Prioritizing the Digital Healthcare Experience

“Virtual care is … not a fad; it’s the future.” That’s the conclusion of brand consultancy Monigle’s annual consumer healthcare survey. “It’s time to make sure our virtual [healthcare] experiences work as hard as our physical ones.”

Consumers are already on board, registering interest in using digital for everything from routine health maintenance to provider selection, treatment and follow-up. And these already-high consumer expectations for digital will only grow as demands for greater convenience, more on-demand options and increased self-sufficiency become more and more the norm. 

Expectations for tailored digital engagement will grow as the market offers superior healthcare alternatives designed around consumer needs.

As a result, healthcare organizations – typically not known as leaders in new technology adoption – will need to incorporate digital more widely into patient-facing applications as well as behind-the-scenes operations. Organizations that adopt an innovation mindset – and the tools to bring ideas to life – will find they can reach audiences more effectively, make strategic pivots with greater confidence, roll out programs faster and measure performance more accurately.

Several trends have intersected to bring us to today’s inflection point.

• Technology advancement: Technology has matured and supports every patient touchpoint – most of which exist outside the narrow realm of clinical care. From finding providers, to scheduling appointments, to pre-visit screening to follow-ups, claims processing and more, today’s state-of-the-art digital and mobile health platforms can offer users robust functionality that supports every step in the patient journey.  

• Consumer expectations: Thank to the likes of Amazon and Apple for creating consumer expectations for seamless, efficient, intuitive digital and mobile experiences in every aspect of their lives – healthcare very much included. 

• Broadband everywhere: The infrastructure bill signed by President Biden will provide high-speed internet access “at a steep discount to low-income consumers.” This increased bandwidth will enable more robust interactions and functionality for those most in need.  

• Covid reverberations: Consumers who were not videoconferencing pre-pandemic have grown accustomed to doing things virtually for safety and convenience, doctor consultations included. We’ve hardly scratched the surface of possibilities involving VR and the “med-a-verse.”  

• New kinds of competition: Healthcare startups – flush with cash from their venture backers – are rethinking broad swaths of how services are conceived, marketed and delivered. Established organizations will need to question age-old assumptions and reexamine legacy processes in order to remain relevant.  

According to Becker’s, 'More than 61 percent of patients say they’d switch providers just to get an improved patient portal.'

Digital health investment will deliver returns not just for individuals but for organizations as well.

Research by Deloitte found that “Hospitals with high patient-reported experience scores have higher profitability,” with net operating margins of 4.7%, or three times the margins of hospitals with low scores. And digital is key to patient experience: A Becker’s study concluded that “More than 61 percent of patients say they’d switch providers just to get an improved patient portal. ”However, delivering that high quality digital experience isn’t easy: Healthcare solutions provider Kyruus found that, even for top-ranked hospitals, “the race to keep up with patient preferences continues to be challenging,” with relatively few healthcare systems providing features such as virtual assistants, which patients report finding highly useful. 

Hospital systems need to adopt the disruption thinking of tech-driven startups and improve their ability to roll out new programs rapidly, evaluate success and identify near-and longer-term upgrades.  

• Think end-to-end Digital needs to be integrated into every aspect of patient and organizational experience. Just as retailers early on learned to integrate the web at every point in the customer journey, so too must healthcare organizations challenge themselves to discover every touchpoint where digital can make a difference. 

• Continually re-evaluate Healthcare organizations must regularly reassess their readiness to deliver high quality patient digital experience. What functionality do patients expect to see? What are marketplace competitors doing? What is the gap between objectives and capabilities? 

• One-year plan, five-year vision We tend to overestimate the near-term impact of technology and underestimate the long-term possibilities. Having both a concrete one-year plan and an aspirational longer-term vision forces organizations to think both practically and imaginatively. 

• Light the way with beacons Digital transformation sounds open-ended and overwhelming. Defining achievable initiatives to move the ball forward via quick wins – “beacon projects” – help organizations gain learning, confidence and momentum.  

Wherever an organization is today – whether leading or lagging the pack – is almost irrelevant, as digital will continue to evolve and bring new opportunities along with threats. The most important thing hospital networks and healthcare organizations can do is to prioritize digital and develop a mindset of envisioning, testing, refining and rolling out new functionality in support of the digital-first, patient-centric experience – for consumers, it already is the priority.