MedCity Influencers, Patient Engagement

Who should own the patient relationship?

Both healthcare marketing departments and clinical teams have a role in managing the patient relationship so both groups need to work together.

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As the healthcare industry continues to foster patient-centered care — a care model defined by its respect for and responsiveness to an individual patient’s own preferences, needs and values — it is essential for healthcare organizations to develop positive, lasting relationships with patients and consumers. In addition to the importance of these relationships on care quality, these relationships can have revenue repercussions as well.

In fact, 7 percent of patients have switched healthcare providers due to poor customer experience, according to research done by Accenture. This switching could translate to a loss of more than $100 million in annual revenue per hospital, Accenture found.

Though marketers at these healthcare organizations are putting forth strong efforts to identify, reach, understand, and please patients, challenges appear once patients step into the clinical setting. And this causes marketers to hit a “clinical wall,” which blocks them from further engagement or communication. Marketers and clinical teams both work with the patient in different ways, but when it comes down to actually “owning” the patient relationship, who is responsible?

Healthcare marketers are intent on raising awareness and educating market segments on their healthcare organization and the services it provides, as well as ensuring that all interactions a consumer/patient has with their organization be pleasant, convenient, and informative. Their relationships with patients must start early and remain positive, as it is impossible to escape bad experiences if relationships aren’t managed properly from the very beginning.

Further, it is critical for these relationships to be measurable, which will allow marketers to establish standards and levels of consistency with the patient or consumer. Having a consistent message across all parties and departments will help enhance the overall experience and create a greater sense of collaboration within the organization.

Clinicians’ relationships with patients generally focus on care and treatment. These relationships are limited, as the team only knows of the patient from a previous encounter, electronic health records or what is uploaded on the patient portal. For the most part, the knowledge the clinical team has of patients is around their medical histories; they lack the knowledge of the upfront learning patients had and the progression they took before stepping into the clinician’s office. Post-encounter engagement is also less personal – appointment request responses are cold calls, patient portals are branded by vendors and not personalized towards the patient. The overall experience is generic.

These two relationships a patient has within a healthcare institution – one with healthcare marketers, and one with clinicians – are different. But both relationships are equally important, which makes defining who owns the patient relationship difficult. To make this definition even more challenging, patients are often caught in a communication gap between these two entities. For example, clinicians understand disease states, treatment pathways, and care protocols, but don’t have the expertise in digital outreach strategies or consumer behavior to be able to effectively engage patients beyond the point of care.

On the other hand, marketing departments can reach and connect with diverse audiences at ease, but lack clinical experience to educate patients about conditions and procedures on more than a surface level. The communication gap between clinicians and marketers can sometimes put patients/consumers in a position where they’re hearing conflicting instructions from multiple sources. This may cause inconsistencies and confusion during their journey through the health system, and ultimately lead to a poorer healthcare experience.

In order to keep a patient out of the communication gap and engaged in their overall relationship with a healthcare system, it is important to understand TQE — the total quality of the patient encounter. TQE tracks, measures, and monitors all the interactions patients encounter within the health system, both clinical and nonclinical.

Think of TQE as the intersection of patient experience and patient satisfaction. Using analytics to measure patient interaction points allows healthcare organizations to anticipate patient needs, what issues patients may be having with their current care, and how to tailor specific messages to patients.

Within the health system, there are multiple interactions patients have during their healthcare journey, from pre-appointment to post-appointment. Depending upon how sick patients are and how often they need to see providers, the number of those interactions can increase significantly. As a result, hospitals and health systems must identify which interactions have the most impact on patients, and which interactions are not as much of a factor.

Most people have experienced the healthcare system first-hand as a patient, and, when thinking about every encounter that they’ve faced, some interactions are more satisfactory and memorable than others. Further, patients want a healthcare experience that is seamless – a clear, direct line of communication that provides solutions to the answers they are seeking, similar to what they’d experience when making travel arrangements or buying a car. However, with so many touchpoints, it can be difficult for healthcare organizations to identify which of these points have the greatest impact on TQE.

Nonetheless, it is critical for health systems to implement a TQE strategy to strengthen their overall relationship with patients, which can help improve care quality and prevent the loss of patients. The ability to start managing and collectively looking at every single touchpoint by individual service lines is critical before beginning to fully utilize a quality control mechanism like TQE.

So who should own the patient relationship? The answer is that both healthcare marketing departments and clinical teams need to work to understand the TQE at their organization, and collaborate to exchange information to increase that TQE and strengthen the patient relationship. Both parties must partner to create a symbiosis across departments, including sharing technology, strategy, and resources. The result of these joint efforts will be more engaged patients and stronger patient relationships, both key to propagating patient-based care and maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s market.

Photo: Getty Images, PeopleImages.com


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Gary Druckenmiller, Jr.

Gary Druckenmiller, Jr. is VP, Marketing Practice Lead at Evariant. He functions as lead strategist, digital marketing thought leader and C-level executive sponsor for all of Evariant’s enterprise clients, primarily focused on advising health system leadership of opportunistic methods to improve their digital presence and interactive growth potential.

Prior to Evariant, Gary served as Vice-President for Harte-Hanks, responsible for healthcare digital strategy and deliverables including multi-channel campaigns, digital & social media, CRM, analytics, content management & classification best practices. Gary has been with Evariant for 7 years and can be heard often on the hospital marketing speaking circuit. Gary has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Bentley University.

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