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Healthcare providers are faced with the right storm of challenges. Regulatory catastrophe, clinical advancement, and rising costs give just a couple of the economic process which collude to disrupt management in their go after patient care excellence and bottom-line performance. Compounding these circumstances, health systems must deal with increased competition from both traditional and emerging providers, while simultaneously grappling with dramatic changes in technology capabilities and consumer expectations. Managed effectively, these challenges are often converted into opportunities for growing market share and creating memorable patient experiences, all while reducing the value of customer acquisition and repair delivery.

The power of experience and peer touchstone in healthcare has been measured at 2-4X that of other consumer industries. In spite of this, the healthcare industry has historically invested little or no inexperience and referral, believing that patients will remain loyal to “the better doctor,” whatever that term means. In fact, recent studies suggest that patients are willing to modify health providers for a far better experience or just for the power to electronically access their medical records. This reality has enormous implications for an industry that comprises nearly 1/6th of the whole US economy. The resulting math suggests that many billions of dollars are life for healthcare providers who effectively leverage technology to streamline service access and improve the care experience.

Long understood in other consumer markets, progressive healthcare providers increasingly recognize that the sole thanks to affordably create extensible, high-quality delivery capabilities is to digitally-enable customer interaction frameworks. Fortunately, there's an answer model from consumer markets which addresses this need: the mixture of knowledge management, process management, rules management, and mobile apps provides the building blocks required to consistently deliver exceptional experiences. In consumer markets, this is often referred to as journey management; in healthcare, it's often called patient pathways. In both cases, the methods are equivalent, as are the outcomes.

The Building Blocks of Healthcare IT

Double-clicking on each of the building blocks, common IT patterns become possible.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms function the info foundation for healthcare marketers to know their customer base, target specific audiences, measure market opportunity, calculate conversion effectiveness and ultimately, drive return on investment for scarce marketing dollars. Beyond the normal roles of CRM systems, Customer Evolution believes in utilizing these platforms to function the underpinning for all customer interactions spanning web, mobile, email, contact center, and more.

An additional advantage of mobile apps is the ability to shape the patient’s experience through functions like way-finding, form completion and post-encounter calendar reminders

• The synthesis of process management and rules management, married closely to customer data management, offers truth “secret sauce” for generating exceptional experiences. Process management, often within the sort of Business Process Management (BPM) engines, ensures a uniform, brand-aligned set of activities are executed during a lifestyle-aware, streamlined manner. Amplified with rules management, processes are massively controlled in real-time by sensing customer circumstances and shaping the experience to customer preferences.

• A rapidly advancing frontier in customer engagement is that the mobile device/app. The tsunami of consumer migration to the mobile channel is illustrated by the very fact that over 80 percent of all searches are now done by mobile devices. a strong complement to the present agenda is that 70 percent of these searches end in some sort of action within one hour of the search. a further advantage of mobile apps is the ability to shape the patient’s experience through functions like way-finding, form completion, and post-encounter calendar reminders.

With this backdrop in mind, let’s examine the scenario of a typical healthcare experience that's extensible to several sorts of patient interaction. Historically, medical care doctors have narrowly framed the “encounter” because the eight minutes on the average the doctor spends with the patient within the examination room. While this is often a crucial component, it grossly under-represents the encounter from the patient perspective. This pattern continues into post-visit activities including co-payment, prescription picks up, follow-up visits, and so on, as depicted below.

A new health care delivery Model

Entirely new healthcare access and delivery model is emerging which brings the sooner mentioned building blocks (data, process, rules, mobile) together for orchestration of activities before, during, and after the encounter. Here are just a couple of samples of how this will work:

• Appointments are often scheduled with a couple of button clicks immediately following doctor selection to capture the patient before they explore alternative physicians.

• Consumer-friendly mobile apps can link to phone maps, provide an “Uber button” for alternative transportation, present pre-arrival forms during a dramatically improved interface, and drop calendar reminders and notes directly into the device.

• Plan of care instructions are often loaded into the app, which can, in turn, be wont to update the physician as each step is completed (prescription refill, etc.).

• Finally, this improved experience is often shared by the patient to their “friend” network through the press of an app button, simplifying referral for patient and friend.

The benefits to the patient include simplification of a posh process during a stressful period and minimizing lifestyle disruption by eliminating burdensome steps. For the health system, operating costs are driven down through “Do It Yourself” patient services, while earnings and share of wallets are increased through the dramatic betterment of inpatient experience and the resulting increase in customer retention and acquisition.

Our mission is to leverage the principles and practices of progressive consumer markets and convey them to healthcare providers who recognize the necessity to earn every customer through differentiated customer experience. While faraway from trivial, we believe the playbook is being written a day as smart marketers and innovative technologists combine forces to rework an industry long-overdue for customer-facing change. Following on the well-laid tracks from organizations like Amazon and Yelp, our clients are already enjoying the advantages of this fresh approach, as are their patients.