Connected experiences can be the difference between healthcare businesses that exist 5-10 years from now or those that shut down. A patient-centric approach to managing patient experience, and connected experiences puts convenience, accessibility, and customer care at the forefront of the healthcare journey while still improving treatment outcomes.

Introduction

What do you think is the most defining feature of the current digital age? Arguably it might be the fact that today, we are all more connected than ever using digital tools and platforms. It can be trivial today for individuals to talk and connect with others, even if they are across the globe.

But this interconnectedness is not just limited to individuals. Today’s businesses also offer a degree of connectivity that was impossible to provide to customers just a few years ago. From the very beginning of the customer journey to continued engagement far after a sales pipeline has finished, businesses today offer a unique experience to their customers through digital tools.

The foremost industries that have embraced connectivity are customer-service and customer-facing industries like retail, travel, and tourism. But surprisingly, an industry where connectivity would really matter has not yet gotten on board – the healthcare industry.

Connected Experiences

Connected experiences are a relatively new concept for the healthcare industry so it is important to define them clearly before a discussion can be had on the subject. A connected patient experience simply refers to patient experiences where medical knowledge, information, accessibility, and communication are connected across devices, platforms, and healthcare providers.

Patients today want convenience and accessibility to be prime offerings in a healthcare business apart from great treatment outcomes. These changing customer dynamics have been stewing in the background for a while but the COVID-19 pandemic has only hastened these changing attitudes.

Connected experiences result in better patient experiences as they are fundamentally patient-centric. These systems allow healthcare organizations to have flexible patient touch points while also having robust integrated back-end systems that make administrative and medical processes much easier for healthcare organizations.

Imagine if you will, a patient’s record that is available through a digital system that can be easily shared across departments, physicians, and the administrative staff. The patient no longer has to worry about losing their medical records while at the same time, the records can easily be transferred and shared between the primary and secondary care providers. This allows healthcare providers to more effectively coordinate and communicate regarding the treatment processes of their patients. For the administrative staff, this not only makes record keeping much easier but other customer care services like scheduling, billing, and payment collection can also be made much easier and digitized as a result.

For healthcare businesses like pharmaceutical companies, connected experiences also help them in other ways. Increased connectivity allows pharma companies to shift from product-based processes to patient-centric processes that allow them to be far more agile in the digital age.

At a time of lowered confidence in the pharmaceutical industry, increased connectivity also helps companies engage with customers in a meaningful way and authentic manner. For healthcare organizations, this is true as well.

Connectivity fosters better communication and improved experiences. With the biggest patient satisfaction pitfalls almost always related to communication gaps between the provider and patient, connectivity allows healthcare organizations to ensure that patients are always aware of the information that they need. No more unknown delays or unclear medical instructions.

Desilofication of the internal barriers present in a healthcare organization can promote further patient experience improvement as well as better morale for healthcare providers. Today’s patients are just as concerned with the journey as they are with the results, that’s why healthcare businesses need to start focusing on measures that improve the patient experience.

How does it help patient experiences?

The reason why self-service helps improve patient satisfaction is that patients today value convenience and speed over the human connection that customers in the earlier decades preferred. While this is not to say that patients want their entire healthcare journey without any human interactions, they certainly would prefer digital tools to complete activities that would otherwise take much longer to accomplish or those tasks that can have a mental strain.

For example, a patient can self-schedule an appointment in less than 90 seconds while doing the same over a call would take nearly 10 minutes. 10 minutes that matter a lot to not just the patient but also to your administrative staff. With 80 percent of patients willing to switch their healthcare providers for convenience alone, as found by a 2019 NRC Health survey, it’s in your best interests to adapt to the changing need of today’s patients. Providing self-service options is an underserviced demand of today’s patients. By providing them with what they need, your healthcare business can quickly improve patient experiences and even drive higher patient engagement levels

Conclusion

As the healthcare industry works to break down the silos that have cropped in the healthcare industry, it is more and more important to provide connected healthcare experiences to patients. While patients in the past often had to go through their healthcare journey while having discrete, disconnected experiences, today’s digital tools allow healthcare businesses to bridge the gap between each step of the patients’ journey in the healthcare setting.

Connected experiences are not only important to improve patient experiences but help healthcare businesses provide better treatment outcomes. A patient that is holistically cared for by a healthcare organization will have better experiences and have a greater quality of care imparted to them.

Digital tools today make it easier for healthcare businesses to provide a better patient experience. But your healthcare business may not have the resources to hire dedicated tools to manage connected experiences for your patients.

BraveLabs helps healthcare organizations to improve their patient experiences by using digital patient management tools. With our help, healthcare businesses can provide connected experiences to their patients.