How healthcare can use the leading customer experience platform to deliver the ideal patient experience.
If you are in the healthcare business – data, and how it is utilized, is likely something you face weekly. For that matter, you may have even read some of our own Healthcare Industry Trends. Healthcare is rich with patient data, and there are many visions of how it should used going forward. In this article I am not going to predict the “what” and “when,” but rather, show HOW a specific aspect of the patient journey can be improved with meaningful data.
Whether on a secure patient portal, a provider’s corporate website, or a specific practice’s education site, the experience should be focused on the patient and not the way the business is organized. While I realize it’s somewhat taboo to say so, patients are consumers. Outside of their healthcare experience, they are shopping, comparing, and purchasing as consumers. And that experience that they traverse everyday (as an average consumer) affects their expectations across all journeys. Amazon, and similar customer experience leaders have set the bar, and just because you are not selling electronics, stand mixers or the latest fashion does not exclude you from providing a streamlined user journey.
Delivering on this expected norm, or even surprising patients with advanced personalization is something the healthcare industry can glean from leading retailers. This relevance drives trust, and that trust is certainly a commanding emotion when making an important health decision no matter where they are in the process.
Source: McKinsey & Co., 2014
Access to data is another trick when you consider the amount of different systems usually running an average healthcare organization. Connecting these systems, managing security/privacy, and taking advantage of all of your data can be tricky but not impossible. Sitecore leads the way when it comes to delivering on connected, customer (patient)-centric web experiences – including healthcare organizations – delivering on the promise of Meaningful Use. With Sitecore you can consolidate data from many systems, securely, and scale to a mature (even predictive) system that delivers that 360 degree view of your patient that can drive relevant content.
Here are 5 Ways Sitecore can deliver on a world-class patient journey.
- A one-to-one view of your patients’ journeys: As each patient enters your site, Sitecore will track their journey
without the need of any tracking script. This is not a sample of visitors, this is every visitor, and every interaction. With a little planning and very minimal effort, you can score pages to weight their importance; A form completion page – 100 points, sign-up for newsletter – 50 points, social link click – 10 points, as examples. With this simple scoring in place you can start to see which users are taking more “valuable” journeys and start to see patters and work to provide better paths to the higher value pages. These values can then also be associated with campaigns.
Speaking of campaigns: With ease, you can set up campaigns and group them for easy management and detailed reporting. Track keyword campaigns, create and email campaigns, social, print and so on. You can even create campaigns that are built off of a certain behavior or set of activities. With these in place, you can track by campaign and campaign group and continue to define a picture of what is working and what is not (for refinement).
- Start to personalize content: With the picture I painted above, you can start to define your users. How do you show content for a patient, how do you show it for a healthcare professional? This can start simple: change banners; show different classes to convert to a sign up; change content for return visits or logged in vs. logged out. These grow over time to a level of sophistication that will ultimately result in delivering a relevant, connected experience for each patient, every time.
Drive engagement plans: Create simple to very complex rules based engagement plans that automate processes and simultaneously deliver a better patient experience based off of evolving data. A certain value of page score could send a trigger to change page content – say, a newsletter signup form. Enrolling in a class could alert a nurse through email. Collected data could be pushed to another internal system. The possibilities are endless and can by layered. The questions will be: What does your healthcare business want to do to improve efficiency and how will it affect your patient experience?
- The single point of truth: Your patients’ journeys will evolve over time and your view of each user will develop in
their xFile. This clear vision of each users’ experience in time can include: a timeline of activity including mobile, or desktop; what outcomes occurred; what campaigns were triggered; what was the source of each interaction; what type of user is this and what are they most interested in – just to name a few. All of this information can be synced with other systems, resulting in a fully connected patient journey.
All of this takes time, and admittedly, I am providing a quick look at some of the potential. Importantly, we understand the steps that can be taken to crawl, walk, run and ultimately fly with Sitecore. There are best practices to make for quick wins that will also inspire your organization’s journey to a better patient experience and a deeper understanding of each individual user. If you are attending #HIMMS16, stop by and say, “Hi” to Perficient in the Microsoft booth – #3832, where we can provide more depth and discussion around business pain points, and we can talk about how we could help you deliver on the ideal patient journey with Sitecore. Learn more: http://www.himssconference.org/
