Talking consumer healthcare engagement with Health Evolution

In their Executive Briefing on healthcare engagement, Health Evolution sat down with Deloitte’s Urvi Shah, Former President of Providence Healthcare Mike Butler and League Founder and CEO Michael Serbinis. Together, the group discussed the challenges payer and provider organizations face when it comes to digital transformation in healthcare and what they envision for the future.

CX transformation in healthcare

The concept of a digital front door is not new. We’ve seen it executed effectively across numerous industries, such as finance’s implementation of ATM machines and more recently online banking. A front door strategy will enable healthcare organizations to execute on a critical business objective: providing a single location for members and patients to access, navigate and pay for healthcare. Currently, the majority of payers and providers have a digital front door project as part of their roadmap for the next three to five years. 

Current state of healthcare CX

Michael Serbinis identified that the motivation behind a digital front door strategy differs between payer and provider organizations. Payers see themselves increasingly becoming a conveyor of care. They want to keep members interacting with their health more frequently, ideally, multiple times a week or month, which would ultimately reduce future episodes of care, claims and costs. 

Providers are looking to expand their market share and reach consumers more broadly—not just during or after an episode of care. They want to leverage the trust they’ve spent years fostering with patients and use that to drive frequent digital engagements throughout the course of their lifetime.

In order for healthcare organizations to fully realize a digital front door future state, they need to accept that the industry is changing. Large provider and payer organizations can no longer assume they understand exactly what their patients and members require. It’s time to prioritize the consumer and consider what their experience looks like.

This concept was further explored by Urvi Shah via a virtual care example. In a traditional setting, the patient arrives and expects to spend time in a waiting room before being called back to an exam room. With the shift toward virtual care, these in-person elements are essential to incorporate to make healthcare experiences seamless for consumers. Shah’s suggestion here was to ensure a virtual waiting room exists, so patients aren’t confused or left staring at a blank screen.

The future of digital healthcare

The future of healthcare’s digital transformation requires breaking away from the conventional “go-it-alone” mentality and is dependent on forming strategic partnerships. Mike Butler attributed a portion of his past success at Providence to bringing in talent from other industries and said this decision provided them with greater agility and discipline. Urvi Shah spoke to the importance of consulting partners and the insights they bring when it comes to charting an agile roadmap. 

Michael Serbinis predicted a fundamental shift in healthcare technologies, where point solutions will give way to platforms that can aggregate data across technologies with an open architecture. Healthcare needs the type of interoperable ecosystem a platform provides, which integrates the member or patient experience with their provider’s and/or payers systems (i.e. EMR, appointment scheduling, virtual care). 

According to Urvi Shah, the future of digital health technologies must be more consumer-driven. She indicated a belief that consumers should be the owners of their own data to put them more in the driver’s seat of their personal health journey.