Client Story
How a Patient Experience Specialist turns feedback into action
Virtus Health: A leading force in Fertility Care
Virtus Health is a global leader in assisted reproductive technology, specialist pathology and day hospital services, operating in Australia, Singapore, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. Committed to patient-centered care and continuously improving the patient journey, Melbourne IVF, IVF Australia, Queensland Fertility Group and Tas IVF has teamed with Cemplicity to take a data-driven approach to the power of patient feedback.
At the forefront of this effort is Charlotte Davies, Patient Experience Specialist at Virtus Health Australia. Since joining the organisation, Charlotte has leveraged Cemplicity’s real-time patient feedback system to drive significant improvements in communication, care delivery and organisational strategy. This is the story of how.
The Challenge: Fragmented, delayed patient feedback
Before implementing Cemplicity, Virtus Health faced several challenges in collecting and acting on patient feedback:
- Significant delays in obtaining and distributing patient insights, making it difficult to address concerns in real-time.
- Inconsistent timing of patient surveys, meaning feedback was often influenced by pregnancy outcomes rather than the care experience itself.
- Limited actionable insights, as feedback was scattered and not structured into meaningful themes.
Cemplicity’s expertise brings scientific rigor to patient feedback
The introduction of Cemplicity’s digital patient-reported experience system has transformed how Virtus collects, analyses and acts on patient feedback. With automated SMS-based surveys sent at day 21 of the IVF cycle, Virtus now ensures:
Timely, unbiased insights
Feedback is collected before patients know their pregnancy outcomes, removing bias.
Real-time data accessibility
Clinicians and local teams can access patient comments immediately.
A structured, comparable dataset
Surveys are sent at the same point in every patient’s journey, ensuring meaningful comparisons across clinics.
“Since implementing Cemplicity, because of the ease of Cemplicity for our patients, we are receiving more qualitative feedback.” – Charlotte Davies
Aligning local improvement efforts with strategic initiatives
Virtus Health has established Patient Experience (PX) Champions in each business unit to focus on local-level patient feedback and operational improvements. These PX Champions assess feedback from their specific clinic or location, identifying themes and trends and actioning improvements specific to their environments.
Charlotte’s role takes a more strategic view. As Patient Experience Specialist her priority is to ensure that overarching business-wide trends are identified, escalated to executive and director level stakeholders and addressed on a structural level.
Keeping these two roles aligned requires co-ordinated communication to ensure that local-level and enterprise-wide efforts don’t either clash or overlap.
How patient feedback has paid if forward with the development of The Cycle Navigator
One of the most impactful outcomes of patient feedback has been the development of the Cycle Navigator – a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for IVF patients. This document was created in response to feedback highlighting confusion and uncertainty about the fertility treatment journey.
“What we discovered was that patients felt really unsure about what to expect next on their IVF journey. They were unsure: what do I need to do tomorrow? What do I need to do next week? What do I need to do in a month’s time?” – Charlotte Davies
This initiative has been rolled out across all Virtus Health clinics in Australia, with ongoing tracking of patient feedback to refine and enhance its impact.
Taking the guesswork out of improvement ideas
Now that Charlotte has reliable data, she is using it to not only identify improvement opportunities but to back up initiatives with relevant and current patient feedback.
She has developed a structured backlog of patient experience priorities, ensuring decisions are backed by real patient voices. Using an Excel-based tracking system, she aligns every improvement initiative with qualitative patient comments gathered through Cemplicity.
Charlotte workshops these improvement opportunities with the wider executive team, including managing directors, operational leads, and nursing leads, to identify the next priority areas.
Patient voices heard at executive level
The evolution to a data-driven approach has led to executive-level engagement, with Virtus leadership increasingly prioritising patient experience initiatives. Patient feedback is now considered a foundational part of executive decision-making and is fully integrated into executive and operational workflows:
Executive meetings start with ‘Voice of the Patient’
“All our exec meetings now start with patient feedback, not just NPS scores. We display direct patient comments and use them to shape our discussions.” – Charlotte Davies
Local patient experience champions
Each clinic has designated Patient Experience Champions, who run regular huddles to discuss themes and improvement opportunities.
Improved complaints management
Cemplicity has triggered a national standardisation of how Virtus Health manages patient complaints, classifying issues into Level 1, 2 and 3 categories for clear resolution pathways.
“We’ve redone our entire complaints process. Now, if a complaint comes in via Cemplicity or another channel, it’s categorised and assigned a clear action plan.” – Charlotte Davies
The Future: Expanding patient-centered digital transformation
With the success of real-time feedback and data-driven improvements, Virtus Health is scaling up its patient experience initiatives:
Expanding the Patient Experience (PX) team
Leadership has recognised the impact of patient insights and is investing in growing the team.
Enhancing automation and transparency
From appointment reminders to cost estimates, Virtus is working towards a seamless, digital-first experience so patients can concentrate on why they are there, to have a baby.
A new era of patient-centric fertility care
Virtus Health’s commitment to listening to patients, acting on insights and embedding their voices into strategic decisions has transformed its approach to fertility care. With Cemplicity enabling real-time feedback organised around themes, Virtus Health has successfully created actionable, patient-driven improvements; standardised and improved complaints management across all clinics; engaged leadership and frontline staff in patient experience initiatives; and paved the way for digital transformation to further enhance patient support.
By putting patients at the heart of their journey, Virtus Health is setting a new benchmark for personalised, responsive fertility care.
