Forrester Research Links Patient Loss to Access Friction, Not Clinical Outcomes — Keona Health Responds
Chapel Hill, United States – March 31, 2026 / Keona Health /
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Keona Health has published a summary of findings from Forrester’s Q2 2024 Customer Experience Platforms for Healthcare Landscape report and its September 2024 Wave evaluation, outlining how CareDesk aligns with the operational criteria both reports identify as critical to improving patient access.
Forrester’s Landscape report found that healthcare organizations are losing patients not to clinical failures but to access friction: repeated handoffs, fragmented data, and systems that cannot share context across channels. The September Wave evaluation reinforced that point, identifying coordinated, multi-channel platforms as the path forward for patient access teams operating under staff constraints.
“We’ve seen firsthand how frustrated patients get when their doctor’s office or healthcare system is working with a group of tools instead of a truly integrated system,” said Keona Health COO Stephen Dean. “CareDesk is designed to address patient experience fragmentation by coordinating patient data across channels and preserving context through every handoff.”
The Access Gap Costing Health Systems Patients
When scheduling, triage, and clinical data live in separate systems, every handoff becomes a potential failure point. Staff spend time reconstructing context that should arrive automatically. Patients experience the cost in longer wait times, repeated transfers, and unresolved calls.
A study published in JAMA Network Open found that 1 in 5 patients who reviewed their ambulatory visit notes reported finding an error, with 40% describing those errors as serious, a direct consequence of documentation failures that compound when systems cannot share information accurately.
Forrester’s research puts a strategic frame on this operational reality: organizations that fail to reduce this friction risk losing patients to nontraditional providers who make care easier to access.
“Patients don’t leave because of their diagnosis, they leave because the process is exhausting,” Dean said. “Forrester’s research reinforces what we hear from health systems regularly: fragmented systems are not just an IT problem, they’re a patient retention problem.”
CareDesk Capabilities Cited in the Summary
EHR and PM systems were designed to document and bill. They are not designed to orchestrate multi-channel access workflows. Without a dedicated coordination layer, health systems manage patient relationships through a patchwork of tools that were never built to work together.
CareDesk is designed to address that gap through three platform functions relevant to the criteria identified in the Forrester research:
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Unified interaction timeline. CareDesk consolidates calls, messages, scheduling events, and triage notes into a single patient timeline across phone, web, and text channels. The function is designed to give staff shared context at every interaction.
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Rules-based scheduling and routing with full auditability. CareDesk codifies appointment logic and logs every routing decision. The audit trail is designed to help organizations identify bottlenecks and correct errors before they affect the patient record.
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Safe escalation paths when clinical criteria are met. CareDesk includes configurable escalation triggers that route patients to designated staff or care pathways when clinical criteria are met. The function is intended to support timely triage and reduce unresolved call volume.
“CareDesk is built to coordinate across phone, web, and care team workflows,” Dean said. “The goal is to give staff the context they need to resolve issues at first contact rather than routing patients through repeated touchpoints.”
Report Summary Availability
Keona Health’s summary of findings from Forrester’s CX Platforms for Healthcare research is available on the Keona Health website at keonahealth.com/resources.
Additional information about CareDesk is available at keonahealth.com.
About Keona Health
Keona Health is a healthcare CRM company whose CareDesk platform coordinates patient communication across voice, chat, and self-service channels. Built for healthcare operations, not IT departments, CareDesk preserves clinical context across every patient interaction and measures completed outcomes rather than call volume. Keona Health is based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and serves healthcare providers across multiple specialties. Additional information is available at keonahealth.com.
Contact Information:
Keona Health
510 Meadowmont Village Circle Suite 250
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
United States
Ryan Hunt
(919) 246-8520
https://www.keonahealth.com
