Every year, my team at Artera conducts at least one body of market research. Last year we did a study, a statistically significant sample of 2,000 patients who had seen the doctor at least once in the past 12 months. And here are some of the things that they told us.
First, patients will switch doctors when they have that broken experience that I illustrated at the beginning of the presentation. This is coming directly from the patients. So if you do not have a handle on what is going on across all the vendors and all the service lines at your organization, you are priming your patients to be stolen.
They might go to One Medical or Tia or Maven, or one of those nice new boujee clinics. They might just go online and start a virtual session with Amazon, or all those other companies that are delivering care. So experience matters.
2: In our research, we found that patients on average can have at least 11 different vendors that are engaging with them throughout their care journey. So that could be a specialist solution that’s in cardiology, it could be an appointment reminder system, it could be the patient portal. And all of those typically are managed in a fragmented and disjointed fashion.
A lot of patients report getting messages that are out of order. That was my experience on Sunday when I was getting back the lab results for my skin biopsy. And if you didn’t care about patients leaving your health system, maybe this one will convince you that it matters. Nearly half of patients literally will not pay their bills on time because of that fragmented experience.
Early in my career, I did some work in marketing. One of the first rules is you don’t give customers multiple calls to action. Because if you give people multiple calls to action, they have decision paradox and they don’t do anything you want to tell the patient to do the most important thing at any given time. And this is what we see with bills. And then, finally, patients want great communication. So we have this interesting paradox. Patients want it, but if we do it poorly, we are priming them to get stolen and to leave and to go to a different organization. So how do we make sense of this all?
