Healthcare organizations across the country are struggling to maintain or improve patient satisfaction, in part due to financial, staffing and competitive pressures. Yet, falling patient satisfaction scores can further dampen providers' already reduced revenues.
During a featured session at Becker's Hospital Review's Digital Innovation, Patient Experience and Marketing Virtual Event sponsored by Gozio Health, Lea Chatham, vice president of marketing at Gozio Health, discussed how a single, mobile-optimized digital front door can help organizations drive patient loyalty and recoup lost revenues.
Three key insights were:
(1) Patient experience is impacted by how effectively health systems are able to address multiple challenges. Tight margins, staffing struggles, pressure to reduce costs and increased competition are some of the biggest challenges that healthcare organizations face today. The workarounds they often need to make to manage those issues trickle down to patients and can be felt in reduced patient satisfaction, reduced service utilization and ultimately, diminished revenue growth.
Conscious of these risks, organizations are offering a plethora of digital patient engagement tools — including portals, patient-facing apps and other point solutions — hoping to boost patient satisfaction. Yet, the uncoordinated way in which these feature-heavy but often poorly designed solutions are deployed can lead to a disconnected patient experience.
"We offer all these things, but not necessarily in a good, cohesive, simple experience. As a result, about 50 percent of patients say there are no healthcare provider apps that are helpful and only six percent say their provider's app has the features they need," Ms. Chatham said, citing findings from the CHIME Digital Health Most Wired Report 2023 and a study from McKinsey.
(2) A single mobile platform can solve the patient experience disconnect. A digital patient engagement platform optimized for smartphones can help health systems in five key areas that are critical to improving both patient experience and ROI. Those areas are:
- Patient retention: The estimated lifetime value of a patient is $200,0001. Against this backdrop, in an Accenture survey, 26 percent of respondents said they would switch providers for a better digital experience.
- Call center volume: The average time to handle a call is 6-8 minutes, at $3-$4 per call2. An organization handling four million calls annually could save $600,000 if it could reduce call volume by five percent. In addition, since most calls are related to (re)scheduling or getting driving directions, by eliminating call wait times for questions that are resolved digitally, it can improve the patient experience.
- Online scheduling: By improving mobile access to online scheduling, organizations can increase requests for appointments and revenue for delivered services. "One health system that we work with reported an increase of about 50 percent in requests for appointments when they updated their online scheduling options and made them more user-friendly and embedded in their app," Ms. Chatham said.
- Referral leakage: For a system losing $200 million a year due to referral leakage related to difficulties patients have with finding a specialty provider, reducing leakage by just one percent through a convenient mobile provider search option could mean $2 million in recovered revenue3.
- Wayfinding and mapping: Arriving late for or missing appointments or losing one's way once inside a healthcare facility because of confusing directions costs organizations significant amounts of staff time. A mobile platform that provides clear, easy-to-follow directions can help reduce such losses.
A hospital or health system that leverages a single mobile platform that enables even minor optimization in all five of these areas can save about $4.5 million annually, Ms. Chatham said.
(3) Should your organization buy or build a mobile digital front door? Organizations weighing the pros and cons of building a mobile digital front door from scratch versus buying one should consider the cost of the investment in each scenario.
If they opt to build their own proprietary solution, the total investment includes staffing costs associated with a mobile native build for iOS and Android, cloud architecture, content management, mobile design UI/UX, dependency management, addressing edge cases, update management and testing, navigation, third-party integrations, ongoing maintenance and support, analytics, and regulations and compliance. The estimated staffing cost for standing up a credible, high-quality mobile solution is around $2.4 million and the time to build that solution from scratch could be six to 12 months.
If they opt to buy a solution from a vendor that already has all the processes and integrations in place, the cost for deploying a platform such as Gozio's is about $450,000 per year, including the cost of the internal team to oversee the project and the vendor's fee.
These cost estimations mean that over three years, an organization that opts for Gozio's solution can save over three million dollars, Ms. Chatham said.
A mobile digital front door can play a critical role in patient engagement. So be sure you are considering all the options to ensure that you get a solution that will deliver the value patients are looking for and the return on investment your health system needs.
Resources
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3047732/#ref6
- https://www.sprinklr.com/blog/call-center-statistics/
- https://www.mass.gov/doc/2011-examination-of-health-care-cost-trends-and-cost-drivers-with-appendix/download