PEP Health Partners with ECU Health to Advance Patient Experience Through Real-Time AI Insights

ECU Health is integrating PEP Health's experience healthcare technology to further elevate its human-centered care

MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 19, 2025 /CNW/ - PEP Health, the AI-powered patient experience platform trusted by leading health systems, today announced a strategic partnership with ECU Health, a mission-driven rural academic health system known for its excellence in patient experience and commitment to rural health and wellness. This collaboration provides ECU Health with real-time, AI-driven patient and community insights, allowing for a more inclusive, proactive, and data-informed approach to improving the patient experience through the wisdom of unsolicited patient feedback.

"Creating caring experiences for our patients and team members is central to our mission and values," said Dr. Julie Kennedy Oehlert, Chief Experience Officer at ECU Health. "PEP Health's technology offers a new and comprehensive way to deeply listen to patients as well as potential consumers and puts us in a better position to make more informed experience decisions. This partnership supports our ongoing commitment to deliver safe, highly reliable human-centered care to the communities we serve."

Transformative Technology for Rural Health Excellence

Today's healthcare consumers expect transparency, responsiveness, and personalized experiences—and PEP Health meets this challenge by using AI, data science, and healthcare-specific natural language processing (NLP) to continuously analyze millions of patient interactions across online sources, including social media, review platforms, and patient forums. ECU Health will implement PEP Health's proprietary AI analysis of unsolicited feedback from over eight million digital sources.

"Patient experience is the foundation of healthcare excellence," said Dr. Mark Lomax, CEO of PEP Health. "ECU Health's commitment to understanding patient and community insights sets a standard for human-centered care. With our technology, they can focus on what patients' value most and continuously adapt to meet those expectations."

Why This Matters for Healthcare Providers

The stakes for patient experience have never been higher. Patient sentiment directly influences HCAHPS scores, CMS Star Ratings, and financial performance. Traditional surveys offer limited, delayed, and often incomplete insights, capturing feedback from only a small percentage of patients. Meanwhile, millions of people—including patients, family members, caregivers, and future healthcare consumers—are already sharing their experiences online.

These unfiltered perspectives provide a wealth of actionable insights that hospitals and health systems can leverage to improve care quality, enhance trust, and drive better outcomes—if they have the right tools to capture and analyze them.

"Forward-thinking health systems like ECU Health recognize that these insights from unsolicited feedback are key to unlocking better outcomes, improved loyalty, and inspiring long-term patient trust. Our technology provides more visibility into actual patient sentiment—helping healthcare leaders take meaningful action before issues impact care quality or financial performance," continued Dr. Lomax.

To see how real-time patient insights can benefit your healthcare organization, reach out to schedule a demo.

About PEP Health

PEP Health uses advanced AI and natural language processing to analyze diverse, unsolicited patient feedback from online sources such as social media, review platforms, and forums, alongside hospital surveys and internal data. By providing a comprehensive, real-time view of patient and community experiences, PEP Health helps healthcare providers gain insights that traditional surveys often miss. This approach enables organizations to understand patient preferences more deeply, focus on what matters most, and align care with evolving expectations.

About ECU Health:

ECU Health is a mission-driven, 1708-bed academic health care system serving more than 1.4 million people in 29 eastern North Carolina counties. The not-for-profit system is comprised of more than 14,000 team members, nine hospitals and a physician group that encompasses over 1,100 academic and community providers practicing in over 185 primary and specialty clinics located in more than 110 locations. The flagship ECU Health Medical Center, a Level I Trauma Center, and ECU Health Maynard Children's Hospital serve as the primary teaching hospitals for the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. ECU Health and the Brody School of Medicine share a combined academic mission to improve the health and well-being of eastern North Carolina through patient care, education and research.

SOURCE PEP Health

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