Healthcare consumerism. It's no longer the new buzzword in the industry or an emerging trend.
A patient's experience with your system goes beyond the quality of clinical care. Their customer experience is a journey. This journey includes everything from their experience with scheduling, time to get an appointment, parking, interactions with your website and technology, as well as your billing and collections processes. By thinking about patients as consumers, healthcare organizations have an opportunity not only to stand out, but also to meet and exceed patients' expectations.
Beto Casellas, CEO of CareCredit, addresses five questions that can help providers and healthcare organizations succeed in today's consumer-driven healthcare landscape.
Question: You recently assumed the role of CEO with CareCredit and were formerly the EVP, Chief Customer Engagement Officer at Synchrony. How does your track record of using data insights to enhance the consumer experience fit into your new role?
Beto Casellas: While in my Engagement Officer role, I had the privilege of leading a new function called Enterprise Customer Engagement and Analytics, which helped drive Synchrony's customer engagement and analytics initiatives. Understanding consumer behavior is a critical component to any business strategy. Consumer intelligence and data are an integral part of the healthcare ecosystem — and perhaps even more imperative because health is so personal.
At CareCredit, we have teams dedicated for healthcare consumer research and analytics. Our strategies are backed by data. We use consumer insights to create one-on-one, customized experiences, as well as to make adjustments to our credit card offerings that support ever-changing consumer expectations. We understand that healthcare consumers are taking a more active role in their health and wellness and that paying for care can be a challenge. We recognize how important communication around financial obligations can be in the overall consumer experience. As CareCredit CEO, I'm dedicated to keeping consumer analytics at the forefront of our strategies and using data to improve consumers' financial and payment experience in healthcare.
Q: How can health systems better understand their patients as consumers?
BC: Start by understanding patient demographics and circumstances. For example, generational differences may affect consumers' expectations. This was evident in a Generational Health Study we conducted with our consumer insights team. For example, we learned that 51 percent of baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), are more likely than the other generations to use a general-purpose credit card to pay for healthcare. On the other hand, Gen X (those born between 1965 and 1982) and millennials (those born between 1983 and 1994) are more likely to have an HSA, FSA, or other savings/spending accounts they can use to cover healthcare costs.1 We also learned that millennials (61 percent) are more comfortable paying bills online, but nearly four in 10 non-millennials also report doing so.1
Our research also confirmed that technology is a major differentiator among generations. Younger generations tend to be more comfortable with technology and it plays a more integral role in many aspects of their lives, including healthcare decisions and purchases.1 It's information like this that may help you develop a multi-channel communication strategy to engage with your patients. And it can help you determine the changes you need to implement and deliver an optimal experience for every patient, at every touchpoint. Patients of all generations want to be listened to and understood. By aligning your organizational goals with the personal preferences of healthcare consumers, you can establish rapport and build lasting relationships.
Q: Once I define my organization's goals to optimize our patient's experience, how do I institute change?
BC: Creating value can take many paths, and the process to implement varies from organization to organization. Change can be hard but making positive changes can benefit both your organization and your patients if approached with healthcare consumerism in mind.
Prioritize your goals and ask your patients to tell you what is most important to them. Be aware that implementing too much change too quickly at once can be overwhelming for your organization and could cause brand aversion with your patients. A phased approach may work best. Once you know what's most important for your organization and your patients, you can prioritize accordingly.
For example, you may have learned through analysis that patients want cost transparency, but you may fear providing that information. However, this could be an opportunity to improve patient relationships and quality in a way that helps justify costs. It could also be an opportunity to add a third-party payment solution, like CareCredit, that empowers patients to move forward with care and fit payments into their budgets — both of which can position you as a consumer-focused organization and add value to the evolving patient-provider relationship.
Q: How do I make the most of change — and know if it's working?
BC: Once you institute changes, think about how you can leverage them as differentiators. For example, if growth is a goal, you could create highly focused advertising and social media campaigns that promote those differentiators. If improving reputation quality is more important, you could emphasize your reputation management strategy by encouraging patients to leave online reviews. If retention is a priority, you might develop a loyalty program that offers benefits for returning patients and encourages long-term engagement.
In the age of healthcare consumerism, obtaining feedback is key, and it should be a continuous loop, not a one-time event. Define how — and how often — you want to gather feedback:
- Would quarterly advisory councils be valuable?
- Do you want to push out larger yearly questionnaires?
- Do you want to gather feedback after you've made a big change?
- Are feedback requests mailed to patients, conducted online, completed post appointment?
Whatever your cadence and method, when patients see that you implement changes based on their engagement, you can help improve the patient experience and their loyalty to your practice. Your dedication to making data-driven changes that meet the evolving needs of today's healthcare consumer may help your practice stand out.
Q: How can a solution like the CareCredit credit card help support healthcare consumerism in my practice or healthcare organization?
BC: Here's what we know: the average annual deductible for individual, employer-sponsored coverage is up more than 114 percent since 2008, which means patients are faced with higher out-of-pocket costs.2 Due to their increased financial responsibility, patients may be more likely to shop around for care, or even delay care or decline to move forward with a provider's full recommendations, because they fear their out-of-pockets costs. In addition to affecting quality of care and health outcomes, this can have an impact on a practice's bottom line. Further compounding this issue, 73 percent of providers say it takes them a month or more to collect balances due, leading to lost or decreased revenue.3
By offering CareCredit, you can help patients pay for out-of-pocket costs without spending cash up front or tying up cards they use for other expenses. Promotional financing enables patients to move forward with care today and make monthly payments over time.* In turn you can get paid in two business days, helping you save time, increase cash flow, and decrease billing and collection expenses.
Providing options to pay for care empowers healthcare consumers. When patients are presented with choices, they may feel more in control of their finances and their wellbeing. Providers who implement solutions like CareCredit have an opportunity to make a positive impact on the patient financial experience. In fact, we surveyed enrolled providers, and 90 percent of them say CareCredit had a positive impact on patient satisfaction.4 Cardholders echo those sentiments — 94 percent of them are highly satisfied with CareCredit.5 These results demonstrate that a proven payment solution can make a significant difference for both providers and patients in a healthcare consumerism environment.
For more information, please visit carecredit.com/beckers.
[1] CareCredit, Generational Health Research Study, Q3 2018.
[2] 2018 Employer Health Benefits Survey, Kaiser Family Foundation, September 2018.
[3] InstaMed, Trends in Healthcare Payments Eighth Annual Report: 2017, published May 2018
* Subject to credit approval. Minimum monthly payments required. See carecredit.com for details.
[4] CareCredit Payment Benchmark Study with Enrolled Providers, conducted by Chadwick Martin and Baily, December, 2017
[5] CareCredit, Cardholder Engagement Study Q2 2018