The Consumerization of Healthcare
A patient doesn’t cease being a consumer. Healthcare industry players must adopt a holistic view of the patient experience.
Paradigms are shifting in the healthcare ecosystem. The mission of healthcare professionals, hospitals and ancillary service providers, such as radiology, audiology, pulmonary testing services, laboratory services and home-healthcare services, has always revolved around clinical outcomes. Rightly so, after all, nothing is more important to the patient than their health.
However, those in the healthcare delivery business — and this includes insurance companies — are beginning to realize that patients are also consumers with consumer expectations. Most patients have choices and base those choices on the quality of care and medical outcome, primarily. However, they also factor in their non-clinical interactions with a particular clinician, hospital or insurance company. Are they responsive? Did they proactively keep me informed? How easy is it to schedule appointments, get lab results and address billing questions? How well does the provider coordinate with the insurance company?
Healthcare holds a special place among industries, but the trend toward consumerization means it’s no longer immune to many of the market forces impacting every other sector of the economy. It must adapt by putting a consumer-orientated spin on its definition of the patient experience.
Contact centers at the front line of the patient experience
Increasingly, both healthcare industry players and patients draw distinctions between providing care and providing visibility into that care. The nexus between the two is the contact center.
The eCommerce revolution and companies, like Amazon and Uber, have permanently altered consumer expectations around transparency into service delivery. Patients bring those same expectations into their healthcare experience, so getting information into their hands, quickly and accurately has never been more important, and that’s where the contact center comes in.
Workforce Management (WFM) technology allows healthcare contact centers to capacity-plan, to schedule the right people with the right skill-sets at the right time in order to answer patient questions. Within WFM, forecasting and scheduling tools provide call center managers with an ability to predict and plan for demand on the contact center on a weekly, daily, hour-by-hour or even smaller time-increment basis.
Patients interacting with healthcare industry contact centers do it for many reasons, both clinical and business-related. They engage agents in everything from appointment scheduling to questions about medication or insurance. Some agents may be skilled nurses performing clinical triage over the phone. The call center manager seeking to cultivate the optimal patient experience may need to hire staff with a wide variety of skill-sets — sometimes individuals possessing multiple skills or areas of competence (clinical and non-clinical). Multi-skill scheduling presents an elevated set of challenges, requiring a sophisticated WFM solution using specialized algorithms to quantify an agent’s contributions to different call queues and ensure coverage of multiple queues.
A business technology disconnect
Organizations focused on patient outcomes may not be aware of how difficult they are to do business with. In many instances, this disconnect in the patient experience traces back to a lack of business-technology sophistication in the contact center, an over-reliance on siloed technology and processes. The truth is, far too few healthcare contact centers are effectively integrating specialized medical software (e.g. EMR), with their other enterprise systems (call center or CRM software), and that comes at a cost.
The disconnect manifests in contact centers with a spreadsheet-driven, ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ approach to agent scheduling, as opposed to one driven by an agile WFM forecasting and scheduling tool. In today’s consumer-centric environment, it’s not enough to have agents in seats. Healthcare contact centers need an agent with the right skill set in the right seat at the right time, one who can answer a patient’s question correctly and empathetically, whether it’s an insurance question on the phone or an email interaction with a nurse regarding a medical question.
Agents are brand stewards, and the qualitative side of their patient interactions is critical to the experience. Speech analytics and conversation tracking WFM tools — the ability to record, monitor and review patient interactions — are crucial. Without those capabilities, healthcare organizations cannot possibly understand the patient sentiment and gauge the likelihood that a patient will provide a positive recommendation. Healthcare organizations must adopt a consumer-oriented, NPS-oriented mindset. For too long, it’s only been an afterthought.
Healthcare organizations are evolving
All is not doom-and-gloom. The industry has made strides in improving the business side of the patient experience over the past several years, but we’re at an inflection point; the paradigm shift needs to accelerate.
Five or ten years down the road, as the consumerization of healthcare continues, patient expectations will be highly evolved; they’ll demand something closer to the experience delivered by Amazon, Apple or online retailers like Zappos. These companies were once considered digital disruptors, but they’re now setting the customer experience standards patients will bring to every interaction with their healthcare service providers.
The question for healthcare service providers is, will they ever fully view their patients as customers? Will they adapt their technology and processes to meet patient expectations and stay at the cutting edge?
In an environment where patients exercise unprecedented control over healthcare choices, their future competitiveness may depend on it.
- The content of this blog is based on a conversation with
Russell Onofrio, Partner, Cross-Rhodes Management Consulting, LLC.
508–341–6621 Russ@Cross-Rhodes.com
