Embrace member and patient centricity for growth and stability

Healthcare has always been about delivering the best care possible to patients. But bolted-on technologies and suboptimal business processes often muddy those waters, creating poor overall experiences with healthcare organizations—even when the clinical experience is top-notch. Over the last few decades, significant digital advances and a hyper-focus on the consumer have given most of us highly-tailored experiences in other aspects of our day-to-day lives—fueling new, higher expectations for healthcare as well. 

In other words, patients and health plan members are consumers—of healthcare services, treatments, and benefits. They need to be treated as such, with self-service options, easy, hassle-free engagement, and seamless overall digital and physical experiences. It’s frustrating to be transferred around a call center or try to figure out platforms that aren’t intuitive, and it makes you want to look elsewhere for your healthcare needs—even if you love your doctor or pharmacist or have a good benefits package. 

Knowing that, many healthcare organizations want to move the needle on their digital initiatives and become frontrunners, but it’s hard to know where—and how—to start.  

West Monroe understands the challenges of creating consumer-centric digital solutions and systems. But we also recognize that it has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Our member and patient centricity offering was born out of this need.  

Leveraging a framework centered on the healthcare consumer 

Patient and member needs vary by individual, of course, and so do their interactions with your organization. While you can’t expect to roll out the red carpet on an infinite number of experiences, you absolutely can—and should—establish the kind of consumer-focused orientation of your technologies and processes that will allow you to tailor experiences as needed for your entire consumer base.  

That’s why your transformation to a patient- or member-centric organization cannot merely be a departmental initiative but should instead impact the entire enterprise. Doing so ensures that culture, products, services, and organizational structure align with your goals for consumer experience and engagement, allowing you to learn and optimize your tools to how your patients respond. 

Since designing a path to where you want to go begins with a thorough understanding of where you are, we’ve established four pivotal areas for assessing the current state of your organization’s consumer centricity: 

• Organization and culture. Are your organization’s current structures, roles, and culture conducive to a constituent-centric business model? 
• Products and services. What is the breadth and depth of your organization’s support efforts for patients, caregivers, and the broader set of stakeholders in the ecosystem? 
• Enablement. What infrastructure and operations are needed to improve outcomes and enable consumer-centricity leadership initiatives, products, and services? 
• Measurement. Which KPIs will you use to measure impact, access, and affordability of products and services to guide business practices? 

A focus on these four areas allows us to create a roadmap that fills any existing gaps in your organization’s ability to support world-class digital consumer experiences while setting the foundation for future growth.  

Three-phase approach to digital enablement

When a team achieves flawless coordination, they become nearly unstoppable regardless of the skill level of any individual opposing player.  

Similarly, great coordination is necessary to execute a consumer-centric strategy in healthcare. That’s why we form multidisciplinary teams, centered on industry experts, with specialists in operations, customer solutions, product engineering, product experience, and technology. These teams work together across three main phases to help you craft the vision and the provider journey, design the future state, and define the roadmap to providing excellent experiences to your most valued stakeholders, whether that’s patients, members, or providers. Here are the three phases: 

1. Assess the current state of patient centricity. We’ll review and analyze your organization’s digital tools and systems, contact center capabilities (functional and technical), data architecture, system integration, mobile device management, and technology retirement plans.  
2. Re-imagine the consumer journey. This is where we’ll work with you to gather and decipher quantitative and anecdotal characteristics of your consumers, distill persona data into a single page view, catalog provider journeys, and develop the future state journey maps.  
3. Design future state and plan for implementation. In this phase, we’ll get you and your teams ready for change, developing a detailed plan for the agile implementation of any new technologies or processes with an eye toward minimal waste, alternative recommendations, and a robust change management strategy.  

With digital enablement as an inherent principle of each of these main phases, we’re able to help you design meaningful, measurable experiences for anyone who interacts with your business and brand.  

Create better experiences for short and long-term gains 

Prioritizing customer-centric experiences naturally leads to optimizations that improve profitability. The prevailing idea here is efficiency, whether that’s supported by the deployment of omnichannel communications strategies or the custom development of a new digital front door.  

Our approach at all times is to spot quick wins while building the foundation for long-term returns. If you want to support modern consumers’ expectations of an increasingly digital world, we’d love to help. Talk to our team to learn more.