While telehealth has helped engage consumers, it isn’t enough. When healthcare organizations don’t meet consumer needs, consumers defer care—and though they’re now slowly resuming services, their needs must be understood to keep them coming back.
Here are some predictions from NRC Health around how health systems can win lifelong loyalty and gain competitive advantages.
Prediction 1: The more human-centered your design, the more trust you’ll build.
“Human understanding enables healthcare organizations to provide care for each individual,” says Brian Wynne, Vice President and General Manager at NRC Health. “It shifts the focus from transactional encounters to lasting relationships, in which individual customers’ insight is sought to better and co-produce their experience.”
Wynne says organizations that value human understanding will migrate to fewer standard measures, with more interactive probes to capture qualitative patient stories. This creates a cumulative mosaic of successes and failures in care delivery, and aids organizations in understanding each individual’s definition of delight.
“The result is improved outcomes and loyalty for life,” he says.
Prediction 2: You’ll grow patients’ trust when you treat them as individuals instead of
sets of symptoms.
Most would agree that today, our provider-patient conversations remain superficial. Our industry provides the most personal services of any, yet our knowledge about the people we serve is inadequate.
“While we go to heroic levels for the slightest clinical improvement, we’ve missed the power of human understanding,” Wynne says. “It can only be achieved one person at a time—but once it’s mastered, the benefits are endless.”
Prediction 3: When you give every patient a voice, you can co-design their care experience.
Allowing a patient to provide feedback, Wynne says, invites them into a deeper conversation—not just about the care experience they just had, but around their experience in general.
NRC Health’s Real-time Feedback works with organizations of any size to capture 100% of their patients’ voices at scale. Community Insights helps healthcare organizations invite customers into virtual advisory groups, enabling deeper dialogue.
“When health systems do this, they can deliver the most personalized and meaningful type of care delivery,” Wynne says.
Prediction 4: Organizations that seek a deeper understanding of patients can more easily improve healthcare equity.
While it’s challenging to find silver linings in a catastrophe like COVID-19, Wynne points to one.
“The pandemic shed light on the inequities in healthcare today,” he says. “It showed that certain patient demographics were receiving care differently. This, most healthcare executives would agree, is unacceptable.”
In other words, COVID-19 became a catalyst for consumers to ask healthcare systems, “How do I get care where I am?” And while the pandemic meant the stakes were high for systems to find answers to that question, Wynne says that those that rallied around more deeply understanding each individual were the clear winners.
Prediction 5: Healthcare systems that assess consumers’ emotional states will overcome healthcare deferment.
Wynne says that for years, the healthcare industry has been trending around 22 to 23% healthcare deferment. Historically, these numbers reflect barriers to access and affordability. But when healthcare deferment spiked just north of 32% during the height of the pandemic, consumer fear was the primary factor— and in many cases, that fear is still prevalent.
“Healthcare organizations need to not only address the inequity issues around accessibility and affordability, but assess their consumers’ emotional state,” Wynne says. “How can we combat fear by building trust?”
Prediction 6: Healthcare systems that elevate experiences for consumers will secure
brand success.
Wynne says that the area of elevated experiences is where most health systems will compete in the future. In many cases today, he adds, organizations are still trying to deliver a consistent experience. Those organizations that distinguish themselves in this effort will allow their patients to co-design their care, which will ensure the highest levels of engagement and collaboration among staff, providers, community and consumers alike.
“When healthcare organizations deliver a consistent experience, they’ll get ahead,” Wynne says. “Competing in the future is about delivering the elevated experience—one that is partially, if not wholly, designed by the customer.”
This article was sponsored by NRC Health.
