I am seeing an interesting trend in the form of high touch digital healthcare as of late. Many may think that “high touch” and “digital” cannot exist in the same concept, but oh they can. We are actually beginning to see that in some cases patients prefer high touch digital to face-to-face care.
High touch digital is mostly coming in the form of avatars. However, I’m also 
seeing some other unique ways of incorporating human contact into the patient digital experience with great results.
Here are a few recent examples:
- Patient Education: Earlier this year Dr. Marcie Stochak-Chavez from our team blogged about extending the patient physician experience using avatars. I loved her example of the use of a digital avatar with human characteristics to help women through preconception health. In this case human interaction was not replaced. Rather, the avatar augmented and furthered the patient experience through the use of digital technology. The avatar asked initial questions and then triaged the more difficult interactions to clinicians. This allows clinicians to have more time to deal with complex issues.
- Appointment Registration: I love that more and more healthcare organizations are making online pre-registration an option. Going even a step further many hospitals and ambulatory care centers are digitizing the in person appointment registration through avatars to cut down on wait time and add some fun to the patient experience.
- Patient Discharge: The discharge process is ripe for errors and omissions. All too many times patients arrive home without having absorbed the right data they need to maintain their health. The result is often costly readmission. Even a couple years back I was able to witness a demonstration of the use of avatars during the discharge process. Through an automated touch display, patients were able to navigate through their discharge instructions in an interactive way. The avatar even threw in fun questions like whether or not the patient preferred the Red Sox or Yankees (read: the hospital was in Boston). Patients provided rave reviews for their avatar led discharge experience. In fact, the experience was rated higher than in person discharge by a wide margin.
- Find a Provider: Providers need not invest in avatars in order to provide high touch digital care. On any healthcare provider website there is one tool that out shines all others in terms of importance: Find a Provider. In marketing we call this a conversion tool. The job of tools like this are to take all of those unknown consumers that were drawn into the site through content and reputation and then transform them into patients. I’ve seen an excellent example of high touch Find a Provider recently where a healthcare organization offered both online chat or a web call to unknown consumers using the Find a Provider tool. By using this feature unknown consumers first had to enter their name and zip code (really helpful data for marketers) and then individuals from that organization’s call center could guide them through the important process of finding a physician. Plus, they could then schedule an appointment immediately.
- High Touch Health Insurance: Last but definitely not least is the growing use of avatars in health insurance. Health insurance companies have a big consumer experience problem. While the number of self-insured is rising the consumer experience grades for health insurance companies as a whole is, well, awful. Health insurance ranks dead last when compared to every other industry where consumer experience is concern. I was very happy, then, when I read earlier this summer that CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield plans to use an avatar named Chloe to greet those accessing their website. Chloe then talks the consumer through their choices and medical needs. Health plans often find it difficult to find where in the healthcare conversation they fit. Options like avatars create an environment where patients would welcome health plans into their healthcare conversations.
Overall, avatars and other forms of digital high touch are a win-win-win. They are low cost (win), add a sense of fun to otherwise lackluster processes (win), and increase quality all at the same time (win).
Please let me know if you have any questions about avatars used in healthcare. If you have had an experience with an avatar in healthcare, then I’d love to hear about it!
