Connected Care Is Key to Maximizing Patient Engagement in an Evolving Health Care Space

To compete in an increasingly competitive, technology-driven market, health systems must focus on building innovative care delivery and patient experience models that engage consumers in all facets of their health care journey.

This focus on consumer experience is essential for organizations to improve outcomes and build communities of contented, dedicated patients.

“Consumer experience has quickly become a mantra that we are all using, and I think finally health care understands that we should be talking about it,” explains Kelly Jo Golson, the former executive vice president, chief brand and consumer experience officer at Advocate Health.

Golson and her former colleague, Jamey Shiels, Advocate Health’s senior vice president, consumer and digital experience, shared their thoughts on patient engagement during the SHSMD Connections Conference, in September 2023.

Building a Model

Advocate Health, which is the third largest nonprofit health system in the United States, was created when Chicago-based Advocate Aurora Health and Charlotte, N.C.–based Atrium Health merged in 2023. From the beginning, consumer experience was determined to be a key company focus.

“We are excited about the fact that there is a shared commitment to consumer experience,” Golson says. “This is one of the things that was really important to us as we came together as an organization.”

Building this consumer experience model, according to Golson, consisted of focusing on three key objectives:

1. determining how to use data to improve engagement and outcomes;
2. identifying how to connect disparate systems into a single user experience, especially across such a mammoth organization; and
3. asking what are the capabilities needed to embrace and endorse to truly advance a platform strategy within the health care sector.

“We all know that competition in health care is heating up and that it is no longer just with health systems,” she notes. “There are new players and entrants across the board.”

Much of this competition is coming at the hands of “Big Tech,” which is investing significant sums in order to become the first touchpoint for health care users.

“I think that all of us—perhaps at different levels—are feeling the pressure of how to embrace this change at our organizations,” Golson notes.

At Advocate, addressing this included moving consumer experience to front and center on the organization’s strategic plan.

“We were putting our fists down and saying that we were committed to being a consumer-first organization, and determining what that would look like,” Golson recalls. “The other thing we were able to do was to shift that accountability of consumer-first into our broader division.”

At Aurora Heath, the consumer-first strategy became defined as anything that takes place on the front and back ends of care. Efforts that are involved with the hands-on delivery of care fall under patient experience, and are tightly linked with the consumer experience strategy.

Consumer Centric

The need to focus on a consumer-first approach is gaining importance. A recent report by McKinsey demonstrated that, across all industries, revenue of companies seen as customer experience leaders has grown at a rate of twice that of those that have lagged behind in this area. The report also found that the acquisition of three customers is needed to offset the loss of a single customer, and that 80% of value creation comes from expanding share of wallet with existing customers.

“These are the factoids that really helped us gain buy-in and traction within our organization regarding why we must get consumer experience right and truly redefine ourselves as an organization,” Golson recalls.

Along with having consumer experience located prominently in the organization’s strategic plan, Golson and her colleagues developed a consumer experience dashboard that allows for detailed measurement of metrics and linkage to incentives within the organization in order to align leaders with this focus. 
The end-to-end consumer experience begins with awareness and acquisition in order to engage consumers, moves through care delivery focused on convenience and leveraging emerging technology, and finishes with engagement and loyalty, personalizing each patient’s health journey and providing necessary tools to strengthen relationships with their health care team and encourage healthy living habits.

Realizing these goals necessitated the development of five core beliefs as an organization in order to truly use connected health and digital connectivity to improve the consumer experience, ultimately driving revenue and improving outcomes: identity, personalization, journey orchestration, consumer data platform and the use of artificial intelligence.

“As we look at this idea of engagement and how you transform this from a metric into health outcomes, into share of wallet, into customer retention, it really does begin with the identity,” Shiels says. “Do we really know who that user is?”

Developing this user identify then allows for personalization of the health care experience, allowing users to feel understood in their health care goals and helping marketers assess how to best engage with them.

“Once we have that identity, we’re able to start to segment our users and delivery of that level of personalization,” Shiels notes. “We know who you are, where you’re coming from, and we know what we are on the hook to provide you with from a clinical and health-system perspective. We can then bake that into the overall experience.”

Orchestrating the patient’s journey then involves creating a chassis that connects individual, disparate experiences across the health system and leverages data, technology and other efficiencies in order to improve outcomes and return on investment.

“You’ve got all of these pieces, and you can then really start to push forward with improving outcomes and engagement,” Shiels notes.

Finally, the staggering development of AI technology is set to permanently alter the health care space, as with all other industries. While much remains to be seen regarding how exactly the technology will affect health care marketing, answers regarding its effect on elements such as search algorithms, help bots and how reliance on AI will be able to aid staff will in many ways determine the future of patient engagement.

“AI is a fabulous tool and a terrifying tool,” Sheils says. “We have to look at how it can enable us to achieve the goals we’ve been talking about, whether that’s through content strategy, improving how we engage with customers and how we can augment the abilities of existing staff. Digging into this will really shape the organization moving forward.”