Digital disrupters like Amazon and Uber have changed our expectations for everything.
Because of digital transformation, we now access goods and services through our smartphones, computers and voice assistants, in addition to traditional telephone and in-person options.
However, healthcare has been slow to catch up. It has held on to cumbersome processes that are perhaps a decade behind other industries and that make the experience of seeking care frustrating and onerous for consumers.
Even in a tradition-bound field like banking, customers can manage their accounts however they choose—online, mobile, phone or face-to-face—and they can expect their data to be kept safe and confidential across all platforms. This digital transformation was prompted by banks looking to trim costs.
They identified labor-intensive tasks and standardized and automated them—giving us ATMs and online and ultimately mobile banking. From seeking to reduce costs, banks gave their customers more convenience and flexibility.
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Earlier in my career, I led digital transformation in the financial service sector when individual investors had to call their broker to make a trade. Then investment firms found they could cut administrative costs significantly by moving the trading process to online self-service, backed by telephone support. They found that customers were willing to do tasks online if they could quickly access help by phone. Airlines had the same realization.
Now, customers of these industries only call when they have a problem. This model requires phone representatives who are more highly trained—but fewer of them.
Like financial industries, healthcare is responsible for important, confidential customer data, but it has been notably slow to adopt these kinds of changes. Several factors are now pushing healthcare to embrace the digital transformation that other industries undertook some time ago:
- Health systems today are fighting for margins and feeling great pressure to reduce administrative costs. Among the reasons for this are lower payments per procedure from Medicare and Medicaid.
- Healthcare consumers are paying a larger portion of their care through premiums, deductibles and copays. They are increasingly looking for value.
- Consumers also want transparency: access to their medical information, the ability to control it and upfront information about costs. Yet healthcare is still largely a black box.
- More than half of Americans today do not have a primary care physician. They consume healthcare a la carte, as opposed to keeping the same doctor for 20 years. They increasingly expect service where and when they want it. Urgent care facilities, chatbots and nursing hotlines are starting to deliver on these expectations, but we can do much more.
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On the near horizon, I see three key opportunities for health systems to pursue digital transformation that will benefit them and the patients they serve:
- Easy online access to the basics. Health systems at a minimum must enable online features that allow consumers to find and communicate with doctors, book appointments, receive appointment reminders, see their medical records and pay their bills.
- Integrated, digital options for patients to self-serve. This is no small feat, but integration leads to a far more satisfactory experience for the consumer. After the upfront investment, it will bring reduced costs to the health system through, for example, the ability for patients to see their test results or order prescription refills through a portal. Few U.S. health systems are far along toward this change, but the upside is compelling—making healthcare easier for consumers and costs lower for systems and payers.
- CRM that integrates with EHRs. Perhaps the most important digital transformation will be customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that integrate with electronic health records (EHRs). These applications will include physician finder directories, which, like a retailer’s inventory management system, must be a single, thorough and accurate listing of doctors. Also needed are marketing automation tools (like Marketo or Marketing Cloud) capable of processing “if-then” scenarios to personalize customer communications. Also essential are automated call distributors linked to the CRM system. That system must be consolidated and seamless in transferring a call based on the customer’s need. Fragmented systems exponentially increase customer frustrations. So much money, effort and mindshare went into implementing EHRs—health systems and clinicians are still refining the changes that EHRs brought to their workstreams. However, the next step is to ensure that users find the same information across all channels. To do that, we must connect all the back-end infrastructure, which is no easy feat.
Does healthcare gain anything by being a late adopter to digital transformation?
To a degree, health systems can learn from other industries’ early successes. Customer platforms and the infrastructure behind them are now very standardized: track what each customer buys, where and how often, and keep those data all in one place; communicate with each customer in the mode they prefer; compare Customer A with similar customers to better predict what offers, merchandise, services, etc., will help keep them as a customer; serve each customer webpages tailored to them; and if a customer called recently, angry, ensure that all systems are aware of that and treat the customer appropriately.
The digital transformation of our nation’s health systems will no doubt have growing pains, but market forces are relentlessly pushing the field towards these changes. The benefits of digital transformation are many, and consumers are more than ready for them.
Alexandra Morehouse is chief marketing officer and a member of the senior executive team for Banner Health, leading the development and rollout of an enterprise-wide digital transformation platform.