It doesn’t take a doctoral degree to understand the importance of a seamless healthcare experience. But what most healthcare providers overlook is just how dissatisfied their patients have become.
A consumer study conducted by our partner Redpoint Global found that the majority (71%) are dissatisfied with their healthcare experiences, including impersonal visits, long wait times, confusing processes, and difficulty scheduling appointments.
Furthermore, 54% said that neither providers nor insurers have the contextual information needed to personalize a healthcare experience — such as data from wearables and other consumer-driven products.
As we continue our Healthcare series, we’re looking at how providers can adopt a fresh approach, as recommended by Gartner: the three-tier generations model.
What needs to change?
Healthcare organizations have traditionally viewed engagement in silos, focused on basic needs like acquisition, retention, and improved Medicare Advantage ratings.
Unfortunately, fragmented data and siloed processes cause friction for consumers. Meanwhile, healthcare organizations struggle to drive better health outcomes, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
Changing course requires a mindset and technology shift. This shift does not diminish the importance of retention or acquisition. Instead, it considers all activities holistically to produce the type of seamless experience consumers have come to know and love.
Consumer Engagement in Three Generations
The rise of healthcare consumerism is well documented, as detailed in our previous post on the increasing demand for personalized experiences.
To meet this expectation, a 2020 Gartner report explores why consumer engagement is a top-level initiative for CIOs. And how a generations model advances an organization’s readiness to “act as one” in relationships with healthcare consumers.
This engagement takes place across three phases:
- First with preparation,
- Then across your channels and business functions,
- And, finally, across an entire healthcare ecosystem.
It Starts With Preparation
According to Gartner, most healthcare organizations are currently in Generation 1. They use consumer data to optimize single-channel, static journeys with little to no visibility into the consumer’s entire healthcare profile or interactions.
However, you have to start somewhere. And this phase is all about preparation.
In Generation 1, healthcare organizations determine the two or three most important consumer journeys for their organization. Experiences are bucketed into four categories: managing illness, accessing healthcare, managing wellness, and caretaking.
Identifying and mapping how these key consumer journeys might improve (i.e., what is the optimal course of action?) will shed light on what is needed from a technology standpoint to move into Generations 2 and 3.
A Consumer-Centric Approach: Act as One
Once a healthcare organization reaches Generation 2, all business units and channels work cohesively to deliver a seamless consumer experience. Let’s look at an example.
Say a provider identifies chronic illness maintenance as a Gen 1 initiative. In Gen 2, it might move from assigning a home healthcare aid (involving a single business unit) to coordinating the patient’s care across the complete enterprise, with all departments accessing the same data for a seamless experience. Scheduling, procurement, outreach, and administration all act as one on behalf of the patient.
In Generation 3, the holistic experience evolves to include any stakeholder with an interest or investment in the patient’s healthcare: an admitting hospital, dialysis company, or other third parties.
The understanding is that consumers have access to and control of their health data across the entire ecosystem. Their personal health record ingests data from all permissioned sources and enables sharing with providers, insurers, caregivers, or devices such as wearables. No data, process, department, or siloed channel clouds the single view of the healthcare consumer.
Consumer Engagement in Action: Moving the Needle
The “act as one” generational model helps organizations break down barriers to personalized care. To move the needle, companies need to leverage data, strategy, and technology.
Gartner recommends implementing a healthcare consumer engagement hub (HCEH) as the underlying technology. An HCEH moves healthcare organizations through each generation by tying multiple systems together to allow for a consumer engagement approach across channels, the ecosystem, and events.
But the impact of an HCEH is only as good as an organization’s data. Acquiring consumer data isn’t a problem for healthcare providers. Most are already drowning in it. The challenge lies in centralizing, managing, and enriching consumer data to drive personalization.
That’s why Amplifi and Redpoint Global have partnered to deliver an end-to-end approach.
The Redpoint rgOne platform is a consumer digital experience hub employed by healthcare organizations to accomplish many of the objectives laid out in Gartner’s generational model. Amplifi’s skilled consultants work with healthcare organizations to successfully implement rgOne — including the design, delivery, and support to make your program a complete success.
In the final post of our series, we’ll discuss how Amplifi and Redpoint help organizations deliver an omnichannel CX that gets to the heart of the matter: better health outcomes.