In today's healthcare market, patients see themselves as consumers and expect a consumer-like experience.
This is changing the nature of competition, as providers increasingly must compete on customer experience (CX).
In a May Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Redpoint, Sarah Lull, healthcare customer experience executive at Redpoint, and Craig Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Lucerna Health, discussed the consumer trend and reviewed how a solution based on data, analytics and activation can add value for patients and provider organizations.
Four key takeaways were:
- Patients want a more personalized healthcare experience, which is changing the nature of competition. Ms. Lull shared data from a survey conducted by Dynata indicating that 75 percent of U.S. consumers wish their healthcare experience was more personalized. "In fact, 41 percent said they would actually leave a brand due to poor personalization," she said. "Patients demand this during the entirety of their healthcare journey, which is going to span the course of their lifetime. Every step along that journey needs to have a personalized brand experience."
These attitudes are changing the nature of competition in healthcare. "We really believe that the imperative and the future for healthcare, whether you're a payer or provider, or in the pharma life sciences space, is to compete on the strength of your customer experience," Ms. Hull said. Competition starts at the beginning of the patient journey and occurs through each step.
- Personalization requires evolving to market to mass audiences of one. "We need to move from broad segments to segments of one," Ms. Lull explained. "We need to switch from batch and episodic events to more real-time, event-driven actions while removing friction within those experiences." This requires that the patient is at the center of all those experiences, that every channel provides an equally good experience and that awareness across channels ("omni-channel") exists so patients can start a process in one channel and complete it in another. There is a difference between multi-channel, which can have silos, and omni-channel, which requires a cohesive, consistent, coordinated patient experience across all channels.
- Redpoint sees omni-channel experiences grounded with data, insight and activation. Those elements need to work together seamlessly for true omni-channel personalized experiences. Customer data management includes member identification, clinical data, channel preference and web browsing history. Machine learning brings together this data so it's current and accessible and can drive insights and actions. The activation layer is the centralized brain across an ecosystem and endpoint channels, which enables healthcare organizations to build segments, audiences and content that's reusable.
- A personalized, omni-channel experience must drive value. "In healthcare, value drivers revolve around the acquisition and retention of customers," Mr. Thomas said. "You want to engage consumers who are not otherwise engaged as well as measure and support your own team's operations. There are many value opportunities, which amount to big dollars, when deployed broadly across your enterprise."
Mr. Thomas shared an example of an appointment survey use case. After every patient visit, the system automatically triggers a detailed patient satisfaction and Net Promoter Score survey. "It's available in multiple channels and multiple languages, and we get a strong response rate that's very helpful to the provider," he said. Data can be filtered by state, market segment, facility or dates of service. Scores are segmented by service and operations and clinical experience.
This data "allows organizations to understand how consumers are experiencing their companies at a detailed enough level to manage process improvements, training and compensation programs," Mr. Thomas said.
Healthcare organizations are transforming their patient experiences to meet the consumer-driven demand for personalization. Organizations can benefit from solutions like those offered by Redpoint and Lucerna to provide cohesive, data-driven experiences that drive value.
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