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Healthcare Customer Journey

Customers or patients? An individual’s unique relationship with health systems

04/28/2023

by Amy Goad

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting Customers or Patients? Effective Strategies for Building Brand Loyalty at the HIMSS Global Health Conference. In that presentation, I discussed the individual’s relationship with a health system and how they will be both a patient and a customer at different times in their care journey. For that reason, we should not be debating whether or not we should call individuals patients OR customers. Instead, we should recognize that they are both and recalibrate the conversation to focus on the importance of differentiating when someone is in a customer versus a patient role. Working from that framework, I also shared my strategies for health systems to leverage that distinction to build a better holistic experience and earn life-long loyalty.

Ideally, the people receiving care from your health system will spend as little time as possible as a patient because that means they’re generally getting the treatment and support they need, and therefore have better overall health outcomes. However, the challenge for any health system lies in effectively recognizing when someone transitions from customer to patient, or from patient to customer, and then adjusting the interactions accordingly.

If those interactions aren’t managed, health systems risk long-term loyalty. For example, say a patient was treated as a customer. In this scenario, the provider focused more on the transactional aspects of a patient’s treatment and immediately brought up appointment scheduling and costs, instead of leading the conversation with compassion, asking about the patient’s feelings, and addressing questions following a diagnosis. When this patient’s treatment is completed and they re-enter the customer phase of the care continuum, they are likely to consider leaving the provider for someone with a better bedside manner. On the flip side, when that same individual is healthy and seeking proactive care as a customer, they are more likely to value a concise, logistics-focused conversation.

After my oldest daughter was born, I received a weekly newsletter from my doctor’s office with helpful tips for new parents. The information about what development milestones my newborn would be reaching and the practical advice about taking care of her–and me–were so valuable. In addition to the good patient experience I had, this customer experience made it an easy decision to stay with the same provider when I had my second daughter.

I share this story to illustrate how my customer experience directly informed my choice as a patient. And I’m not alone. People who feel like their care providers are working to earn their loyalty when they are customers are more likely to give them the right to care for them as a patient, resulting in stronger and more genuine loyalty over a longer period of time.

Creating a customer loyalty framework

So, how can health systems use these two competing ideas to create a loyalty framework for their organization? I recommend starting by answering these three questions:

1. Do I understand and have insight into the end-to-end journey across the care continuum? Do I have a clear understanding of my patient population and the typical care journey’s they are on?

2. Are my patient and customer experience initiatives balanced? Can I categorize my strategic initiatives and know whether they will impact the customer or patient experiences or both?

3. How do I know if the initiatives are effective? What do optimal patient and customer experiences mean for your organization? How will you be able to objectively measure success and progress against those defined goals?

Answering these foundational questions is the first step in building a comprehensive loyalty program. But what about the roadblocks to building that program? Challenges like resource constraints, change fatigue, financial pressure, the speed of innovation, a lack of visibility across your organization, and competing priorities are impacting every health system in the country.

Setting your framework up for success

The solution starts with evaluating the tools and technology you already have. In recent years, there’s been a push to introduce more, newer, better, faster things. Adding to that list won’t meaningfully shape your health system; but, making plans to take your existing tools to the last mile will.

Look at the technology investments you’ve made and how they are currently being used. Is there room to consolidate or integrate? Are there un-tapped or underutilized functionalities that can be leveraged to build your health system’s loyalty program? Lean on your established governance and organizational structure to inform your next steps:

• Project management offices, whether centralized, decentralized, or hybrid, significantly contribute to the ability to prioritize initiatives, deliver consistently, and report on progress and impact.
• Process improvement programs with defined methodologies and playbooks that are consistently used across an organization have a significant impact on the patient experience, providing a unique visibility to the front-line challenges and fostering the ability to address those challenges.
• Enterprise analytics organizations that are utilizing the right technology and leveraging a sophisticated data management and governance methodology provide significant value to an organization through the ability to quantify and measure the opportunity for improvement and the impact that is made through various projects and programs.
• Finally, organizations with robust automation platforms and capabilities can automate key functions, and continuously identify opportunities to shift tasks from labor-intensive/time-consuming activities to be automated, freeing up the capacity to work on higher value, more complex activities, and spend more time with patients.

Most organizations have each of these functions operating at some level of maturity. Any one of these functions is powerful, but when orchestrated together, they unlock an incredible amount of value. Orchestration does not have to be administratively heavy or costly, but it does require aligned governance, engaged leaders with clear roles and responsibilities, and open communication channels.

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