How to choose the right technology partner for your CX transformation

New disruptors are entering the healthcare technology landscape every day, many with deep expertise in UX and UI. Healthcare organizations looking to remain ahead of the curve and sidestep the threat of disintermediation need to start their CX transformation now. 

The right technology partner can significantly accelerate the build process, allowing healthcare organizations to get-to-market fast while easing pressure on in-house IT teams. This blog is intended to simplify the process of choosing a CX transformation partner with insights into what an ideal technology partner brings to the table.

Why partner to improve your healthcare CX?

Healthcare providers and payers don’t have the same technology resources and dedicated IT headcount as companies like Google, Microsoft or Amazon. And that’s okay. After all, they’re not technology companies—they’re healthcare companies. What they do have is established trust and extensive experience delivering healthcare to patients, members and consumers. When healthcare organizations choose to move their CX transformation forward with the help of a technology partner, they get to focus on what they do best—delivering care. 

Building a best-in-class healthcare CX from scratch is technically challenging, time-consuming and costly, which makes achieving organizational goals and objectives more difficult. As technology giants continue to enter the HealthTech sector and other healthcare organizations shift their focus to improved consumerized experiences, the sense of urgency for change is greater than ever. Simply put, there is no time to waste. By partnering now, healthcare organizations can accelerate their journey toward improved retention, net new patient or member acquisition and revenue growth. If left on the back burner, people will begin to look elsewhere for their care in a market where their options continue to expand.

There are many nuances associated with patient care, interoperability, privacy restrictions, government regulations, etc. that influence the way payers and providers do business and ultimately how they design and deploy their CX. With that in mind, the CX transformation partner you choose should have a proven track record in delivering best-in-class technology solutions for clients that have similar regulatory and privacy limitations.

Key considerations when evaluating a CX transformation partner

Configurable and scalable technology

Every payer and provider organization has different goals, so you should never settle for a generic technology that aims to please the masses. You need a technology solution that can be tailored to meet the business goals of your organization. Similarly, today’s consumers have highly specific needs, so a one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare CX lacks the personalization that the average consumer now demands. 

In order to stand out, you need a partner that does more than sell a homogenized product to every client. Their technology must be configurable. Configurability is critical from both a business and consumer perspective. For the business, configurability means matching your established and trusted brand and choosing custom experiences that best support your consumers to drive positive health outcomes. For the consumer, this means custom health journeys powered by robust content libraries to ensure there is always another step to be taken toward a healthier lifestyle.

Scalability goes hand-in-hand with configurability. In today’s market, the ability to expand and expand quickly is paramount. When choosing a partner, it’s important to make sure they have a tried and true digital infrastructure in place to get to market quickly, test, learn and scale at a pace that matches your timeline. 

Configurability and scalability are imperative but hard to actualize. In order for your CX to be truly transformative, it must be built upon an open architecture. This means a technical infrastructure that is not static, but is consistently iterated and updated. An open architecture is the key for payer and provider organizations to unlock technologies that don’t have to be discarded and reevaluated as new innovations enter the market. It allows the concept of plug-and-play, so new partners and APIs can always be integrated into your technology ecosystem without having to rethink the entire technical infrastructure.

Extensible data capabilities facilitated through interoperability

Interoperability is not a new concept for healthcare organizations, however, nobody has yet to create truly interoperable healthcare experiences. In order to create a seamless, best-in-class CX, your underlying technical infrastructure must revolve around an interoperable, connected ecosystem. 

Your organization has probably invested in numerous point solutions to improve consumer engagement and ultimately health outcomes. While all these products serve a purpose, they can result in highly fragmented experiences, which can lead to low engagement and a poor ROI on your technology investments. While every product collects detailed patient data, when they can’t communicate with one another data becomes siloed and impedes your ability to create data-driven, personalized consumer experiences.

When evaluating a technology partner, you should ensure they make interoperability a top priority. They need to be able to connect disparate point solutions from all areas of your business. Disregarding legacy systems and product investments is often not an option. An interoperable infrastructure adds value to your existing systems while leaving room for new APIs and integrations. For instance, League has pre-built integrations with Salesforce, cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform and appointment scheduling vendors like Lifemark. 

A critical component of enabling this interoperable infrastructure is your partner’s deep understanding of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). For example, League’s FHIR-native platform integrates data from various sources and maps them to the FHIR standard. This brings data together to create a holistic view of every user, which facilitates the creation of personalized experiences at scale and delivers industry-leading engagement. 

Wired for Transformation: The State of Healthcare APIs.” Change Healthcare, 2021.

Once your CX technology has been optimized to facilitate interoperability, you gain access to a massive data lake that centralizes consumer data from every corner of your organization. This effectively breaks down data silos that have historically been barriers to creating a 360-degree healthcare CX. With this shift, healthcare organizations need to ensure their chosen technology partner has deep experience in data analysis and personalization at scale. 

A large part of extending your data capabilities is a shift toward cloud storage. The cloud has many advantages over on-premises storage, including easy access from anywhere at any time with no upkeep required. With a cloud-based strategy, the information in your data lake is always growing, which enables an iterative approach that adjusts personalization based on changes in health information.

Enable personalization at scale

According to Mckinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions—and three-quarters will switch if they don’t like their experience. These are the standards healthcare must meet to attract and retain consumers in the digital-first era. 

In order to meet consumer demands, healthcare organizations need to leverage their integrated data sources to create personalization at scale. This is a highly technical process, and with consumer expectations at an all-time high and accelerated timelines, there is little room for error. A technology partner should have tried and proven machine learning algorithms ready to be tailored to your consumers’ needs. In addition, technical expertise in AI and behavioral science experiences are a must-have.

This means experience when it comes to creating machine learning models that drive next-best actions and a proactive care model, which is a big shift for healthcare. Previously, payers and providers have operated within a more reactive care model that focuses on episodes of care. However, as digital health becomes more prominent, so does your ability to improve preventive care interactions. For example, if a patient’s data shows a correlation to risk for breast cancer, a truly personalized CX would direct that patient to schedule a mammogram as part of their health journey or explain how to perform a self-breast exam.

The shift toward highly personalized digital healthcare interactions is dependent upon your ability to provide relevant content that leads to meaningful health experiences. Breadth and depth are paramount when it comes to the programs and content being targeted toward the consumer. Access to large content libraries is a major benefit of a partnership approach, as it facilitates effective, long-term health journeys that you don’t have to build from scratch.

Collaboration from build to implementation and optimization

As part of your vetting process, it’s important to evaluate how your team will work with any given technology partner. When beginning the build process, aligning upfront on strategies in and across verticals is key. You should feel confident in your partner’s understanding of your organizational goals and their technical expertise from the very start. Additionally, establishing a performance-based payment model is a great way to ensure your investment. For example, League’s payment model ties back into user engagement strategies and content performance—so when the program launches, you can anticipate ongoing and proactive support. 

A structured and thorough implementation plan is needed from the very beginning. Your technology partner’s plan should meet your timeline, integrate into your team’s existing workflows and layout pre-set expectations with well-defined milestones. In short, your partner should work the way your team wants to work. An organized implementation process should benefit IT teams in two distinct ways: easing the workload on understaffed teams and reducing internal pressure for a speedy time to market. Your IT team becomes the directors and facilitators with extensive technical assistance from your chosen partner. 

Once your CX is live, it’s important to maintain a relationship with your partner. A partnership should not be one and done after implementation. It should be an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship that works to continually improve and optimize your CX as time goes on and advances in technology occur. This is where a performance-based payment model shows its value for long-term success. For example, League’s KPIs are tied to customer success via monthly active user rates ensuring the focus remains on clients’ goals and business objectives.

What’s the next step forward?

All of these key considerations point to one type of solution—a platform, like League. League’s solution is a customizable, healthcare-centric platform technology that not only facilitates a plug-and-play build process but also operates upon an open architecture that effectively future-proofs your healthcare CX investment. 

Choosing a best-in-class technology partner with a pre-built platform solution is crucial. With this type of partnership, you get the best of both worlds—support from a partner with deep technical expertise and access to a platform with deep content repositories that help you meet your business objectives.