While some consumers equate their healthcare experiences with waiting in line at the DMV, the upside is that there is tremendous opportunity to change the experience with today’s patient population. By removing friction and offering personalized care and communications, providers and insurers can increase patient satisfaction and improve the overall healthcare journey.
The DMV reference is not just a random analogy. For key insights on the patient experience and how it can be improved, Redpoint surveyed 1,000 U.S.-based adults via Dynata about their healthcare experiences. More than half of the consumers surveyed said that their experience with health insurance companies is so poor they would rather visit the dentist, deal with jury duty, sit in the middle airplane seat on a long plane ride or – you guessed it – wait in line at the DMV.
With 47 percent of consumers surveyed reporting that they do not receive a holistic experience from their healthcare provider, the lesson is that there is ample room for improvement.
Frustrations Abound
Consumers provided many reasons why the healthcare experience is less preferred than a dentist visit and other typical life frustrations. Complaints included long wait times, impersonal visits, challenges scheduling appointments, a confusing or complex process to access care, and the inability to communicate digitally on multiple channels with their provider or insurance company. The majority of consumers (71 percent) reported at least some frustration with the healthcare experience.
More than half (54 percent) of consumers also feel that their healthcare providers and insurers don’t have all the contextual information they could to personalize healthcare recommendations. The lack of personalization tops the concerns of most patients, with 75 percent wanting deeper personalization in healthcare and some 61 percent that would visit their provider more often if the communications experience felt personalized to them.
Prescription for Better Healthcare: Communication
Hope isn’t lost. Consumers are telling healthcare providers and insurance what they can do to improve. Beyond eliminating friction with simple tools like offering better digital communications options, patients want the experience to be more personalized and catered for them as individuals.
Healthcare payers and providers can help cater to the individual patient needs via a golden record that provides them with a deep understanding of the individual patient. With the golden record, both payers and providers can coordinate patient information to hyper-personalize messages, offer healthcare recommendations and coordinate other logistical elements of providing healthcare to help close the gap between expectations and the current patient experience.
Value-Based Care Starts with Personalization
In 2018, Redpoint partnered with Lucerna Health to advance the market’s transformation to value-based care through personalized engagements with the healthcare consumer. A single view is the foundational requirement for delivering personalized engagements that are in the context and cadence of an individual healthcare consumer’s journey.
With every available data point about the consumer compiled into a golden record, healthcare organizations like Lucerna have the deep understanding of each consumer required to drive the model. Combined with in-line analytics to determine next-best actions and an intelligent orchestration layer to consistently deliver messages in any channel or moment of engagement, healthcare organizations have a single point of control with which to guide an individual journey.
In practice, this leads to lower costs, better patient engagement and satisfaction, and better outcomes because consumers are presented with information and recommended actions that are the most relevant to them as individuals. Inefficiencies that result from siloed data and an unintegrated system of various providers (primary care, lab, pharmacy, specialists, etc.) are eliminated, which greatly help the consumer navigate through the healthcare system.
For more information about the role of healthcare consumerism and how providers can use data to transform the patient relationship, you can also view our on-demand webinar with Lucerna Health here.
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