Does this sound familiar? You call a health plan that you’ve been with for at least five years. The operator asks about your coverage or network and where you live. You dutifully answer all the questions, all the while thinking: “Don’t they have this information? What good is their record-keeping if they don’t bother to access those records?” When you visit a provider’s office it’s the same thing: “What medications are you taking? When were you last here? Who did you see then?” Questions you’ve already answered. Questions they should have the answers to. Consumers, providers, and payors agree: the healthcare consumer experience needs to be improved. When customers interact with healthcare providers or payors, they rarely have a sense that the healthcare entity knows who they are. Instead, customers must provide the same information over and over again—giving them the sense that nobody in the system cares. Or they receive a notification to do something clinical as if being directed by a drill sergeant. While other industries have found ways to give customers positive experiences, healthcare’s customer service remains sub-optimal--to put it nicely.
Healthcare organizations lack a comprehensive view of their customers: who they are, what they need, and how to interact with them. Even though they often have a lot of information, they don’t have access to the right information, it is stored in many different locations, or they can’t make use of it in an effective way. Bancroft is exploring ways to solve these problems and reverse this trend--using sophisticated data sources and analytics from the consumer sector to foster new kinds of customer engagement. Netflix, for example, is very good at figuring out what movies you like and recommending those that you might want to watch. Bancroft wants to bring the Netflix experience to consumer engagement in health.
The Challenge
Nobody in the healthcare industry has a comprehensive view of the customer or effective means of engaging them. Health plans and hospitals’ first-party data—collected from the patients—provides very limited information or insights to support effective consumer engagement. They will know some of a customer’s health history, but they are less likely to know their occupation, activities, family situation, education level, income security, and other factors that can have a big impact on health and wellbeing.
They are unlikely to even know multiple ways to engage with the customer or their preferred method of engagement. What information has been collected, such as key healthcare process data (claim demographics, enrollment, eligibility and benefit limits) is difficult to access and use in a meaningful way.
Payors--while strong on network, claims, and care management--have a limited view of the lives of their members and are only scratching the surface on digital engagement and consumer-oriented user relationships. Life sciences companies are very limited in their knowledge of consumers at the individual level, relying on broad marketing campaigns rather than tailored engagement. Digital health players tend to be strong in operational and consumer user experience but weak on traditional RCM and payor data interactions; their consumer insight capabilities are usually mixed.
Finally, healthcare companies of many types are rarely strong across the continuum of functional elements required to support the kind of consumer journey that has proven effective in other industries. They might be good at clinical delivery and claims management but weak at digitally oriented engagement across the patient journey--such as proactively reaching out to patients to check in and suggest care that they might need. They typically don’t make effective use of the messaging, communication channel, and engagement approach to achieve the best outcomes for patients.
The Objective
Throughout healthcare there is an unmet need for companies to effectively and efficiently deliver a customer journey that delights the patient. Addressing this unmet need starts with enriching their own information with the right consumer data and extends to utilizing that combined data with analytic tools and engagement solutions to deliver a good consumer experience. Meeting that need will radically upgrade the quality of the consumer journey, reduce friction in the system, increase health system efficiency, and achieve superior cost and health outcomes for consumers.
The tools to solve these problems already exist in the consumer and digital markets. The key is having healthcare organizations make use of innovative, market-leading digital data, analytics, and engagement technologies. This can make significant progress toward changing the status quo to deliver people-centered care.
Our Approach
At Bancroft, our mission is to bring these technology building blocks to bear in support of our clients. For example, we help healthcare entities enrich the customer data they have already collected with information from third parties. With additional information about customers’ lifestyles and risk facts, we can apply advanced analytics to segment the marketplace and understand what kind of engagements each customer would want or need.
We can then support engaging with customers through multiple channels, both physical and digital. In doing this, we also help gather and analyze the signals from a consumer's actions and activities to provide critical feedback on their processes and learn more, feeding into the virtuous cycle of improved customer engagement.
Do you think Bancroft might be able to help you? Contact us today!