Apr 20
2020
Digital Disruptors Exceling At Delivering Exceptional Digital Customer Experiences
By Drew Ivan, chief product and strategy officer, Lyniate.
It is becoming increasingly popular to move healthcare outside of the clinic and into the community and the home with the use of telemedicine platforms, apps, and other digital means — and the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically accelerated that trend. Counterintuitively, this healthcare crisis has the potential to attenuate the relationship between the patient and the healthcare system, putting provider organizations at increased risk from “digital disruptors” like Amazon, Google and Apple, whose ambitions to take over consumer relationships in healthcare are stronger than ever.
As patients re-orient during the pandemic around other points of care (hospitals, urgent care, pharmacy, etc.), the relationship patients have with their PCPs (which is one of the health system’s biggest and most meaningful advantages against the advancement of healthcare disruptors), can lose value to the consumer. As such, it behooves health systems — who are understandably all hands on deck working to address the COVID-19 crisis today — to be giving serious consideration to ways of fending off digital disruptors as their big challenge in a post-COVID-19 world.
This means focusing on leveraging the unique strengths and assets they have and getting smart about aggregating and using the disparate consumer/patient data sets they manage, to deliver a consumer experience only they can provide.
Digital disruptors excel at delivering exceptional digital customer experiences by using the massive data sets at their disposal that render rich insights into customer trends, needs, behaviors, preferences, proclivities, etc. With that said, hospitals and health systems have an advantage in their exclusive access to patient data and their in-depth medical knowledge.
Health systems need to thoughtfully but aggressively leverage these advantages if they want to successfully retain primacy in the consumer’s healthcare brand relationships. With non-emergent care rapidly shifting to the digital space, digital brands have a golden opportunity to disrupt the traditional patient-health system relationship should provider organizations miss the opportunity to reinforce those relationships by delivering much more personalized digital interactions.
It’s important to remember that healthcare organizations do not need to match the digital sophistication of the big data-driven consumer tech giants. They just need to use what they already know about patients, communities and medicine to create the kinds of experience for patients that only they can.
As hospital leaders aim to protect their organizations from digital disruptors in the post-coronavirus aftermath, these three considerations should be top of mind: