Healthcare must prioritize personalization to recover financial loss and reduce care gaps. A patient’s journey must be considered one holistic experience rather than a disjointed series of interactions, accelerating the healthcare consumerism trend, writes John Nash, chief marketing and strategy officer at Redpoint Global.
In the first month of the COVID-19 health crisis, telehealth visits in the U.S. increased 300-fold year-over-year, accounting for roughly 70% of all encounters, according to data from Epic Health Resource NetworkOpens a new window . Part of the dramatic increase can be attributed to one axis of the equation: a significant decrease in overall encounters caused by a near cessation of elective surgeries and patients forgoing physicals and screenings.
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Consequences of putting off care include a significant loss of revenue for hospitals and providers, as well as widening gaps in care. As the IQVIA Institute model shows, the human costs of delayed screenings are stark – including an estimated 36,000 delayed breast cancer diagnoses.
These costs – which do not even include the stress on the industry from COVID-19 cases – will inform much of the overall healthcare industry strategy in 2021. To recover financial loss and reduce gaps in care, healthcare professionals will focus on mass personalization techniques. A consensus will be reached that a healthcare consumer’s journey must be considered a holistic experience rather than a disjointed series of interactions, accelerating the healthcare consumerism trend.
Increased personalization will be central for closing care gaps and staunching revenue loss because it underlines many of the tactics healthcare professionals will pursue to accomplish those objectives.
A Greater Focus on Patient Engagement
Providers traditionally follow a three-pronged strategy for closing care gaps: quality scorecards, population health management, and patient engagement. The identification of quality metrics and ongoing population health initiatives satisfy the first two pillars, but patient engagement has been less understood – and less acted on.
One reason for this is because providers – and payers – have historically lacked a single view of the healthcare consumer. Siloed data, channels, and a lack of systems integrations cloud the single view. This makes it harder to engage with a patient according to their preferences and behavior, including their tolerance for an in-person visit, their ability to access transportation, social determinants of health, current health condition and other risk factors.
Removing siloes to create a single view of the healthcare consumer is a key step in improving patient engagement, allowing providers to personalize experiences throughout a healthcare journey.
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Integrating all Consumer Data to Create the Single View
A deeper dive into what a single view means involves more than combining claims data with medical records. To truly drive personalized engagement, providers must know everything there is to know about the healthcare consumer. A unified profile will include demographic and behavioral data – first-, second-, and third-party data; structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data; as well as data from every device, sensor, and IoT data.
Real-time data updates are a vital component for providing personalized engagements to drive improved outcomes. It is not enough to compile data onto a single platform; a persistently updated record with real-time data from every source provides the means to engage a patient with relevance in the moment of interaction. For this reason, we will see providers, hospitals, and healthcare organizations beginning to prioritize the development of a single customer view in 2021.
Personalized Communications and Outreach
A direct result of possessing a single view of the healthcare consumer will be the ability to deliver messages, content, and communications, not just in a patient’s preferred channel or according to their behaviors. It also involves delivering them in the context of a personal healthcare journey. Hyper-personalized communications will be a key trend in the coming year to reduce care gaps and bring patients back to clinics and doctors’ offices.
Personalization will include incorporating operational sensitivity into care gaps and consumer choices. Consider, for example, the possibilities with integrated claims and clinical data and a single view that also includes a real-time view into a provider’s scheduling system. An optimized interaction could easily include letting a patient know – in real-time – appointment options that match a consumer’s availability. Long wait times at one location might entail sending an SMS message (or email, if that is a preferred channel) to notify the consumer of a better alternative.
More Focus on Value-Based Care
Already a growing trend, value-based care (VBC) will accelerate in 2021. A system of rewarding providers on improved health outcomes rather than a fee-for-service, the crux of the VBC approach, reduces care gaps by viewing a healthcare journey as a holistic experience – with an empowered healthcare consumer as the focal point.
The patient-centric approach of healthcare consumerism invests the patient in their healthcare journey. Creating personalized experiences through a single view helps foster that investment. When every interaction is relevant to the patient experience, the patient is incentivized to improve outcomes by scheduling and keeping wellness visits and age-appropriate screenings. Also, because a holistic, personalized patient experience builds a relationship between a provider and a patient, the patient is more likely to seek needed care rather than find reasons to delay.
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Be Part of the Solution
An American Hospital Association (AHA) reportOpens a new window from June estimated $120.5 billion in losses for hospitals and providers through the end of 2020 related to the pandemic. Most of the loss incurred was due to lower patient volumes. With a focus on using personalization techniques derived through a single view of the healthcare consumer, hospitals and providers can make important headway to ensure a different outlook for 2021.
It promises to be an interesting year in healthcare. The wide availability of a pandemic vaccine is a very real possibility, and a Supreme Court ruling in the spring may decide the future of the Affordable Care Act. Whether the legislation is replaced or not is an open question, but what is certain is that consumers are increasingly in control of holistic healthcare journeys.
Price transparency, new clinic business models, value-based care, and telehealth are among the many forces pushing the market to put the consumer at the center of decision-making. Combined, these forces have built up momentum to the point it looks like an unstoppable freight train coming down the track. By personalizing the healthcare experience, providers will guarantee that they are fully on board and not standing in the way.