A few months ago, Salesforce published “ Connected Healthcare Consumer ,” a report based on surveys of more than 6,000 people around the world about healthcare. It reveals that less than 47% of consumers think that the healthcare industry is more focused on their own needs than on those of patients. This analysis also highlights the barriers to care perceived by patients, especially younger generations, who express a strong interest in technology-based and digital methods such as mobile applications, texting with a health coach and using a voice assistant.
Representative graph of the customer experience generation in the health sector
Source: Salesforce Research/p>
In addition to this Salesforce report, a PwC study shows that only 49% of consumers say that the healthcare customer experience is satisfactory.
Data like this shows that companies and brands in physician phone number list the sector, ranging from insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies, do not consider themselves “client centric” or 100% focused on the customer. Now, it is more necessary than ever for these companies to strengthen their strategies and consider customer experience as one of their core values.
A major shift would be to start seeing patients as critical, “empowered consumers” who need to protect their health first and control the disease second. This means anticipating problems and solving them before they affect the patient. Many insurers such as Metlife or AIA Vitality are already putting the customer at the centre and promoting healthy living and wellbeing.
In this post we propose three main points of attention that companies in the health sector should focus on to improve customer experience.
Keys to improving customer experience in the health sector
To improve the customer experience in any sector, the first thing we must do is understand and analyze the customer's journey with the brand, in order to provide them with a memorable experience and solve their problems and pain points.
In the health sector, almost all of us face the same problems: delays in waiting lists, reduced consultation times and excessive bureaucracy caused, often, by the lack of convergence between the health systems of the different autonomous communities or medical centres.
With an overwhelmed healthcare system, it is not surprising that patients feel that after getting an appointment, there is a lack of personalization in the treatment (due to the lack of consultation time that doctors often have to meet) or that they have to communicate their medical history several times because doctors or specialists cannot retrieve it as it is on platforms or tools that are not compatible with those they use in their centers.
With these pain points on the table, we identified three key priorities that could improve customer experience in the healthcare sector:
Digitalization to reduce friction
Hyperpersonalization
Convergence between platforms
1. Digitalization to reduce friction
Covid-19 is the biggest test of digitalisation that brands have ever experienced, especially in the healthcare sector. We are seeing how there is an increasing move towards remote care and friction in waiting times or visits is beginning to be eliminated . In addition, new solutions are appearing to diagnose remotely and measure data that will be used to make predictive analyses.
Salesforce’s Connected Healthcare Consumer report highlights that 68% of consumers/patients expect centers and hospitals to interact with them in real time as much as possible, especially in the millennial and generation Z segments.
Graphic image representing the customer experience in the health sector
Source: Salesforce Research
These data highlight the need for the sector to reinvent itself to meet the demands of its “customers”.
Some time ago we wrote about the digitalisation of the health sector, using as a reference our client FIV Valencia, who quickly knew how to adapt to the situation and developed a free video consultation service, thus anticipating patients' concerns and improving their experience.
Another example can be found at Harvard Medical School Hospital, which helps diagnose and treat patients more quickly thanks to its chatbot Buoy Health . The bot listens to a patient’s symptoms and guides them to the right care based on their diagnosis.
Similarly, Johns Hopkins Hospital has launched GE Healthcare, innovative medical centers that, thanks to predictive Artificial Intelligence techniques, improve the efficiency of patient care. According to the hospital itself, thanks to this system they have optimized their capacity to care for and admit patients by 60% .
As we can see , there are many ways in which technology can eliminate a fundamental pain point for patients, which is waiting time, but we must not forget that in a sector like the one we are dealing with, it is essential that we understand that everything related to health is and must continue to be something human. This means that whenever we decide to take the step towards digitalization, it should be from the point of view of speeding up the most repetitive tasks of healthcare professionals as much as possible so that they can focus on the human side and thus increasingly offer a great patient care service.
2. Hyperpersonalization
As we have pointed out, the health sector is first and foremost a “human” sector, so no matter how much we advance in the field of digitalisation and patient care, treatment must always be personalised and we must not make the mistake of offering a “standard” service, that is, making our clients feel that they are not being offered tailor-made treatment.
A crucial way to offer this hyper-personalization is the possibility of having patient data that can be centralized and analyzed . For example, platforms such as Apple Healthkit play an important role in how health-related data can be managed, respecting patient privacy at all times and turning that data into valuable and useful data to prevent the patient from getting sick as much as possible and to have a personalized experience.
This app has a set of APIs that encompass care apps, fitness apps, activity trackers, blood pressure or glucose monitors, or nutritional apps, to optimize all relevant aspects of health. The result is an open digital ecosystem that brings together all kinds of participants from all over the world of medicine: from doctors, researchers, hospitals and patients to developers of health and fitness apps. All this data will allow this Apple platform to play an important role in the hyper-personalization of health, development of new drugs, in treatments or in insurance.
Another example of hyperpersonalization is the American company Tempus , which is using artificial intelligence to allow doctors to filter a large collection of clinical data in order to personalize patients' healthcare treatments. Specifically, Tempus is concentrating AI to benefit cancer research and treatment.
Hyperpersonalization is nothing new. As far back as 2016, the Cleveland Clinic partnered with IBM to also use AI to optimize the patient experience by personalizing healthcare plans on an individual basis.
3. Convergence between platforms
Finally, one of the biggest impediments to offering a good customer experience in the healthcare sector is often the lack of a complete view of the customer. That is, different doctors, for example, will have different data on the health of their patients and will lack a holistic picture. This is a reality today: most healthcare systems in the autonomous communities do not speak to each other, that is, if a patient is living in Madrid, but moves to Valencia for work or on vacation, the doctor cannot access the patient's complete history and can only rely on his intuition and what his interlocutor tells him.
