You Have the Data, What Now? A Roadmap for Improved Patient Experience
October 17, 2023
October 2023
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Your most visited medical office is your website
Healthcare Marketing is Digital Healthcare
Healthcare marketing and digital healthcare are synonymous because this is where nearly every patient experience begins. Unfortunately for patients, most enterprise healthcare websites assume healthcare begins, instead, in the physician’s office. These assumptions place an undue burden on the patient to self-diagnose possible solutions and underlying conditions.
Wait times for new patient appointments increased from an average 21 days in 2004 to an average of 26 days in 2022; while average wait times for specialists have risen to as many as 45.6 days.
Healthcare websites serve multiple purposes but are seemingly designed around one key stakeholder: the provider. Healthcare providers have developed robust content libraries and thousands of pages of content that prepares a patient for a visit. Yet, they fail to provide the health management tools and relevant information that patients are actually seeking. Tools like Bouy Health’s symptom checker are a signal that the future of healthcare begins with search and self-diagnosis. Attempting to manage or change those behaviors will simply cause a patient diaspora, as will the failure to develop tools of similar sophistication.
Long wait times are not just an inconvenience, they’re a public health disaster. According to a study published in Preventive Medicine Reports, delays in medical care may increase morbidity and mortality risk among those with underlying, preventable, and treatable medical conditions. Nearly 3 in 4 Americans said it was easier to go to the ER than to get a doctor’s appointment. Healthcare websites must play a bigger role and effective digital will help close the divide between patients and access to the care they need.
Getting There
Is the answer another survey? Focus groups, web analytics, and digital tools provide mountains of data but healthcare consumers don’t receive a proportionate benefit from the information they willingly provide. The question remains: “we have the data, now what?”
Great service models are designed to address pain points, ease frustrations, or improve cumbersome processes. Although the data you collect contains the answers, most healthcare organizations struggle to develop services that decode and leverage the data in meaningful ways. Developing effective digital services can be an overwhelming task for healthcare providers, made more complex by a lack of digital expertise and teams that are missing specialized roles that are necessary for developing effective digital marketing and engagement strategies.
Global healthcare leaders are making avoidable mistakes, often investing in the wrong capabilities and pouring money into platforms and technology that promise an improved patient experience without fully understanding the underlying causes of an underperforming patient experience.
Our work with the teams responsible for implementing the platforms that drive patient experience (PX) often struggle to command the basic tenets of digital marketing, user experience, and content strategy, making decisions with a limited understanding of the tools and strategies that result in improved PX.
Where does the journey begin?
Modern healthcare journeys don’t begin in doctors’ offices or on the “understanding gastritis landing page.” They begin with a google search and are left with far more questions than answers. Healthcare consumers have limited tools at their disposal and are tasked with developing a new vocabulary in a frightening language. Further complicating these experiences is the sheer vastness of available resources - most of which aren’t tied to healthcare providers. The ability to meet the needs of patients is undeniably dependent on digital resources with other channels taking a distant and mostly irrelevant second place. Providing immediate access to physicians through digital healthcare is a separate and unique issue that we will set aside for this article.
What now?
Healthcare providers already have the tools they need to reverse this relationship between their patients and digital resources, they simply struggle to implement them correctly.
Content is a misunderstood and overlooked pillar of the patient experience. Patients and healthcare consumers seek solutions in the language they know, not the terms in which healthcare providers speak. The current state of healthcare content creates a catch 22 in which the patient invests an enormous amount of energy and time, cross-referencing articles, papers, and doing the work of the healthcare professional to simply put their possible condition into definable terms. This is compounded by the reaction physicians have to their patients googling symptoms and the inevitable contraindication of Dr. Google. This is an unrealistic and antiquated approach and dismisses the modern digital behaviors of generations of patients that implement this exact behavior in every aspect of their lives.
Switching to a Content-Driven Approach to Patient Experience
Winning the market share of traffic is key to improving the patient experience. Patients should expect to find digital expertise synonymous with the care they experience with a physician, not solely services marketing. Falling short of these standards contributes to poor PX, poor HCAHPS star ratings, frustration, and diminished healthcare outcomes. Content that engages and educates a patient sets the stage for a vastly improved healthcare journey.
Creating Effective Digital Services
Content Strategy, SEO, UX/PX, and the ability to leverage analytics are the key activities that result in improved experiences that impact every aspect of the patient experience, from understanding a symptom or condition, to finding a physician, managing a disease, or simply paying a bill. These fundamental capabilities are often attempted by healthcare providers but rarely with the degree to which they will have an impact on the patient experience, improved health outcomes, or bottom line.
Improving the Patient Journey through Data-Driven Design
Step One: Analytics and Keyword Strategies. Establishing the intent of the patient is key to creating content that aligns with their needs and the terms in which they will describe that need. Providers will benefit from establishing a keyword strategy that aligns with patient-entered terms for specific needs. Developing content that aligns to those terms, is a fundamental shift away from “if you build it, they will come” a strategy that dominates the current healthcare landscape. Extracting search engine data and website analytics provides a blueprint for developing a keyword strategy to engage more patients through the targeting of precise keywords that are optimized for specificity and relevance, not just volume.
Step Two: SEO Content Strategy. Developing content that aligns with patient needs requires a fundamental shift in the process that informs content to be developed and where in the journey it should be encountered. Adherents to the adage that Google is your homepage have it half right but fail to understand that UX design, technical SEO, and content are inextricably linked. Content should be developed for the specific problems patients are seeking, extracted from analytics, and translated into easily understood terms that will correlate with language patients use to describe the solution they seek. Page design, both visible and technical, should support these SEO optimizations efforts with close attention paid to title and description tags that indicate to search engines the type of content the patient should expect to encounter. These digital basics are among the most commonly overlooked and poorly implemented aspects of SEO and content optimization.
Step Three: Effective User Experience. Enterprise-driven design dominates the patient experience, expecting patients to ignore their instincts, common sense, and habituated behaviors. There should be a clear connection for healthcare providers between the “Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age” and the effect they have on a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Again, digital plays an outsized role in providing two of the five core principles of SDOH: “Education Access and Quality” and “Health Care Access and Quality”, both of which are ignored in the vast majority of enterprise healthcare systems and their digital experience platforms.
Developing digital content and experiences that force the patient to circumvent an enterprise health system, its content, and digital systems will only result in patients finding workarounds through other digital resources (WebMD, Health and Wellness blogs, and an ocean of unverified content). Retail and B2B user experiences have significantly outperformed and outpaced their healthcare provider counterparts, resulting in sophisticated user experiences that increase engagement, lower costs, streamline operations, and improve bottom line performance. The healthcare industry’s resistance to this trend is noticeable in nearly every interaction - from self-diagnosis to appointment scheduling and bill payment. Content-driven design shifts the experience to pivot around the patient as the primary stakeholder, providing access to relevant content and effective tools that provide preliminary diagnostic information that arms the patient with clear answers, not confusion. User Experience is often misunderstood as the design of a single touchpoint, a page, or a form when, in fact, it includes all of the interactions the patient has leading up to and including the moment when they interact with a page or a form. Understanding the continuum of the experience is essential when designing digital services that close the digital divide in healthcare.
Step Four: Accessible Technology. With an intense focus on technology and IT spending, there is, again, a gap between expectations and reality. Enterprise health systems pour significant capital into IT but overlook the importance of patient-facing systems that result in improved patient experiences, patient success, and improved patient outcomes. Archaic content management systems that require specialized expertise create a significant barrier for patient experience and clinical and marketing teams to participate in expert content development and maintenance of the website. This divide creates two dangerous conditions: a misinterpretation of requirements and a lack of expertise in content strategy. Both result in less effective digital content, contributing to poor search performance and ineffective patient experiences.
Modern enterprise Digital Experience Platforms (DxP) close the gap between content creation and publishing through sophisticated experience management tools, components, and functionality that circumvent the need for IT involvement. These HIPAA compliant platforms have been tested for over a decade outside of healthcare, powering the highest-traffic and most successful digital platforms we all utilize on a daily basis. Platform and vendor selection should be an integral and inclusive aspect of digital healthcare transformation and the development of effective patient experiences, driven by internal stakeholder technical and business requirements, but more importantly, designed to support patient requirements.
Placing control in the stewards and authors of the website allows for the type of continuous improvement routines that answer the questions “we have the data, now what?” This strategy dramatically improves patient experience, HCAHPS stars ratings, patient sentiment, and patient health outcomes. Healthcare providers are often overwhelmed with the pace of technological and experiential advancements and must rely on outside help to transcend the status quo and deliver transformational experiences. Expertise from specialized and experienced operators is instrumental for gathering requirements, defining a strategy, and creating effective digital experience platforms that deliver more than generic content and frustration.
Improving the Patient Journey through Data-Driven Design
Episode details
Healthcare Marketing is Digital Healthcare
Healthcare marketing and digital healthcare are synonymous because this is where nearly every patient experience begins. Unfortunately for patients, most enterprise healthcare websites assume healthcare begins, instead, in the physician’s office. These assumptions place an undue burden on the patient to self-diagnose possible solutions and underlying conditions.
Wait times for new patient appointments increased from an average 21 days in 2004 to an average of 26 days in 2022; while average wait times for specialists have risen to as many as 45.6 days.
Healthcare websites serve multiple purposes but are seemingly designed around one key stakeholder: the provider. Healthcare providers have developed robust content libraries and thousands of pages of content that prepares a patient for a visit. Yet, they fail to provide the health management tools and relevant information that patients are actually seeking. Tools like Bouy Health’s symptom checker are a signal that the future of healthcare begins with search and self-diagnosis. Attempting to manage or change those behaviors will simply cause a patient diaspora, as will the failure to develop tools of similar sophistication.
Long wait times are not just an inconvenience, they’re a public health disaster. According to a study published in Preventive Medicine Reports, delays in medical care may increase morbidity and mortality risk among those with underlying, preventable, and treatable medical conditions. Nearly 3 in 4 Americans said it was easier to go to the ER than to get a doctor’s appointment. Healthcare websites must play a bigger role and effective digital will help close the divide between patients and access to the care they need.
Getting There
Is the answer another survey? Focus groups, web analytics, and digital tools provide mountains of data but healthcare consumers don’t receive a proportionate benefit from the information they willingly provide. The question remains: “we have the data, now what?”
Great service models are designed to address pain points, ease frustrations, or improve cumbersome processes. Although the data you collect contains the answers, most healthcare organizations struggle to develop services that decode and leverage the data in meaningful ways. Developing effective digital services can be an overwhelming task for healthcare providers, made more complex by a lack of digital expertise and teams that are missing specialized roles that are necessary for developing effective digital marketing and engagement strategies.
Global healthcare leaders are making avoidable mistakes, often investing in the wrong capabilities and pouring money into platforms and technology that promise an improved patient experience without fully understanding the underlying causes of an underperforming patient experience.
Our work with the teams responsible for implementing the platforms that drive patient experience (PX) often struggle to command the basic tenets of digital marketing, user experience, and content strategy, making decisions with a limited understanding of the tools and strategies that result in improved PX.
Where does the journey begin?
Modern healthcare journeys don’t begin in doctors’ offices or on the “understanding gastritis landing page.” They begin with a google search and are left with far more questions than answers. Healthcare consumers have limited tools at their disposal and are tasked with developing a new vocabulary in a frightening language. Further complicating these experiences is the sheer vastness of available resources - most of which aren’t tied to healthcare providers. The ability to meet the needs of patients is undeniably dependent on digital resources with other channels taking a distant and mostly irrelevant second place. Providing immediate access to physicians through digital healthcare is a separate and unique issue that we will set aside for this article.
What now?
Healthcare providers already have the tools they need to reverse this relationship between their patients and digital resources, they simply struggle to implement them correctly.
Content is a misunderstood and overlooked pillar of the patient experience. Patients and healthcare consumers seek solutions in the language they know, not the terms in which healthcare providers speak. The current state of healthcare content creates a catch 22 in which the patient invests an enormous amount of energy and time, cross-referencing articles, papers, and doing the work of the healthcare professional to simply put their possible condition into definable terms. This is compounded by the reaction physicians have to their patients googling symptoms and the inevitable contraindication of Dr. Google. This is an unrealistic and antiquated approach and dismisses the modern digital behaviors of generations of patients that implement this exact behavior in every aspect of their lives.
Switching to a Content-Driven Approach to Patient Experience
Winning the market share of traffic is key to improving the patient experience. Patients should expect to find digital expertise synonymous with the care they experience with a physician, not solely services marketing. Falling short of these standards contributes to poor PX, poor HCAHPS star ratings, frustration, and diminished healthcare outcomes. Content that engages and educates a patient sets the stage for a vastly improved healthcare journey.
Creating Effective Digital Services
Content Strategy, SEO, UX/PX, and the ability to leverage analytics are the key activities that result in improved experiences that impact every aspect of the patient experience, from understanding a symptom or condition, to finding a physician, managing a disease, or simply paying a bill. These fundamental capabilities are often attempted by healthcare providers but rarely with the degree to which they will have an impact on the patient experience, improved health outcomes, or bottom line.
Improving the Patient Journey through Data-Driven Design
Step One: Analytics and Keyword Strategies. Establishing the intent of the patient is key to creating content that aligns with their needs and the terms in which they will describe that need. Providers will benefit from establishing a keyword strategy that aligns with patient-entered terms for specific needs. Developing content that aligns to those terms, is a fundamental shift away from “if you build it, they will come” a strategy that dominates the current healthcare landscape. Extracting search engine data and website analytics provides a blueprint for developing a keyword strategy to engage more patients through the targeting of precise keywords that are optimized for specificity and relevance, not just volume.
Step Two: SEO Content Strategy. Developing content that aligns with patient needs requires a fundamental shift in the process that informs content to be developed and where in the journey it should be encountered. Adherents to the adage that Google is your homepage have it half right but fail to understand that UX design, technical SEO, and content are inextricably linked. Content should be developed for the specific problems patients are seeking, extracted from analytics, and translated into easily understood terms that will correlate with language patients use to describe the solution they seek. Page design, both visible and technical, should support these SEO optimizations efforts with close attention paid to title and description tags that indicate to search engines the type of content the patient should expect to encounter. These digital basics are among the most commonly overlooked and poorly implemented aspects of SEO and content optimization.
Step Three: Effective User Experience. Enterprise-driven design dominates the patient experience, expecting patients to ignore their instincts, common sense, and habituated behaviors. There should be a clear connection for healthcare providers between the “Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age” and the effect they have on a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Again, digital plays an outsized role in providing two of the five core principles of SDOH: “Education Access and Quality” and “Health Care Access and Quality”, both of which are ignored in the vast majority of enterprise healthcare systems and their digital experience platforms.
Developing digital content and experiences that force the patient to circumvent an enterprise health system, its content, and digital systems will only result in patients finding workarounds through other digital resources (WebMD, Health and Wellness blogs, and an ocean of unverified content). Retail and B2B user experiences have significantly outperformed and outpaced their healthcare provider counterparts, resulting in sophisticated user experiences that increase engagement, lower costs, streamline operations, and improve bottom line performance. The healthcare industry’s resistance to this trend is noticeable in nearly every interaction - from self-diagnosis to appointment scheduling and bill payment. Content-driven design shifts the experience to pivot around the patient as the primary stakeholder, providing access to relevant content and effective tools that provide preliminary diagnostic information that arms the patient with clear answers, not confusion. User Experience is often misunderstood as the design of a single touchpoint, a page, or a form when, in fact, it includes all of the interactions the patient has leading up to and including the moment when they interact with a page or a form. Understanding the continuum of the experience is essential when designing digital services that close the digital divide in healthcare.
Step Four: Accessible Technology. With an intense focus on technology and IT spending, there is, again, a gap between expectations and reality. Enterprise health systems pour significant capital into IT but overlook the importance of patient-facing systems that result in improved patient experiences, patient success, and improved patient outcomes. Archaic content management systems that require specialized expertise create a significant barrier for patient experience and clinical and marketing teams to participate in expert content development and maintenance of the website. This divide creates two dangerous conditions: a misinterpretation of requirements and a lack of expertise in content strategy. Both result in less effective digital content, contributing to poor search performance and ineffective patient experiences.
Modern enterprise Digital Experience Platforms (DxP) close the gap between content creation and publishing through sophisticated experience management tools, components, and functionality that circumvent the need for IT involvement. These HIPAA compliant platforms have been tested for over a decade outside of healthcare, powering the highest-traffic and most successful digital platforms we all utilize on a daily basis. Platform and vendor selection should be an integral and inclusive aspect of digital healthcare transformation and the development of effective patient experiences, driven by internal stakeholder technical and business requirements, but more importantly, designed to support patient requirements.
Placing control in the stewards and authors of the website allows for the type of continuous improvement routines that answer the questions “we have the data, now what?” This strategy dramatically improves patient experience, HCAHPS stars ratings, patient sentiment, and patient health outcomes. Healthcare providers are often overwhelmed with the pace of technological and experiential advancements and must rely on outside help to transcend the status quo and deliver transformational experiences. Expertise from specialized and experienced operators is instrumental for gathering requirements, defining a strategy, and creating effective digital experience platforms that deliver more than generic content and frustration.
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