More Speed, Less Confusion: 3 Trends Shaping The Future Of Healthcare Marketing

By Will Reese, President and Chief Innovation Officer, Cadient, a Cognizant Company

Today, the average consumer uses a wide variety of apps on their smartphone. Whether it’s to find a nearby restaurant or look up a movie review, this digital consumer experience is also gaining traction in the healthcare industry. In August 2015, Yelp announced that the more than 25,000 U.S. hospitals, nursing homes, and dialysis clinics listed on its site will include additional data such as emergency room wait times, friendliness of staff, and noise levels in hospital rooms.

Patients are increasingly gravitating towards online tools like Yelp to find and research doctors, both for convenience and to ensure they are receiving the best possible care. Consider these facts:

• 42 percent of patients use online physician reviews like Healthgrades and Yelp to locate a doctor
• 44 percent of patients would go out-of-network for a doctor who has more favorable reviews
• 56 percent of patients use YouTube to learn more about their condition
• 84 percent of patients Google their condition after receiving an initial diagnosis

Taking these figures into account, consumers have rapidly elevated their expectations for their personal healthcare experiences. Compared to Amazon’s ease of ordering, the online service of USAA Insurance, and the speed to content of Netflix — today’s healthcare experience is not typically easy, service-oriented or fast.

However, as these behaviors and consumer expectations become commonplace, organizations need to focus on three key trends that are shaping the future of healthcare marketing and communications — transparency, speed, and crowdsourcing.

Transparency
Driven by their broader consumer experience, patients and caregivers are growing to expect transparency on healthcare costs, time, service, privacy, and outcomes. New digital tools have provided greater visibility into how much procedures and treatments cost, what health organizations have the best outcomes, and what physicians provide the best experience.  

Transparency also applies to the patient’s data, personal information, and health records. While personal health records have historically experienced slow adoption, the demand for ownership of personal information and the clear need for an integrated view across health interactions have reopened these opportunities.

Healthcare organizations also need to proactively demystify the dark points along the patient journey, where patients are missing the context to make informed decisions. It is important for patients to embrace a broader view of health literacy in order to ensure transparency and context. Literacy is now more than words, but extends to health literacy, visual literacy, and digital literacy — all of which are critical to provide transparency without adding to the confusion.

Speed
Healthcare is entering an era of meaningful mobility. Patients expect data, information, and answers on-demand in real-time, and expect this to be delivered directly to them. Mobile optimized sites, tools, and apps have begun to break away from brochure-ware to personalized gateways, data, and content. Further accelerating the demand for speed is the proliferation of wearable devices and sensors. The next evolution is moving from “speed to data” to “speed to meaning.”

Moving forward, organizations need to shift their focus to the little things that make a big impact, whether that is exploring how wearables and sensors can improve the care experience, identifying the small moments in a journey that cause delays in service, or crafting the bits of data and content that accelerate accurate decisions. Time is a significant dimension often ignored in the creation of digital and service experiences for healthcare.

Crowdsourcing
The social experience in healthcare has grown rapidly beyond message boards and blogs. Social health sharing has moved beyond words and into visual social channels such as Pinterest and Instagram. Patients are also using existing sites like Yelp and YouTube as starting points for evaluating treatment options, hospital selection, and reviews on the healthcare experiences including procedure costs, physician office experience, and hospital customer service.

As a result, healthcare is entering an era of democratized data, where consumers can donate and share their data to inspire others, motivate themselves, or to benefit others through research. Crowdsourced data opens up new perspectives to help solve persistent behavioral challenges.

Crowdsourcing creates unique opportunities for organizations to better understand their communities across conditions, geographies, and demographics. It also creates an opportunity for faster and more agile response to satisfying patient needs, and closing existing gaps that are reducing outcomes and driving dissatisfaction.

Conclusion
Looking ahead, healthcare organizations should recognize and appreciate these three trends — transparency, speed, and crowdsourcing — and how their impact on the patient journey allows organizations to create a more personalized and valued health experience. These trends will accelerate the earlier adoption of consumer centered technologies and spark novel partnerships between companies to address these expectations.