It’s time for healthcare to do or die

The recently published Top Health Industry Issues of 2018 by PwC throws out some interesting statistics about the current state of the patient experience in healthcare:

● 49 percent of healthcare executives says revamping the patient experience is one of their organization’s top three priorities over the next five years. Many organizations already have or are building the role of chief patient experience officer.

● Most hospitals and health systems already have patient portals and web tools that help patients perform administrative tasks. For example, 65 percent of organizations offer a means of paying bills online, and 60% offer ways patients and providers can communicate online.

Frankly, I find these numbers disturbing. They mean that in 2018, at a time when businesses increasingly define the effectiveness of their brands by the strength of their customer experience, more than half of healthcare executives don’t identify revamping the patient experience as one of their top three priorities. And at a time when an entire generation of consumers is growing up digital:

● Nearly half of healthcare organizations don’t offer a means of paying bills online.

● Four of ten don’t make it possible for patients and providers to communicate online.

It’s time for healthcare providers to face reality. Patients are not judging the quality of your experience against the care they receive from other providers. Their expectations are being set by other industries. They expect the same efficiency and price competitiveness they get from Amazon. They expect the kind of price transparency and personalized choice they get from marketplaces such as Airbnb.

And yet, for one of the most important choices they’ll ever make – a physician to help them stay healthy and treat them when they are sick – they face an antiquated, confusing process that hasn’t gotten much better despite advances in digital. Patients still:

● Too often struggle to find accurate, visible location and physician data when they search for care online.

● Labor to sort physicians by critical filters such as insurance accepted on physician provider directories.

● Have to make too many phone calls and wait too long to make an appointment.

For years, healthcare systems have dragged their collective feet catching up to the rest of society, but those days need to change. We’re living at a time when healthcare systems are being held under increased scrutiny by the government and insurers; when government-induced value-based care is shifting the focus of compensation on quality of care; and new competitors and models are emerging for services such as outpatient care. Healthcare systems can get out in front of these changes by:

● Getting savvier about using digital to create better patient experiences long before the patient even enters the facility. By providing user-friendly physician directories, publishing accurate location data, and compelling deep content, healthcare systems can start improving the patient experience without even having to overhaul their experience.

● Encouraging the next moment of care by making available better tools such as online scheduling tools and click-to-call functionality. Instead of creating barriers to care, create easy, efficient tools like Amazon does with its product search, purchase and check-out functionality.

● Bringing care closer to the patient in on-demand fashion, as providers are doing by setting up outpatient services in locations such as pharmacies and stores that are located where patients live.

● Creating reliable online services such as portals that empower patients to monitor their own records and interactions with physicians just as they can review their complete history on sites such as Amazon.

As Analyst Mary Meeker asserted in her 2017 Internet Trends Report, healthcare is at a digital inflection point, where increasingly effective digital tools are catching up to the expectations of digitally savvy patients. The sooner healthcare systems adopt digital with the express purpose of improving the patient experience, the sooner they’ll catch up, too. For insight into how you use digital to more effectively acquire and retain patients, contact SIM Partners.

Mike Hill is SIM Partners’ Director of Enterprise Sales. In 2016, Mike joined SIM Partners bringing over 27 years of healthcare experience ranging from Fortune 100 companies to owning an emergency department coding/billing software platform. Mike prides himself on the relationships he has built in the industry around the country and has engaged with several national health organizations including ACHE. Now Mike’s primary concentration is patient acquisition, access and engagement in addition to improving provider visibility in online search with a focus on mobile optimization.

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