In addition to the traditional doctor’s office, the initial point of care may start with a visit to the grocery store, drug store or can be conducted online or over the phone. Healthcare is no longer just about healing those that are sick, but now also includes preventative methods by developing health and wellness engagement strategies to help ‘consumers’ lead healthier lives. The payment model is changing and consumers are demanding more from healthcare providers. Throughout this radical transformation of the $3T Healthcare industry, it is incumbent on healthcare providers to build out traditional retail capabilities around consumer engagement and loyalty. This begins with data.
Retailers around the world have transformed their customer engagement, and in many cases, their entire operations by uncovering meaningful insights with their data. Product and service decisions are now being based on data, rather than the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” outlook. Developing personalized communications in the store, online and at home are improving engagement and building long-term loyalty. Healthcare providers have an opportunity to leverage the massive amounts of data accumulated just as retailers have over the past two decades to drive consumer engagement and loyalty, and it’s one of the most important opportunities facing healthcare providers right now.
Understanding the Patient Journey with Data
To develop a customer-first journey, one must begin with the data. The healthcare industry has seen an influx of new data through EHR/EMRs as well as the proliferation of new patient generated data from mobile health and wearable technologies. However, use of such data has remained a complex challenge for hospitals in three specific areas:
- Hospital system data has traditionally been isolated across service lines and/or various data warehouses.
- The insights derived from the data are often used for operational and financial purposes versus being consumer focused.
- Attitudinal research is often too concentrated on a specific product or service versus understanding the consumer’s healthcare journey.
While these three issue-areas are stunting the opportunities for patient loyalty and customer growth, hospital systems have an opportunity to leverage data to understand who is more likely to leave their network, why they are leaving, and what can be done to improve consumer engagement and retention. This understanding is the beginning of the customer-first journey.
Foundational Analytics
To begin, organizations should focus on the behavioral data within their systems. This will allow them to connect the data points and develop a 360° view of the consumer and understand the touch points along the customer’s healthcare journey. Providers should integrate medical, financial, and billing data as well as any other data points such as a CRM, click stream, social or third-party data sources. This customer centric view of the data will allow systems to understand engagement and retention by service line, medical condition, consumer group, etc., while pinpointing opportunities for improvement.
Loyalty Drivers
In additional to drawing insight on what consumers are telling us through their behavioral data, we should also conduct attitudinal research to assess how consumers make certain healthcare decisions, what drives loyalty, and understand their mindsets along their healthcare journey. Similar to retail, consumers go through the mindsets of ‘discover’, ‘decide’, ‘visit’ and ‘reflect’ as they make their healthcare choices. Understanding why they make certain decisions can inform new products, services and experiences that they desire.
Consumer Science and Data Analysis
Integrating the behavioral and attitudinal information to create a consumer-centric view of the data establishes a clear path for leveraging customer science and predictive analytics. For example, these advanced analytic approaches can be used to develop consumer segmentations, predict consumer churn, and calculate a provider’s share of wallet. In addition, providers will be able to know which consumers are more likely to visit an ER for routine procedures or complete a health and wellness program or activity.
Consumer Engagement and Loyalty
Once we understand the foundational analytics, why consumers make choices and draw insights through predictive analytics, hospital systems can begin to make decisions focused on consumer strategy and engagement and develop products and services that create personalized experiences. These personalized data driven engagement strategies create the ability to deliver relevant content at the optimal frequency & cadence through the channels that the customer prefers. This will increase engagement rate as systems look to drive healthy behavior as well as develop loyalty in an increasingly competitive environment.
Data Driven Triple Aim
Data driven insights and strategies can drive improvements against the healthcare triple aim: create a better customer experience, improve health, and lower costs. Understanding the need for consumer data analysis in healthcare and how to leverage it will position organizations at the forefront of customer engagement. Ultimately, data driven engagement will generate a frictionless and personalized consumer experience which will drive loyalty and a greater share of the wallet for healthcare systems and more importantly help customers adhere to medical treatment and medication and help them lead healthier lives.
