How to Bridge the Gap Between Patient Experience and Digital Transformation
Dawn Pascale
It’s a changing world driven by digital transformation. With 41% of your patients saying they would stop using your practice if they have a poor online experience, it’s clear that healthcare providers must bridge the gap between digital transformation and patient satisfaction. What needs to happen to stay on top of these trends?
Digital Transformation and the Patient Experience Healthcare is adapting to a new era of consumerism that hit every other type of business decades ago. Twenty years ago, all a hospital had to do was add on a new specialty wing, and the patients would show up. Today, the “if you build it, they will come” strategy has been replaced by the era of the discerning healthcare consumer.
This new patient is more likely to trust an online review over a referral—even from a family member. Your patients expect price transparency as much as they do a positive experience. Increasingly, they’re using telemedicine over an in-person visit. Today’s patients want the convenience of a digital bill and online payment options. One study showed patients are frustrated by:
- Practices that fail to adapt to digital administrative processes in billing, charts online, digital pre-appointment forms and more.
- Receiving paper bills; three out of every four American healthcare consumers fall into this category.
- Data and records go missing, which happens even among providers within the same health system.
Younger consumers are particularly frustrated and one in five have already switched providers because their online experience was a poor one.
Fierce Healthcare says, “digital experiences can be a big reason consumers write negative online reviews of providers.”
It seems that we’ve made strides toward digital transformation on the clinical side but failed on the administrative side. Our lack of digital transformation in our administrative workflows is created a poor candidate experience. With HCAHPS scores increasingly tied to reimbursement, this lack of digitization is sure to hit your clinical facility right where it counts—in the pocketbook.
What can organizations do to bridge these gaps?
Administrative Digital Transformation Steps If your goal is to improve the patient’s digital experience with your practice, Health IT Outcomes has some suggestions for how to bridge gaps and mend fences:
- Improve data management and governance. First, set policies and infrastructures around the digitized data you keep, whether it’s cleaning transactional data or retaining it.
- Use data analytics in creative ways. This will help facilitate data transitions between workflows and improve the candidate experience.
- Establish digital journey maps. Think of the patient experience from their perspective to tighten any gaps in how they interact with your facility online.
When data collection and real-time communication come tougher, patients can stay more engaged. They can contribute to their personal care plans by reviewing charting and tests online. Their activity tracking device can sync with online patient records to improve the health of a population. Care teams then have more accurate data at their fingertips to improve the quality of care and ultimately, healthcare outcomes. This is exactly the melting point where the patient experience comes together with our digital transformation.
MedSource Consultants provides innovative clinical resources to healthcare organizations around the United States. Talk with our team about bridging gaps in your hiring and succession planning. We can help.