody who's a consumer of our digital offerings has a relationship with us."

29:33 "The medicine is being practiced not only on our physical bodies but on our digital bodies."