BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Evolving Customer-Centric Health Systems During the Post-Pandemic Period
Changes in customer interests and behaviors—many of them driven by the COVID-19 pandemic—and the evolving power of digital solutions and marketing have created an environment ripe for innovation, allowing health care systems to develop strategies to better drive patient engagement.
Learning from and building upon these changes, experts agree, is essential for health systems as they work to customize their consumer experiences and provide top-tier health care solutions.
The Importance of Integration
For Chris Boyer, vice president of digital strategy and marketing intelligence at Beth Israel Lahey Health in Boston, the task of integration began when he started his role at the newly formed health system.
"Beth Israel Lahey Health came together as a system a few months before the pandemic,” he says. "You can imagine how when March 2020 came around, much of the integration work was put on hold as we focused on other priorities.”
With his new role, Boyer conducted an audit and determined that there was a fragmented digital ecosystem. "We had multiple different EMRs (electronic medical record systems), more than 50 websites, more than 20 content management systems, 14 different find-a-doctor directories, tied to multiple different credentialing databases,” he recalls. "More importantly, there was no standardization of data or content. You can imagine how complicated that was.”
To begin the task of consolidating and updating the system’s digital experience, Boyer dug into consumer research on their usage of digital technologies. Initially, this existed in the form of a single data point on patient satisfaction with the use of telehealth, which had been added to the end of a brand tracking study.
"It wasn’t the most robust data, but it was important!” says Boyer. "It was an exciting data point to have because it allowed us to realize that this type of data can help influence what we should be doing from a digital experience perspective.”
When COVID-19 vaccines became available in January 2021, data collection on vaccination allowed Boyer and his colleagues to gain great amounts of valuable knowledge regarding how patients preferred to learn about the shots and make appointments. Through this, Beth Israel Lahey Health was able to begin plotting what consumers did and did not want in their digital health care communications, and subsequently take action. "We used this data to inform how we best communicate with vaccine hesitant patients,” Boyer notes.
Understanding the behaviors and wishes of the health system’s digital customers enabled the creation of a plan to develop a more cohesive digital ecosystem composed of multiple, interconnected elements, including websites, online provide directories, patient portals, online appointment scheduling and other "Digital Front Door” experiences.
The first foray into that experience was streamlined, focusing on an online primary care scheduling tool. "Through our understanding of digital consumers, through market research and my role as a digital marketer, we pointed out, ‘You have a larger ecosystem here,’ and were able to outline and identify all of the different elements that are involved,” Boyer says. "Not only that, we were then able to bring market research and consumer research in to inform how we shift or change those elements in the online appointment scheduling experience, and tie it together as a measurement/analytics framework. That really marked the beginning of our understanding of the consumer and how digital can work to address drivers of change."
This interaction is a core component of the revised roles, and increased importance of collaboration, that are key to creating innovative digital solutions. "It used to be that IT [information technology] came up with a great idea and launched it, then came to marketing and said, ‘Make it happen,’ bring people to it,” Boyer explains. "Or the clinical leads would say, ‘We’re building a website, now go drive traffic to it.’”
Now, he adds, whenever work on a new product or service initiative begins, a different approach is taken. "First, we understand the need for an integrated team, people who aren’t simply IT or clinical or marketers,” Boyer notes. "Then we can leverage consumer research to identify opportunities—what we need to solve—and document those requirements so we can then leverage all of our resources to build, design and put the product out into the market.”
After months in the market, the team continues to review and learn from the data they’ve been able to collect in order to inform optimizations of the current experience and inform future iterations. "Measuring and improving—this is how you can use market research and digital and technology to drive acquisition and patient engagement," Boyer says.
Respecting the Individuality of Each Consumer
Kelly Faley, vice president of digital experience at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, also stresses the importance of consumer insights, and both the breadth and specificity of experiences they can communicate. "We want to understand what patients are looking for when they are trying to get care,” she says.
The key to this is noting where a patient’s health care journey begins, and how to become involved in the whole spectrum of the care process. "Picture a blank Google screen,” Faley explains. "That’s where your patient’s health care journey starts.”
To collect as much personalized data as possible, Faley and her colleagues conduct close to 500 live, video recorded patient interviews annually, with the goal of understanding what people are looking for with their health care and how they look for it. The information they’ve been able to gather has been immensely valuable and has allowed for building a far more streamlined digital interface. Additionally, the personalized nature of the video interviews provides a level of detail that has previously been difficult to obtain.
In the interviews, customers are given specific tasks to role-play how they would handle examples of medical needs. They then navigate through the site, narrating what they would do and commenting on their thinking and reactions.
"We get really great insight into how patients navigate a website. They tell us how they expect our tools to work, what the buttons should be labeled and the terms they would use to describe the service,” Faley says. "Patients also tell us so much more than we ever ask about. We hear about offline experiences and frustrations. Since everything is videotaped, we can easily compile short, powerful videos that convey needed changes to our executives and physicians.”
Faley and her team have found that these reels have more impact than graphics typically included in slide presentations.
"Remember, all the people in our organizations that are making decisions are health care workers in some form or another, and they all have heart—it’s not all numbers and data,” she says.
The Evolving Digital Experience
Faley points out that historically, and for many places still, a website exists mainly as a promotional tool. But that role is changing. "Digital is no longer your online brochure,” she says. "We must look at digital as a key part of an integrated delivery system. It is a point of care as much as a call center or clinic. It’s important to be inserting yourself into operations so the voice of the customer is heard.”
At Sharp, a key result of this research into convenience and access has been the launch of a prominent "same-day care” page on their website. Many consumers had been going online in search of immediate care and became discouraged by the difficulty in booking those appointments. Via the same-day care page, patients are provided with links to four different care options: appointment scheduling, urgent care, emergency care and virtual urgent care. Included also is information regarding urgent care and emergency department wait times, as well as appointment availability and tools that assist patients with understanding what type of care fits their need.
Developing a Digital Framework
In addition to using well-functioning digital tools, Linda MacCracken, associate director at Accenture in Chicago, highlights the importance of engagement and digital touchpoints shaping how organizations choose to fit into their consumers’ lives. "The pandemic has driven changes in consumer expectations for health care experiences, which health systems can leverage to better attract, retain and drive value,” she says, adding that these post-pandemic views are foundational to digital engagement.
Customers choose organizations and brands to fit their life with purpose, so health systems can match engagement capabilities based on the customer episode. MacCracken adds that systems are deciding whether to operate by:
- Delivering an excellent product or service,
- Delivering a great experience within the health episode, or
- Delivering meaningful long-term partnership.
These data driven experience design decisions allow health systems to keep pace with changing expectations for the digitally enabled consumer experience, she says.
