If you’re charged with digital transformation at your hospital or health system, how much are you thinking about patient experience?
The correct answer should be along the lines of a lot, every day, all the time, top priority.
In general, to ask about patient experience is to learn whether the list of things that should have happened during your in-person appointment, virtual visit, hospital stay, or outpatient surgery actually happened. It’s a patient-centric way of trying to assess care.
Just as with in-person care, there are certain things that should happen in the digital patient experience. These things greatly influence a patient’s perception of care, as well as their access to it.
In fact, there is an entire realm of expectations to be met or thwarted before a patient has even left the couch. Things like . . .
- How fast does the website load?
- Can they find the patient portal log-in quickly?
- Are they able to schedule online?
- Can they pay a bill online?
- Is the font easy to read?
- How quickly are they able to find the page they’re looking for?
- Once there, does the content make sense, or leave them anxious and confused?
This is all to say, hospitals and health systems who want to fully embrace a patient-centric model of care need to include all the digital touchpoints of care. They must do this when thinking about patient experience. After all, you can’t center your health system around patients if you don’t truly understand what they need and want in a digital experience, and how that experience leaves them feeling.
Patient Experience in a Digital World
In general, customers expect digital experiences to solve problems, whether that problem is, “I need a reservation quickly,” “I need a product,” or “I need some answers.”
Customers may approach a digital healthcare experience with a retail-mindset (solve my problem!), but it’s often a multi-layered process, involving:
- Gathering information about a condition (do I need to see a doctor?)
- Researching care (usually understood as a location + a provider)
- Scheduling care (including getting authorizations in place to schedule care)
- Planning the care (understanding where to go, filling out pre-visit forms, etc.)
- Receiving the care (in person, but could be digital if it’s virtual care)
- Following-up or coordinating more care
- Paying for care
During each of these experiences, customers have expectations. Expectations met lead to more positive perceptions. More positive perceptions lead to any number of things, including increased customer loyalty, a feeling of emotional connection, and better outcomes. These are things that are good for hospitals and good for patients.
By honing in on a few basic ingredients of the digital experience, we can more easily identify common opportunities and pitfalls that make or break customer expectations at each of these digital touchpoints.
Ingredient #1: Accessibility and language
An accessible digital product is one that older adults and people with disabilities can interact with and use just as well as someone without disabilities.
In person, hospitals and health systems must be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But when it comes to the digital experience, many are falling short. In fact, only 5% of the top hospitals in the U.S. meet the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Not only that, the home pages of most top U.S. hospitals are riddled with accessibility errors.
This sets up a poor digital experience for customers with issues related to eyesight, hearing, dexterity (such as from arthritis), and cognitive or attention problems—not to mention, people who have no specific impairment, but are anxious and stressed about their health.
Remember, digital experiences should solve problems and make life easier. If a patient can’t properly see, hear, navigate, or understand a provider’s website, the expectations of what should happen when the page or app loads already haven’t happened.
This is why inclusive design is so important for health-related websites. Inclusive design means that you’re taking into consideration the needs of ALL users when designing the digital experience.
There’s also an opportunity to improve the digital patient experience by including language translation options.
Through focus groups, one of our clients—a large children’s hospital—learned that many of their Spanish-speaking patient families were frustrated with the website. The phone translation services were equally frustrating because the calls would frequently get dropped. The families said it was easiest (though of course it wasn’t actually easy) to walk to their neighborhood clinic to make appointments or do other business in person, because there was always a translator on-site.
The hospital is investing in designing a new website experience fully translated into Spanish. They recognize this is essential for improving the digital patient experience for their families.
Key question to think about: In your organization, what difference would fully accessible, inclusive digital experience make to your customers?
Ingredient #2: Content
Your written and video content isn’t just an arm of your brand. It’s also a chance to engage your customers, to help them understand treatment options, and to empower them to take charge of their health.
To do this, healthcare content should aim for a grade 6 reading level, and not go beyond grade 8.
In working with both adult and children’s hospitals, we find the reading level on their websites is consistently high, usually grade 10 or above. It’s not uncommon to see post-graduate reading level when we review content. This tends to happen when there isn’t strict content governance, and doctors or people who don’t specialize in healthcare web writing best practices write and/or have control of the content.
It makes for a very poor digital patient experience when you’re met with long sentences, walls of text, multisyllabic words, and medical jargon. Plus, more than ⅓ of Americans have poor health literacy—something which contributes to poor health outcomes and decreased access to healthcare.
Patients who are frustrated, in pain, or scared about a child’s health (and likely also reading on their phones) need all the help they can get. This is why plain language, simple sentences, clear voice, and easily scannable pages can greatly improve the digital patient experience.
Key question: Do you know the reading level of the content on your hospital’s website?
Ingredient #3: User experience (UX)
Both content and accessibility are elements of UX. But if you really want to understand the digital patient experience and where expectations aren’t being met, it’s important to look at UX from a 10,000-foot view as well.
In other words, can your customers truly use your website/app to do the things they need to do, start to finish, without friction, confusion, and frustration? What does it mean to truly put your customer at the center of the digital experience?
This is exactly the question Luminis Health started with.
Formed by a merger of two regional health systems, Luminis Health had the opportunity to build a completely new website and integrated app. In a competitive market and with a completely new brand, they had to win over customers (in many cases, winning them back).
Hence, they needed to make their new digital properties 100% customer-centric. Doing extensive UX research helped us understand exactly what Luminis customers wanted and needed in a website. We were able to build and implement innovative digital solutions, including a logged-in dashboard experience, a robust, self-serve find care tool, and an AI-driven chat. Luminis customers can now find exactly what they need, when they need it—without any interruptions of the overall experience.
When patients are more in control of their care, it gives them more a sense of empowerment, which means they are more likely to stay engaged throughout their care journey.
Key question: What do you consistently hear from customers about the most frustrating areas of the digital experience, and what are the downstream effects of those frustrations?
Where Do We Go From Here?
Lowering the reading level on the content, making your website more accessible, understanding the pain points of your UX: These are all actionable steps your organization can take to improve the digital patient experience. But creating a true patient-centric digital experience will likely require an organizational mindset shift.
It’s also important to consider how you will measure progress. Tracking the data behind user experience is more difficult now, with Google Analytics no longer being HIPAA-compliant. At Modea, we have expertise in data and analytics that’s compliant with industry standards, with solutions like Heap and Freshpaint.
Also, how will you innovate patient engagement strategies that leverage digital tools to create a genuinely better experience for people? In other words, how can you innovate not just for the sake of efficiency, but for genuine patient needs?
And lastly, when it comes to feedback and improvement, what structures can you put in place to ensure patient voices are heard and valued?
Ultimately, when you focus on improving the digital patient experience, you wind up with more satisfied patients, as well as more engaged patients. Solve more of their problems before they even walk in the door of your hospital and the results are likely to be better for everyone involved.
