Today's healthcare consumers expect their experience — from scheduling to payment — to be easy, seamless and online, much like almost every other service and product journey they go through today. Healthcare is complex, and many parts of its ecosystem use antiquated and offline processes and tools that are disjointed and difficult to navigate.
During a featured session as part of Becker's Patient Experience + Marketing Virtual Forum sponsored by Change Healthcare, Laura Anderson, senior vice president and chief product officer for RCM technology product management at Change Healthcare, shared key insights into how marketers can drive patient engagement and acquisition through digital experiences.
Five key learnings were:
1. Today's healthcare consumers expect the same digital experiences as in other sectors. "It's really hard to navigate through healthcare, and it's getting even more complex," Ms. Anderson said. This complexity, alongside a digital experience that lags significantly behind the streamlined consumer experiences in other sectors, is driving digital transformation. The cost burden, which is increasingly shifting to consumers, is also pushing patients to look at healthcare more as traditional shoppers do, focusing on cost and quality, including a transparent, streamlined digital experience.
2. The patient-centered journey is an important part of revenue cycle management. Reduced denials, increased and faster collections, reduced bad debt, streamlined and automated eligibility, authorizations, referrals and optimized staff efficiencies are top RCM priorities. A seamless patient-centered journey, which helps individuals navigate through pre-visit — including scheduling, reminders and expected costs — to post-visit, including payment and provider outreach, can help those in RCM meet their goals. Digital patient engagement also helps keep customer turnover at a minimum. "If you make it easy for your patients to do business with you, they will stay with you," Ms. Anderson said.
3. Digital offerings need to break down the barriers that hamper the patient experience. When evaluating consumer-facing digital technologies, marketers need to think about what functions will offer patient engagement and patient access, while driving organizational growth. Technology platforms need to be seamless to the customer. These platforms also need to allow the business to offer patients convenient online appointment scheduling, timely appointment reminders, mobile and touchless patient intake, continuous patient communication, integrated financial clearance and personalized payment processing.
4. Start small with patient engagement digital transformation, especially if the business is just embarking on this journey. Providers not yet offering a digital experience can focus on easier-to-implement functionality, like appointment reminders, and later work on the more complicated and challenging offerings, like scheduling. "Start small," Ms. Anderson advised. "I don't think it's realistic for a lot of organizations to go big bang, particularly because what we're talking about seems easy, but it's not."
5. Partner with the RCM team to deliver a cohesive, end-to-end patient journey. Collaboration between marketing and RCM allows healthcare providers to deliver a comprehensive, holistic, end-to-end patient journey that puts patients at the center. Not only does this offer consumers easy access, transparency and convenience to healthcare so that they get the care they need, it enables the organization to meet its revenue goals. "What's good for patients is good for the business," Ms. Anderson said.