Creating the Consumer Value Chain in Healthcare
A Roadmap for a Simpler Consumer Experience
Whitepaper | William Krause
Vice President Change Healthcare Connected Consumer Health
Bill Krause leads innovation and solution development for patient experience management at Change Healthcare. He works to help customers capture value through advanced consumer engagement capabilities.
In a healthcare marketplace increasingly shaped by consumer choice, organizations that focus on improving the consumer journey will help future-proof their business models. Payers that deliver a unified consumer experience can reach further downstream to drive outcomes; providers who adopt similar strategies will be able to reach upstream to attract more consumers.
Creating value for consumers through a connected, intuitive consumer experience (versus the pursuit of strategies primarily aimed at meeting internal business objectives) helps both payers and providers boost engagement, compliance, loyalty, and retention. Achieving these goals, in turn, supports value-based care requirements and ultimately enhances economic sustainability.
Streamlining the consumer journey requires that organizations aggregate and share data and provide tools that allow consumers to easily navigate their care ecosystem in pursuit of smarter healthcare decisions. Importantly, that means encountering less friction when it comes to selection, access, and payment.
Embracing the e-Commerce Model
Healthcare organizations can learn much about how to accomplish these objectives from other industries. A major trend across multiple sectors has been the focus on omnichannel consumer journeys that both accelerate and simplify the purchase funnel and, at the same time, broaden new customer acquisition strategies. Beyond these established reach and simplification strategies, consumer industries have employed a variety of approaches to maximize the value of the consumer’s dollar and encourage loyalty. Using these approaches, companies across virtually every consumer sector have realized outsized growth and retention in relation to their peers.1
A Dysfunctional System
Unfortunately, the healthcare industry lags far behind most other sectors when it comes to adopting similar approaches to help consumers find, access, and pay for care. Today’s healthcare consumer value chain is fragmented across a range of channels and entities and is impeded by disparate, incompatible data. Over two-thirds of consumers cannot complete the steps required to access care without crossing two or more entities and using multiple online and phone channels.2
A recent study commissioned by Change Healthcare that assessed consumer beliefs about healthcare underscores how dysfunctional the system feels from the patient perspective.3
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of consumers want and expect a digital experience that is similar to those provided in other retail sectors.4