While organizations are making progress, health inequity is still pervasive across race, gender, age, and income in healthcare. We’re engaging in more and more conversations with healthcare organizations about ways to help you authentically and diligently address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) across the healthcare experience.

A Strategic Approach to Influence Change for DE&I

Hospitals play key roles in delivering care, offering access to care, employing people, and acting as social safety nets in their communities. DE&I is imperative on a human level to promote broader perspectives, better reflect the people healthcare organizations serve, and help foster a more inclusive work environment. But, in addition, health equity supports business goals such as improved clinical outcomes, improved consumer engagement, and better financial performance.

Change management becomes a vital consideration for organizations that wish to fully embrace DE&I in their overall missions and operations. That includes steps to establish DE&I KPIs, which are critical to actually making change happen.

We help our clients think through the strategic approach of DE&I through the following:

• Developing dedicated teams
• Developing a task force/committee
• Allocating budget focused on health equity
• Continuously measuring to ensure our clients are on track to achieve their mission

Development in Action

Including diverse populations in persona development, journey mapping, and user testing is key to understanding an organization’s specific friction points, barriers, and expectations. In our work building consumer journey maps for one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S., we ensured that approximately half of the respondents can bring diverse ethnic, age, socio-economic, and sexual orientation perspectives.

Similarly, with another client, we conducted extensive research with aging populations to ensure we understood messaging and commerce experience needs to drive the adoption of a direct-to-consumer medical device. Not only did we gain significant insights through this process, but we also disproved some common misconceptions.

We also helped a leading healthcare system think through an inclusive Find-a-Doctor strategy and ensured that they addressed LGBTQ+ populations on individual physician profiles.

Content strategy and messaging are key to addressing DE&I. Ensuring that everyone feels a sense of belonging builds trust, brand loyalty, and adherence to clinical protocols.

SEE MORE: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) in Healthcare

Healthcare Leaders Turn to Us

Healthcare and life sciences organizations serve on the front lines of addressing health equity. Perficient is dedicated to enabling these organizations to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within their companies. Our healthcare practice includes experts who understand the unique challenges facing the industry. The 10 largest health systems and 10 largest health insurers in the U.S. have counted on us to support their end-to-end digital success. Modern Healthcare has also recognized us as the fifth-largest healthcare IT consulting firm.

We bring pragmatic, strategically grounded know-how to our clients’ initiatives. And our work gets attention — not only by industry groups that recognize and award our work but also by top technology partners that know our teams will reliably deliver complex, game-changing implementations. Most importantly, our clients demonstrate their trust in us by partnering with us again and again. We are incredibly proud of our 90% repeat business rate because it represents the trust and collaborative culture that we work so hard to build every day within our teams and with every client.

Contact us to learn how we can help you plan and implement a successful DE&I initiative for your organization.

Healthcare organizations play key roles in offering access to care, employing, and motivating skilled workers, and acting as social safety nets in their communities. They, along with life sciences organizations, serve on the front lines of addressing health equity.

A well-planned and executed DE&I strategy not only creates a healthier and more welcoming environment for team members, but research from McKinsey has shown that these programs can also have significant benefits to an organization’s financial performance.

Delivering on the aspirational goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) requires vision and diligence. As a global digital consultancy, we are uniquely positioned to equip healthcare and life sciences leaders as they plan, activate, monitor, and expand their DE&I initiatives.

The Impact Our End-to-End Expertise Makes on DE&I Initiatives

Experts from across Perficient are working together to support healthcare organizations’ DE&I initiatives across a variety of specializations, including:

1. Strategic Planning and KPI Identification / Tracking: We partner with healthcare leaders to think through strategic approaches (e.g., developing dedicated teams and budget focused on health equity) and to establish and continuously track KPIs.
2. Change Management: Our change management professionals apply broad-based business experience and expertise to drive user engagement and adoption of major change programs. We help healthcare leaders manage the transition process to ensure their team is ready, willing, and able to perform effectively in the new environment (e.g., implementing acceptance of a DE&I program throughout an organization).
3. Personas & Journey Mapping: Including diverse populations in persona development, journey mapping, and user testing is key to understanding their specific friction points, barriers, and expectations.
4. Data Integration: Integrating a client’s current EDW or data lakes with publicly available data sources (e.g., Feeding America, Healthy People 2030, Common Core data, etc.). allows the client to identify patients likely impacted by different SDOH circumstances. With this direction, payers, organizations, or provider groups can create programs/outreach to their members to impact SDOH and health equity within their population. We work with their digital teams to integrate community resources on their patient portal to address SDOH (e.g.: food pantry, Lyft program to doctor appointments, etc.). This creates a personalized experience for the member, and targets areas they may need the most help.
5. AI & ML: We balance the need for better, quicker, and faster improvement with the real and pervasive risk that if we build these tools without thinking all the time about DE&I, we could be building inequity into the technology solutions that should minimize inequity, not exacerbate it.
6. Accessibility: We keep individual’s diverse user stories and unique challenges in mind and consider how health conditions and temporary impairments may impact an individuals’ ability to interact with digital experiences.
7. Content Strategy & Messaging: User experience, content strategy, and messaging are also key to addressing DE&I. Ensuring everyone feels a sense of belonging builds trust, brand loyalty, and adherence to clinical protocols.
8. Clinical Trials: We enable life sciences leaders to build inclusion into the clinical trials that determine if a new drug or medical device is safe and effective.

EXPLORE NOW: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) in Healthcare

Healthcare Leaders Turn to Us

Perficient is dedicated to enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within their companies. Our healthcare practice is comprised of experts who understand the unique challenges facing the industry. The 10 largest health systems and 10 largest health insurers in the U.S. have counted on us to support their end-to-end digital success. Modern Healthcare has also recognized us as the fourth largest healthcare IT consulting firm. With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Perficient is a trusted, end-to-end, global digital consultancy.

We bring pragmatic, strategically-grounded know-how to our clients’ initiatives. And our work gets attention – not only by industry groups that recognize and award our work but also by top technology partners that know our teams will reliably deliver complex, game-changing implementations. Most importantly, our clients demonstrate their trust in us by partnering with us again and again. We are incredibly proud of our 90% repeat business rate because it represents the trust and collaborative culture that we work so hard to build every day within our teams and with every client.

Contact us to learn how we can help you plan and implement a successful DE&I initiative for your organization.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, virtual medicine was growing in the United States. Telemedicine was expected to grow at more than 15% annually through 2025. Approximately 22% of physicians had used telehealth to see patients, and over 50% expressed willingness to adopt it in the next few years. Patients also pushed for improved access to virtual care, with two-thirds of consumers interested in telehealth and 20% willing to switch primary care providers (PCPs) if another provider nearby offered telehealth visits. Nevertheless, health systems grappled with the rapid rate of change in the digital space and struggled to prioritize virtual care.

COVID-19 changed all of that. Almost overnight, healthcare organizations were forced to adapt — quickly — in order to keep revenue streams flowing and deliver patient care. Today, just over a year later, providing and receiving care virtually is an expectation among both physicians and healthcare consumers alike. But the experience is often cumbersome, with patients of different backgrounds adjusting to different processes and technological requirements. With virtual care growing at an unprecedented rate, patients now perceive organizations that accommodate them through virtual care as being higher-quality and more sophisticated than other systems.

So what’s different now — one year after the pandemic started? As virtual care continues its rapid expansion, health systems need to prioritize the consumer experience in order to set their brands apart as leaders. It’s not OK to set it and forget it. Creating an easy, sticky and pervasive experience is the bare minimum in today’s healthcare market. If you don’t do it, another organization will, and healthcare consumers are not afraid to switch providers for convenience.

Follow these six strategic recommendations to create a strong, high-performing virtual health strategy for your organization.

1. Create personas to identify your target audiences for virtual care

Even if you invested in personas and journey mapping before the pandemic, you likely need to adjust those strategy aids for a post-pandemic world. COVID-19 has changed how people look at healthcare, and those views aren’t going to shift back to the way they were previously. Your consumers have different priorities, concerns and goals. Your personas need to adjust as well.

Consider your various audiences — from millennials and “sandwich moms,” who care for both their immediate families and parents, to Medicare-aged consumers. Depending on their levels of sophistication with technology and the acuity of their health conditions, their journeys and individual needs are very different. Develop personas to build empathy and understanding of who they are as healthcare consumers. Dig into their pain points, behaviors and goals. Consider what devices they use and when as well as their level of comfort with technology

2. Use journey maps to understand personas’ paths to virtual care

Next, map each persona’s individual journey. Healthcare organizations use journey maps to define the stages, touchpoints and messaging opportunities in a consumer’s healthcare process.

The journey starts the moment a consumer first considers treatment, is tracked to the point of booking a virtual appointment and continues all the way through treatment and post-treatment. The journey map should describe the motivations, pain points and questions of the consumer at each touchpoint. It also should present messaging opportunities to impact the consumer’s experience at each of those moments.

Map out the personas’ technology journey as well. How can your content serve patients better? Consider the messaging opportunities for people who need more hand-holding throughout the journey and identify the resources that will enable an easy and positive experience. Highlight opportunities to promote virtual care more prominently throughout your website. Make appointment scheduling easy and accessible through the physicians’ online profile. The more integrated the virtual care offerings are throughout your website, the more meaningful they will be for healthcare consumers.

3. Become a secret shopper. Try your virtual care process yourself

To fully understand user expectations and pain points when it comes to virtual care, get into the mindset of your consumers and test out the process. Try to book a virtual visit online, and complete as many of the steps as possible. You will learn a lot about where things work well and where there are gaps in the experience. Work with your clinical and administrative teams to document the steps you’re not able to test on your own, like the actual appointment and post-encounter follow-up. Consider the emotions of your various audiences at each stage and what messaging they may need to see to progress through the journey.

Healthcare consumers choose virtual care for the convenience it offers, and they expect that convenience to extend throughout the full virtual care experience, including scheduling, check-in, paperwork (intake form or other forms), payments, and appointment reminders. Keep this in mind as you review the process. What is highly convenient about your virtual care experience, and what needs improvement to smooth the process for your users?

By visually mapping the journey, you will ensure you don’t miss key pain points or messaging opportunities. You will start to see how each step leads to the next. It should flow easily, but if it doesn’t, you’ve identified a gap that needs to be addressed.

4. Iterate and improve your virtual care experience

After you map the journey for the personas you want to target, detail the experience flow, and begin the process of improving the experience for healthcare consumers. Take each friction point and address it. Does the user need more instructional content, do they need encouragement, or is the operational process clunky? Develop messaging that is tailored to each of your audience segments:

• Existing patients care most about quality of care and will want to know that virtual care can deliver the same quality of diagnosis and basic care as an in-person visit.
• New patients care most about convenience, wait times, and cost and will want to know that signing up is simple and cost-effective.
• People with chronic conditions care most about reducing the daily struggle of managing their condition. They will want to hear empathy in your messaging and to know that you are providing new tools to ease their burdens.
• Consider care advocates or adult children or partners who are supporting patients through the process.

Define virtual care offerings and when to use each. Create virtual care landing pages with instructional messaging. Create triage charts and/or pages for when to use virtual care versus primary care, urgent care, or other care options. Identify opportunities for featuring virtual care on your website. Partner with clinical and operational teams to build processes and communications to improve the virtual care experience.

5. Review and readjust your virtual care services regularly

You don’t have the luxury of resting on your laurels when it comes to virtual care. Other healthcare organizations, including those brand-new to the industry, are working to tailor virtual healthcare experiences to users’ expectations. What worked for your patients a month ago may not be right a year from now.

Constant monitoring of your virtual care experience is key. Track what’s working and what isn’t. Work with your service lines to determine if it makes sense for them to join your virtual care lineup. Determine whether your personas and journey maps are hitting the mark for your key performance indicators, and make adjustments if needed.

6. Apply what you’ve learned across your virtual health portfolio

All of these steps are important to the core virtual visit experience, but they also are crucial as you think about virtual health as an ever-broadening continuum of experiences and technology options. Today’s consumers increasingly expect innovative healthcare solutions as a matter of course. A substantial element of that expectation is that you have already thought through new experiences and made it possible for users to engage and experiment with ways to manage their own care, as well as how and what data they share and with whom.

Don’t just look at your current virtual health systems and consider them complete. Constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the user experience and what your users can do virtually. Consider whether you can open virtual health to new and different service lines. Think about how your virtual health systems integrate with other systems, such as your electronic health records (EHRs), and plan for how to make that integration process both seamless and beneficial to your users.

Virtual care is ‘the new normal’

In a post-pandemic landscape, healthcare consumers will expect virtual care to be part of providers’ regular offerings. As we all adjust to this new normal, organizations that make the virtual care patient experience as frictionless as possible will have a key advantage. When you determine what consumers in your area want from virtual care and align your offerings to meet those needs, you’ll have a key advantage over your competitors.

Our Digital Healthcare Strategy team has vast experience in helping healthcare organizations create effective virtual health strategies and refine those strategies for the benefit of their consumers. Contact us today for more information.