Look Outside Healthcare to Boost Patient Engagement

There have a been a number of sessions and panels at recent events looking at the patient engagement and experience in healthcare. Some have discussed why and how healthcare should pull non-healthcare examples and ideas in to address consumer experience.

To that end, it seemed like a nice time to share some insights from a little while ago that the Advisory Board put together on this topic. Honestly, some of the things in this report are exactly what we would say if asked about where to look for out-of-industry examples.

The Advisory Board report Meeting Out-of-Industry Digital Experiences: Five Essential Components of a Strong Digital Experience does a great job of laying out key areas where a non-healthcare concept can be really effective when translated to healthcare. 

Importantly, the report calls this out, “Health care has long wanted to adopt the digital consumer experiences of banking, retail, and entertainment. However, health care has fallen short of that goal—often citing the unique difficulties of the industry.” As part of the insights in the report, the Advisory Board does some myth busting around this and then goes on to provide some good guidelines around what to do to drive a great digital experience.

Myth 1: The rules of consumerism don’t apply in healthcare. The report calls out some different studies about patients and what their expectations are. They want the same experience in healthcare that they get in other areas of their lives, and they will switch providers to get it. 

Myth 2: Healthcare is too regulated and complex. Yes, healthcare is regulated, but there are ways to balance that with creating great engagement. The financial industry has been way ahead of healthcare on this. For a balance of security, privacy and great digital experience, that is a good example.

Myth 3: Healthcare is too personal. Of course, it’s personal, but that doesn’t always mean people want to talk to a person. It is possible to create unique, personalized experiences with technology that engages people and gives them choices about when they engage digitally and when they engage with a person.

The report proposes that there are five keys to a great digital experience:

1. Functionality: It needs to be useable and work as intended.
2. Customer service: The service experience is a much complaint among patients than quality of care is. Providing great service is so important and there are tools like AI that can help do that today.
3. Self-service: People want the option to do things for themselves. They want the flexibility that offers. They may ultimately decide to talk to a person but many want a self-service option first.
4. Personalization: According to the report, “Personalization offers consumers customized experiences based on factors such as their demographic data, engagement, location, and articulated needs. In practice, companies target tailored content to consumers based on their user profile.” It goes on to share statistics on how consumers respond to personalized interactions and communications. Needless to say, they like them.
5. Omnichannel: It should go without saying that people are more engaged when you offer them access through their preferred channel. 

Finally, the Advisory Board offers some examples of outside healthcare experiences to take a look at like Amazon one-click ordering, JP Morgan Chase online banking, Netflix “Taste Communities”. Of course there are others that often come up like Delta Airline and Chick fil A.

The report goes on to say that in addition to good examples of great digital experiences both inside and outside of healthcare, there are also good solutions out there, and no one has to start from scratch.

Finally, it sums up with, “The goal for health care leaders is to implement each component into a cohesive digital experience for patients. Creating a digital experience is not a quick fix. But using these components as building blocks will help health care organizations work towards the strong digital experiences that other industries offer.”