The following is guest article by Joshua Titus, CEO and founder of Gozio Health.
When it comes to the digital experience in healthcare, too many organizations are losing consumers during crucial moments of the patient journey. EY describes these moments as the point when people can’t get the answers they need digitally or experience a rough handoff from digital to human interactions. This leads to dissatisfaction and lost revenue.
It’s no secret that consumers want to interact with their healthcare providers digitally. Two-thirds of consumers expect digital experiences to mirror the quality of in-person encounters. Yet too often, they’re met with an impersonal digital experience that is inconsistent across channels, driven by an interface that is hard to use or understand. These breakdowns in the digital experience are a top reason consumers switch healthcare providers, another survey reveals.
Digital Patient Experience
With so much at stake, healthcare leaders must consider whether their digital experience is helping or hurting consumers during crucial moments of the patient journey.
Lessons from leading health systems yield the following best practices for helping consumers.
1. Package digital resources in a form consumers can navigate easily. For so long, consumers have enjoyed the convenience of reserving a table at their favorite restaurant or their desired seat on a flight or in a movie theater from their mobile phone. Yet when it comes to leveraging mobile tools to connect with patients, most health systems’ digital functionality is about a decade behind what consumers find in other industries. That’s why it’s important to view your mobile app from the consumer’s perspective, evaluating the extent to which answers to common questions are easy to find.
At University of Miami Health System, the organization’s first mobile app offerings consisted of “Find a Physician” and “Locate a Facility” options. Once the health system added features such as wayfinding and the ability to schedule an appointment, refill prescriptions and access test results, the mobile app became a true digital companion for patients. Even better, while the behind-the-scenes functionality might be complex, for consumers, using the app feels simple and seamless. Today, the app attracts 2,000 to 3,000 users a day, significantly more than before additional services came into play.
Tip: Start with user experience testing. This gives your organization greater insight into what the mobile experience is like and how it can be improved before rolling an app out to the communities you serve.
2. Map the patient journey based on what you know and then adjust using new data as you have it. Research shows 83% of healthcare apps are downloaded fewer than 5,000 times. That’s a dismal number for health systems, where downloads should reach the hundreds of thousands to be worth the investment. At WakeMed Health and Hospitals, the health system mapped the patient journey to identify pain points and opportunities to strengthen the patient experience with mobile functionality. The organization also conducted focus groups with residents to determine what patients want from the health system’s mobile app and connected with peers to discover which features resonate the most with consumers.
The WakeMed All-Access App builds lasting connections with consumers that help keep patients in the WakeMed network, with 100,000 downloads over the first two years and 2,500 new downloads each month. Most important, two out of three users are repeat users, showing that done well, a mobile experience can help keep patients in the health system network.
Tip: Map the patient journey from their point of view to provide the features they will fine more helpful. Don’t stop once the app is live. Continue to test and gather data to make adjustments and keep engagement high.
3. Ensure that your mobile app strategy is a cohesive part of your larger health system strategy. For instance, if there are niche audiences your health system hopes to attract, develop custom offerings that appeal to these audiences, and meet these consumers where they are in promoting these offerings. If your health system’s big-picture goal is to keep more patients in-network, examine which features—from online scheduling with specialists to virtual consults directly within the app—could support this goal. A health system’s mobile engagement platform could even be used to strengthen employee retention by putting the digital tools employees need in one place. The key is to focus on your organizational goals, map what the journey should be to help achieve those goals, and then deliver a consumer-centric experience that matches that journey.
Tip: Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need a unique app for each group of consumers you serve—like labor and delivery patients, staff, or even plan members. You can create unique experiences within a single branded mobile app.
Well-Orchestrated Digital Experiences—By Design
There’s a perception among consumers that digital innovation by health systems has stalled, an Experian survey shows, with just 17% of consumers saying digital access to health system services has improved in the past year. Meanwhile, only 13% of digital decision makers at healthcare organizations would describe their digital health partnerships as “successful.”
To truly help consumers by providing the best digital experience, health systems need to think about where that experience fits within the bigger picture, consider what patients most want and need, and constantly review and adjust. That is how to deliver features that surprise and delight existing and potential patients. By investing in a highly strategic and consumer-centric approach and learning from their user data and their peers, health systems will be better positioned to leverage their mobile app as a tool for deepening connections in their market.
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