Every year, our friends at Kyruus conduct a survey and release their Patient Access Journey Report. The 2022 report highlighted the growing interest in digital tools for patients to manage their healthcare journey. According to the report, “For the sixth consecutive year, Kyruus surveyed 1,000 consumers across generations and geographies to understand how their preferences for finding, selecting, and accessing care have evolved. This year’s report provides insights into consumer preferences along three key stages of the patient access journey:
- Search: How consumers search for care and what sources they find most trustworthy
- Selection: How consumers evaluate criteria most important to them in selecting care
- Action: How consumers prefer to schedule appointments and complete pre-visit tasks”
There were three key findings that really stood out to us:
- First, cost, quality, and convenience are the top criteria that influence how consumers make decisions about their healthcare. We saw in another recent survey that convenience is driving patient experience. Then, according to the release about that survey, “More than 80% of responders evaluating primary and preventative or specialist care noted whether a provider or hospital accepts their insurance as one of the top five factors considered when deciding to seek care. Location and proximity ranked as the second-most-likely factor for all types of care.”
- Interest in online booking is still strong. Over 40% favor this option and 1/3 say it is a factor when considering where they will obtain care in the future. This finding backs up other surveys that show the preference for online scheduling anywhere from 40% to 70% percent depending on who you ask. Ultimately, this just reinforces the critical need for digital patient access.
- And speaking of digital access, the third finding we found really interesting was that healthcare consumers are eager to use digital channels for pre-visit tasks and to engage with their healthcare providers. In fact, 93% are extremely or very interested in using digital self-service for pre-visit tasks and 65% cite text message, email, or mobile app notifications as preferred methods of communication.
An important thing to note about this survey is that it highlighted that there are many digital doors that patients can enter through. We see this as one of the biggest challenges to effective digital patient engagement. We’ve found that the more effective approach is to have one or two digital entry points that are well aligned to help navigate patients through their entire journey. This approach is supported by another study that showed that the majority of patients would like to manage their healthcare through a single platform.