In July of 2020, an Experian survey found that 60 percent of people had higher expectations of their digital experience than before the pandemic. That means it took less than four months for online behavior and expectations to shift — irrevocably.
As the pandemic accelerated the rate of digital adoption across all aspects of life, consumers began to develop similar expectations for their healthcare. These days, people want to search for and evaluate providers, doctors, and treatments in the same way they do electronics and clothing. (After all, that’s the experience they’ve come to expect from Amazon, Google, and Walmart.) They want immediate access to a wide variety of information—from hospital location to a specific doctor’s specialty to treatment reviews from other patients—so they can make their own informed decisions about their health.
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Carrie Liken Carrie Liken joined Yext as the company’s first Head of Industry for Healthcare. In her role, Liken leads all healthcare-related activities, including product and partnership development. Over the last fifteen years, Liken has gained experience in the government, legal, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors, focusing on healthcare and health policy. For 8.5 years, she […]
In short, patients want more control of their own healthcare journey.
But providers, hampered by outdated data systems and insulated from marketplace competition, have not made the same adjustments as retailers. That will change quickly as new technology makes data more accessible and consumer goods giants like Amazon and CVS continue to encroach on primary care.
Here are three lessons providers can borrow from retailers to improve the patient experience.
- Make your “inventory” visible.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Finding the perfect shoes on a site like Amazon is simple and intuitive. A quick search for “green men’s running shoes” shows you what’s in stock and how soon each option can be delivered, while individual results pages provide detailed product information and customer reviews.
Finding the right doctor should be just as easy. If provider data and availability is your health system’s “inventory,” a patient should be able to search for it on your website just as they would for shoes on Amazon.
Modern search technology can take a natural language query like “doctors near me who accept Aetna insurance” and filter out relevant results. It can access information like a doctor’s specialty and whether they’re accepting new patients and available on a specific date — all of which can be used to deliver specific, accurate info to the patient.
This is particularly valuable for providers facing staff shortages. Just because a doctor is available on a certain day doesn’t mean her support staff is. Advanced search technology can determine if support staff is unavailable and remove that option, saving the patient the frustrating experience of having to rebook an appointment.
- Break down information silos.
So why isn’t searching for a doctor online as easy as finding a pair of running shoes? That has a lot to do with how healthcare organizations have historically stored and organized information.
Too often, the information a patient needs is scattered across siloed technology systems within a provider organization. Medical records may be stored on one database, facility records in another, and staff schedules in a third. These legacy data systems, often constructed piecemeal over the years, can’t communicate with one another, trapping the information.
This is where modern search technology can make the difference. The right system can leverage APIs to extract information from disparate sources and combine them into workable data sets. This can be used, for example, to match physicians to specialties and conditions treated.
That information can power a specialized search experience like “find a doctor” or a universal search experience that relies on natural language processing. What’s more, it can be made accessible to a third-party search engine — so a patient searching Google for doctors with a specific speciality in your area will see your results.
This allows patients to do more than just find a doctor. They can also answer other critical questions: Where is the provider located? How do I pay my bill? How do I log into my medical records? How do I change or schedule an appointment? All of this information already exists within an organization; the key is connecting it and making it accessible to the patients who need it.
- Focus on consumer experience.
Providers used to focus on digital search primarily as a patient acquisition tool. The web was seen as a way to attract more patients and feed them into the top of the conversion funnel.
Priorities have shifted amid the healthcare workforce shortages caused by the pandemic and Great Resignation. With more than eight in 10 facilities facing shortages of allied healthcare professionals and America’s already thin nursing workforce retiring en masse, many hospitals aren’t in position to take on additional patient volume.
So, what are short-staffed providers to do? Shift the focus from filling the funnel to improving the patient experience for those already in it. As retailers have shown, digital channels can be just as adept at improving retention as they are driving acquisition.
An immediate way to address the digital experience is by ensuring consumers have easy access to the information they need. Patients already in the process of receiving care within your health system have just as many questions about their care as prospective patients… maybe more. They want access to their medical records, contact information for their physician, details about their treatment, reminders about scheduled appointments, and more.
People accustomed to easily accessing information online don’t have the patience to navigate complicated website drop-downs or pick up the phone every time they want an answer. Putting this information at their fingertips with advanced search shows that you prioritize their time and wellbeing.
Of course, building a strong patient experience will help with acquisition as well. As the primary driver for making healthcare choices has shifted from things like proximity and price to valuing the experience, patients are relying more on word of mouth. Improving the experience brings in better reviews, which improves both your online and offline reputation and brings more patients to your facility. What improves the bottom of the funnel improves the top of the funnel, creating a flywheel.
Hospitals go to great lengths to deliver exceptional care to their patients. That commitment should extend to the digital space. By making your inventory visible, breaking down data silos, and building a better patient experience, providers will have happier patients and healthier margins.
Photo: LumineImages, Getty Images
Carrie Liken joined Yext as the company’s first Head of Industry for Healthcare. In her role, Liken leads all healthcare-related activities, including product and partnership development.
Over the last fifteen years, Liken has gained experience in the government, legal, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors, focusing on healthcare and health policy. For 8.5 years, she worked for Google, where she worked with healthcare organizations of all sizes to better understand the patient journey, digital’s impact on patient and customer acquisition, and how to drive increased revenue and sales through digital means.
Liken holds a degree in public policy and political science from Duke University and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she focused on health policy.
