Tag: Avtex

Key Components of A Digital Front Door Healthcare Experience Strategy

Mike Pietig

By Mike Pietig, vice president of healthcare experience, Avtex Solutions.

Many healthcare organizations today offer a multichannel engagement approach, presenting online and mobile access to services and even care. Adopting digital channels is a great first step toward meeting your consumers’ expectations, but is just the starting point.

Consumers today expect to be given choice in their healthcare engagement and care channels – via mobile app, on their computer, over the phone, in person – and they want these interactions to feed into a connected, seamless omnichannel experience that is simple, intuitive, and personalized to their needs. Today’s digitally integrated economy requires an approach to healthcare that puts consumers’ needs first and engages them at every relevant touchpoint along their journey.

Many healthcare organizations are turning to a digital front door to facilitate this kind of digitally optimized, omnichannel experience. A digital front door sets the foundation for a stronger, more consistent omnichannel experience that enhances every connection, increases loyalty, reduces friction, and drives competitive advantage.

Our healthcare experience experts have identified the five components needed to build a Digital Front Door strategy that meets consumer expectations and strengthens the omnichannel healthcare experience:

1. Alignment

At Avtex, we often talk about the need to define your “North Star” to ensure that every aspect of the consumer journey aligns with your organizations’ overarching philosophy of the best possible experience. A Digital Front Door ensures there is alignment with this desired healthcare experience, from goals to governance.

Like any successful customer experience strategy, the digital front door must align with and improve upon existing patient and member experience strategies to digitally transform your organization. Activities like journey mapping and CX process mapping can help uncover pain points and clarify how a Digital Front Door plan can support your overall North Star.

2. Understanding
A 360-degree view of your consumers is necessary to build a strong digital experience. Building a complete, holistic understanding of your consumers’ experiences will help you to identify gaps and opportunities to elevate this experience and create a more rounded, consumer-centric environment. For example, you may consider developing a voice of the customer (VOC) program to gain new insights, or you may decide to perform persona mapping exercises to help understand your target segments better so you can better meet their identified needs.

It’s also important to prioritize gathering employee feedback and data, as these insights provide invaluable information on needs, preferences, trends, and pain points – both at the individual and group level. We’ve learned that improving the employee experience will lead to a measurable improvement in the consumer experience.

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Communication Is Key To Patient Experience During and After COVID

By Mike Pietig, vice president of healthcare experience, Avtex.

Mike Pietig

Communication is core to delivering exceptional patient experiences every day. In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, and as patients and their providers slowly move forward, communication is as critical as ever.

Now is the time for providers to review how they’ve traditionally communicated with patients and what adjustments can be made to improve communications in the future. The deferring and cancelation of elective services has resulted in millions of lost revenue, putting even tighter constraints on marketing budgets, so a communications review is imperative.

An alarming 81% of consumers are unsatisfied with their healthcare experience, according to recent research by Prophet. When providers enhance communication as part of the patient experience (PX), the outcomes include improved patent retention, new patient acquisition, increased utilization of health system services, and more.

Well-planned and personalized communication ranks highest in importance in the patient experience, by the patients themselves. More effective communication increases patient engagement opportunities, reduces the volume of incoming calls that the organization is receiving (which helps staff focus on the highest priority items and the most critical patients), and lowers the cost to serve patients and maximize resource utilization, which is especially important now, given COVID has put intense strain on providers’ resources and finances.

To survive and thrive in the new norm, it’s time for providers to modernize their communications approach.

Learn the patients’ communication channel of choice.

Historically in healthcare, outreach has been focused on billboards, direct mail and tv/radio ads as the main communication channels in between face-to-face visits. These marketing blasts are nearly impossible to track for return on investment and do nothing for patient retention. Patients live in a digital world and expect digital outreach.

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