Health Care Customer Experience Evolution

Customer experience is in a time of dramatic change in health care and insurance. I work in both sectors; and over the past 15 years, I’ve seen an evolution of thinking. The NASDAQ-driven digital revolution that sparked Silicon Valley and created upstart mimics in places like Silicon Beach and Silicon Slopes has truly reached health care and insurance. Honestly, health care customer experience often seems to be one of the last frontiers due to legacy systems, a delicate balance of pricing and costs, a patchwork quilt of state and federal legislation, and the firm entrenchment of industry operations (among other things). We can all note that the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase health care challenger Haven failed with a soft whimper as it quietly dismantled without any publicly-announced revolutionary breakthroughs.

Health care is challenging. That being said, change is already here, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a multitude of pilot programs, startups, and collaborative partnerships pushing for change (and, often, a slice of margin). Two key areas of great movement in health care customer experience are technology advancements and human approaches.

Technology Advancements

The digital revolution is driving change in telehealth, wearables, remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. As greater digital prevalence evolves (both within the health care sector as well as beyond), so does patient/consumer adoption. We see this trend especially in older generations. Every single day, a new group of people ages into Medicare. Individuals below age 65 adopt digital at a higher rate than those above age 65. As we look at even older age groups, the digital adoption continues to drop. However, the younger you look, the more digitally native people become.

Beyond digital, mere technological advances are revolutionizing health care as well. For example, the COVID-19 vaccine brought to the world through mRNA technology was a completely new form of vaccination. That new form of vaccination could also bring solutions for other scourges like HIV and cancer as well. New medicines continue to be developed and approved for use (including 20 through the U.S. Food & Drug Administration since the end of November as of the date of this article). And, of course, new medical devices are also released each year across a spectrum of needs.

Human Approaches

While technology advances are changing the health care experience for people, looking at people at the center is also altering experiences. In fact, many different human-centered approaches are now factoring into customer experience improvements. I’ve shown four arenas of growth in this kind of approach below in sub-bullets, and I know there are more ways to think through this perspective.

• Inclusive design helps health care workers consider disproportionate needs of different communities of people. For example, black people face sickle cell anemia at higher rates than other groups. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ individuals may face difficulties accessing health care from providers experienced in unique health care needs. Inclusive design will factor these kinds of situations into care.
• Holistic health care considerations aim to help people across the many different dimensions of health. For example, there is an especially strong current focus on mental health, in part, due to the amplified impact of the COVID-19 pandemic along with other stressors. Companies, among others, are beginning to realize the importance of addressing all dimensions of personal health.
• Building local and personal approaches into experience design is driving individualized and customized health care approaches. This perspective is especially important when considering the need to provide health care at scale. Personalization in engagement can help drive progress while tapping into local community partners can help to amplify impacts.
• An integrated health care experience is growing as large companies add new components to their health care offerings through building, acquiring, and/or striking partnerships with new practices and pieces of the health care chain. We are seeing a lot of activity in this area to build more seamless and frictionless experiences for customers as new ideas and ways of viewing health care proliferate.

Wide Open Future

There is a wide open future for health care customer experience. Honestly, the timing for innovation is perfect and strongly needed given some of the industry problems arising in health care. Health care deserts are forming in rural communities where health systems are having difficulty maintaining operations and/or staffing. Medical professionals, due to the exacerbation of the pandemic, are stepping away from the field due to pressures exerted by society. Medical inflation which has typically hovered around 6-8% over the past decade has held to that rate during the pandemic. However, will health care be the next industry that begins to face accelerated inflation due to accelerated inflation in other industries? Meanwhile, state legislatures are beginning to pass health care legislation that limits the ability to access care across state boundaries and the ability for transgender youth to access care.

And that short, brief list is just for starters. With so many large problems, health care professionals can feel more than free to bring their energies–creative, innovative, design thinking, and more–to this space. Every day provides a new opportunity for a wildly different breakthrough. What will you contribute?