Reduce friction points in the digital journey

- [Heather] Hello everyone, and thank you for joining today's webinar, "Driving a Frictionless Digital Patient Experience." My name is Heather Vollmer, I'm a virtual events manager here at Optum. Before we begin, please note the following housekeeping items. At the bottom of your audience console, our multiple application widgets you can use to customize your viewing experience. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can click on the Q&A widget at the bottom of your screen to submit a question. We do capture all questions and we'll be providing follow up to questions as appropriate. If you experience any technical difficulty, please click on the help widget. It covers common technical issues. You can expand your slide area by clicking on the maximize icon on the top right of the slide window or by dragging the bottom right corner of the slide window. There is a survey widget, which you can use at the end of the webcast to provide us with feedback on today's presentation. Additionally, this presentation uses streaming audio. You may listen to the audio through your computer speakers or headphones to ensure the best possible system performance. Please be sure to shut down any VPN connections and connect directly to the internet. And with that, I will hand it over to our moderator today, Danny Fell.

- [Danny] Thanks, Heather. Hi, and welcome to today's webinar. I'm Danny Fell, and I work with Optum's Consumer Insights and Precision Marking and Engagement Solutions. And today I have the pleasure of facilitating this discussion on the digital patient experience. And I'm also excited that I'm joined by two of Optum's patient and consumer engagement experts, K. R. Prabha and Andy Wallmeyer, both from Optum Advisory Services, and they're joining me to share their thoughts and insights as well. Prabha, why don't we start with you? Why don't you do an introduction and talk a little bit about the work you do here at Optum.

- [Prabha] Thanks, Danny. And I'm really excited to be joining you and Andy here on this panel to talk about one of our favorite topics. As background, I am Prabha and I'm a VP with our Strategy and Growth Advisory practice at Optum. I lead our enterprise strategy, consumer and digital. And I think those agendas blend very well together and very relevant to today's discussion. In addition to that, I have about 25 years of executive and consulting experience, both in industry having worked at a health system and then prior to that in management consulting, having worked across both peer and provider. And I would say that just having grown up and lived and worked in India, in Canada, and the US, my whole focus is around how can we bring a global view to our care solutions as we think about the consumer and then the changing landscape in digital.

- [Danny] And I'm really excited you're able to join us today, Prabha. Andy, welcome to the webinar. Tell us a little bit about the work you do at Optum.

- [Andy] Thank you, Danny. I'm glad to be here. I work with Prabha and others as a manager and Optum Advisory Services where my work focuses on consumer experience in both the provider and payer spaces. I've got 20 years of digital consumer experience, strategy consulting, and digital startup leadership. Recent projects for Optum have included an end-to-end consumer experience transformation project with a small health system, point of view development on evolving consumer data privacy expectations and their impact about how we think about consumer experience at HIPAA covered entities. And finally, payer-provider collaboration to transform consumer experience at the point of service in different provider offices. Thank you for having me.

- [Danny] Yeah, and I'm looking forward to some of your comments around personas and segmentation, in particular, Andy. Let's jump into the topic today. As part of a little bit of a setup for you, we've actually modified or fixed our title today and we did that a little bit in jest, but really to point out that it's hard to get a perfect frictionless experience in any industry and healthcare is no different. So maybe this is a little bit more of an appropriate title. Prabha, any thoughts on this?

- [Prabha] Danny, I think you summed it well. While we would like to talk about it, a frictionless digital patient experience, we all who work in healthcare understand that this is a work in progress and healthcare is lagging behind other industries from a consumer standpoint in what we do or what we can do digitally. So I think, while it's tongue in cheek, it's also thought provoking to say how do we work towards reading a more frictionless experience, because the needs for an individual going through healthcare and what they expect in terms of the experience, both from digital standpoint but also from a care delivery standpoint are different. And if we can just progress the slide further, Danny, I think we'll talk about just what do we wanna cover today in our webinar. And I think first and foremost, based on our experiences and our expertise, we've talked about how digital is here, right? There is no further debate, there's no debate that we hear in the industry about whether we need to be digital, how much, or the fact that whether even that is a consideration on or our consumers. And I think the overwhelming answer is yes, digital is very much expected to be part and parcel of healthcare, in every aspect of it. But also how the digital experience will drive the business for our health systems, for our payers, and other healthcare providers as well. The other thing we also recognize, and we are gonna talk with more facts and figures, is also how the digital experiences are not meeting consumer needs and expectations. And very specifically, I'm gonna call those out differently because there are certain needs as we go through the healthcare journey, but there's also expectations of each of us as consumers having experienced digital through the other industries, whether it's banking, it's retail, and kind of our expectations and how much of a gap there is. Also, I think, as healthcare systems get more digital, invest in more digital capabilities, there's this idea of actually using best in class in everything we use because obviously we care about quality outcomes at the end of it. And that same philosophy applies to every interaction. So while that is true, I think the criteria that, or the critical thing that we wanna talk about today is how those point solutions can actually create discontinuity, but how we need to bring them together such that the overall experience is bigger than the the parts that we go through. And finally, I think Danny and I have talked about this. Danny, you, me, and Andy have talked about this around loyalty. What does loyalty mean in this new age for a consumer in a digital forward industry and agenda as well. So with that, I think let's just dive right into it and talk about digital experience and why we think it's gonna drive some business success. So, Andy, I know you've done a lot of research in this area, so would love to hear you come in with your viewpoint about why do we think it's so important to our business success.

- [Andy] Thank you, Prabha. So one of the last things you mentioned there and one of the themes we'll touch on later is the importance of loyalty. And the headline there is that loyalty just ain't what it used to be. We're watching this webinar right now because you know that digital experience isn't a hugely important part of consumer experience, which is important. I think one of the things which has been interesting for us to see in the last few years is that it is very important and it's becoming ever more important as time goes on. So one of the things that some recent survey data found that one of four consumers surveyed in 2022 reported switching providers due to dissatisfaction with their experience. So not only did these people switch, but they switched because they were unhappy. And then when they went on and asked people at a greater level of detail, why exactly was that, the critical factors dominantly were ease of navigation and inside of that digital factors were added near the top of the list. So this is true, this is something that we're seeing out there and it's a trend that's increasing. And I would say, especially for those of our audience who are interested in pursuing younger consumers, this is true across the board, but this is even truer still for younger consumers. The younger they are, the more likely they are to leave for poor experience and the more important digital experience is to them when they consider how their experience needs are being met.

- [Danny] This is really what's driving the urgency, right?

- [Andy] Yeah.

- [Prabha] Excellent. And Andy, I think, we talked about younger customers expecting the digital experience to be really flawless, right? Because they see that in other aspects of their life and frankly some of them have not seen anything other than a digital experience depending on which generation they are with. And they're also in that stage of their life where they probably have very few health conditions that need more long-term management just yet and they're willing to like walk away and try something new as well. So there's the willingness, but there's also less of a burden on their health because of kind of their age and the life situation they're in as well.

- [Andy] Absolutely.

- [Prabha] So, as part of another poll that we've talked about before too is on that theme of expecting modern digital communications, we hear that there's an increased expectation on our provider systems. Over 73% of the people who were polled in the survey, which had almost 2000 participants, which is statistically a pretty good number, talked about the fact that they expected more modern and digital communications from the health plans, but more importantly, they expect the same or higher number from their care providers. And when you look back in 2020, it's literally about two years apart, that number was in the sixties. So when you think of it, there's an increasing urgency or a pressure from a consumer standpoint for healthcare organizations, care delivery systems to really start engaging with them, both in modern communication styles, but also using digital as a key channel for that.

- [Andy] Thank you.

- [Prabha] So let's go ahead and talk about... Yeah, let's talk about what that means. Andy, I know this is something that is close to your heart. So let's hear you.

- [Andy] Yes, I was gonna say, you mentioned a report and one of the things we can think about is a lot of people when they think about consumer experience, they say, well, that's a nice to have, that's something that's not really critical. And so one of the questions we ask ourselves all the time is, well, how big of a deal is this? How important is this? And probably you mentioned some really interesting data coming out. There was a report that was recently published by Change Healthcare, which is now part of Optum. And as Prabha mentioned, more than 1900 consumers were surveyed by Harris Poll recently. Two thirds of them said, how bad is the experience? It feels like every step in the healthcare process is a chore. More than half of them said that they've avoided seeking care because they weren't sure what the cost would be. And I'll self-identify I'm in that bucket. A lot of 'em said they know some people who would do anything to avoid seeking care. And I think, what this really underlines here is this isn't just about consumer experience as a nice to have or a cherry on top, but what we're seeing here is that poor consumer experience is leading people to avoid care, which is going to lead to poorer health outcomes. This isn't a nice to have, this is essential to what we do and why we exist.

- [Prabha] Absolutely. And, Danny, I think we've talked about this as we see the avoidance of care, we're pushing a lot of the health concerns in the disease burden and the cost to our system, which is already rising further out in the future. And I know, as you work with some of our Optum assets and data and analytics, you're probably seeing some of those trends already.

- [Danny] Yeah, I think this is a really important point you're making, Andy, that this is not just about customer experience, it's really about clinical outcomes, right? It impacts compliance, it impacts engagement around clinical actions or things that we want consumers to do to take care of themselves. So really important point there.

- [Andy] So one of the things we look at, we say, okay, well, consumers are clearly dissatisfied. There's a certain extent to what the healthcare system is offering them right now aren't meeting their needs. What are their needs? What do they want? Lots of people look at this, we've talked to a lot of people on this in our own original research, but there are a few themes that jump out. So the first is, a lot of times people find it overwhelming, they don't even know where to start in their health journey, which is perhaps surprising to those of us who live in the space every day. But it's important for us to keep ourselves grounded in that fact. Scheduling, I think we all know that scheduling is a big thing, but it comes up time and time again at the top of consumers lists. Cost information, specifically, price transparency, we saw one of the downstream effects of when you don't have that is not seeking care. That's important. Health equity is a persistent challenge. I think we need to name it in every venue that we are including this conversation today. And then finally we think about all of the proliferation of digital health tools and platforms, which we've worked so hard to adopt, especially throughout the Coronavirus pandemic. The result is oftentimes a frustratingly disjointed and friction filled user experience. And there's a lot of different ways you could look at this, but I think that survey that we mentioned just had some really interesting data points. Danny, if you could bring those forward. I'll just highlight a couple of things here. So figuring out where to start, we mentioned that's was cited as the biggest barrier to seeking care for one in four people, which is just an astounding number when you think about it. Scheduling, we talk about scheduling. This one I thought was really interesting, especially in light of one of the comments probably made earlier. 87% of consumers polled said, "Getting an appointment with a healthcare provider should be as easy as getting an Uber." Now if you think about that specifically in the context of those younger consumers whose expectations are set by their experiences elsewhere, these are people who maybe have never hailed a cab the old-fashioned way. The Uber experience is all they've ever known. And now they're going in and they're starting to manifest with some of their first health needs that require regular care. So, of course, they're going to expect that kind of ease from the health system. And then finally-

- I think-

- Oh sorry, go ahead, Prabha.

- Go ahead. Let me just say something to that, Andy. I think one of the things we who worked in healthcare a while recognize the fact that scheduling while the consumers expect scheduling to be as easy as doing Uber, we do know that there's a whole bunch of complexity in the back, right? Things around provider schedules and depending on if you have an employed model versus you have an aligned or a community physician model and how much of their schedules are open for being made available. So we do understand the complexity for those of us in healthcare, but we also have to put this front and center about not necessarily the consumer going through this will understand it, but also even if they understand it, they expect us to fix it and fix it for them such that it's easy for them. So I think that's kind of a theme here. While we all work in healthcare and realize the complexity and realize what it takes to actually provide that service, we know that we have to work on it as soon as possible as a priority.

- [Andy] Absolutely.

- [Danny] There's some nuance to this, right, guys? In other words, it's not just, can I schedule an appointment, but what if I have to change my appointment? How easy is that? Or what if I have to cancel my appointment? We have to think through all the iterations or pathways that might be needed beyond just sort of, can I schedule one time? This next stat I thought was really interesting, Prabha. What are your thoughts on that?

- [Prabha] Yes, this is one which always catches my eye because it's like, oh yeah, the big tech companies can fix it. And we know, right? While big tech can play a big part in it that they don't always understand healthcare. And obviously we have Haven Healthcare, which was this combined entity between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan, who came in with, we wanna come in and fix healthcare because we know big data, we know consumer, and we know how to get it fixed. But two years in, they realized that they probably couldn't fix what they started off as a big vision and they exited. But now they have a little bit of a different smaller model that they're working through. What I wanna highlight here is, while we have big data and big tech out there in other parts of our life, healthcare is complex, and we would have to figure out how to bring big data in and some of their province and capabilities. But I think people like us who work in healthcare understand the nuances, understand the exceptions, and understand the difference that we would have to do within our capabilities and services in healthcare to actually meet the expectations of the consumer. Because ultimately when people come into healthcare, they come in because they have a need, right? They have a need to solve a certain problem about their health. And there are a lot of stakeholders and care team members who are involved in solving that problem for them, versus you wanna go shop on Amazon, it's something that you want, you have a choice, but it's not something that you need absolutely to be fixed in your life.

- [Andy] I would follow on that though. I think there's something else that's important to consider here, which is, much has been made about big tech's ability to actually come in and effectively deliver care as well as the consumer concerns about what big tech's entry into healthcare would mean. Do I want these companies knowing this much about me? For me, the thing that really surprised me about this data point, and I think it's important for us to keep in mind as healthcare professionals, is the experience that consumers have been getting with the healthcare providers that they have so far has been bad enough for the majority of them to be willing to say, you know what, I share those concerns and I do trust my provider when they have them established relationships. That's my most trusted relationship in healthcare. But despite all that, I still quote, and this was the survey thing, I wish a tech company, e.g. Apple, Amazon, et cetera, would deliver a new kind of healthcare experience. And that's not saying they're going to those things right now, but I think the important point to note is, a majority of consumers are open to that. They're willing to consider that because they're not currently getting what they would like to see. They would like to see a little more competition in that space with a focus on experience.

- [Danny] Yeah. And it could just mean, bring those design features or enable healthcare to do newer different things, right? It doesn't necessarily mean disrupt in the sense of replace. Prabha, do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the consumer expectations we can move on?

- [Prabha] Absolutely. And I think, so while we've talked about the stats and what we are hearing from surveys, if you step back and take a single consumer or a single patient who is now wanting to engage within a care journey, right, what are the things that really matter? And I know that there's lots of combinations and things which make healthcare complex, but at the end of the day, there's about five or six key things that we need to get right as an individual moves through the healthcare journey. It's things around, well, first and foremost finding a curated list for the providers. So it's not a case of like, I can present options to an individual and there's like a hundred providers on it. I think consumers would benefit from it, what also expect is as a health system, who are the right recommended providers for me as options based on some sort of curated criteria that they would choose. Why are they in for, are they in for like regular wellness visit because they don't have a PCP or they really wanna consult a specialist for a very specific problem that they're facing in their health. The other thing is once they kind of decide on that, after they get the recommendations and they make a choice, because here we do wanna have the individual be a partner and an owner of their health journey. How easy is it to schedule? And to your point, Danny, it's not just the schedule. What if life happens and I have to reschedule it, how easy is it? How soon can I still access or get time on my provider's schedule and can I do that by myself or do I have to use the traditional methods? Do I have to go in on site and reschedule my appointment? Can I do that online with the self-service option? So having all of those, just what would be expected as baseline capabilities is important. Also, once the care is given, right, whether it's online, it's telehealth, however that happens, I think it's important to talk about follow on instructions. And I'll give you a personal example. I went for a follow on appointment actually very recently to my provider and went through the appointment, end of the visit the provider said, "Okay, so I've got all your information." And then they walked out. And then I was sitting there saying, okay, so am I waiting for somebody like their assistant to come in and do a final check of whether it's my BP test or anything or do I just walk out and I was just sitting there, right, like for five minutes before I decided that I'm gonna walk out, tell the front desk, and leave. And I think those follow-up instructions, while it seems trivial in this case, I have never gone for follow-up appointments before. It was once a year work through it. So I even for me for a simple visit, it was confusing. So then you put that in the context of people who probably have to have multiple problems being solved or even expect to get more information about the medication, new medication that's being prescribed. I think follow-up instructions are a key point or a moment of truth, a moment that matters in that journey for healthcare systems to get right and pay particular attention to how to make that easy, convenient, and simple for the patient. Then the other pieces where health systems and health plans kind of have this friction about pre-ops, everyone of us knows that for certain care services, you need to get pre-op. But from a consumer standpoint, they want it to be invisible, right? It should be invisible. They don't need to care about which system authorizes it or who authorizes it, and whether it's gonna be paid for, like can you make it. The next thing that they really need to understand is, what drugs am I gonna have to take, my doctor prescribes certain things to me, so I wanna go get it, but what is it gonna cost me and do I have options for it? So when you think of innovation that happens in healthcare, Mark Cuban has this new company, Cost Plus Drugs, primarily for the intent of making drug prices transparent and affordable and easily accessible, right? And so those kind of innovations that come in really health systems and health plans need to start thinking about how do we develop those partnerships and obviously provide that as a service to the individual. Again, simplifying the journey, making things transfer. And obviously, when the bill shows up, I'm sure each one of us has gone through about, again, how do I even read this bill, whether it's from a health plan or from my provider. And how much of it am I paying and why does it change based on who I went to versus not, but really could I not have heard about it before I went down and had this visit? So I think in all of that, there are some common elements, right? And there are very specific points in that that we have to get right every single time, such that that whole experience feels more than at parts, more than those specific interactions to say, yes, this was easy, this was seamless, and this was exactly what I was seeking. And we need to have that happen every single time consistently. So I know, like I spent a little more time talking in detail about the various point journeys, but I think where it's important is really hearing from you, Danny, and Andy as well, as we've debated this, but what else would you wanna kind of emphasize along this journey?

- [Danny] So I'll just build on, Prabha, that thought about what happens after the visit, after the procedure. I think that's a huge area for organizations to differentiate themselves and you can have a great experience in the physician's office or in the hospital, but if the follow on is convoluted or frustrating, if the billing process reaches a point of excruciating point pain that can undo a tremendous amount of great brand experience and even clinical experience if you think about the frustration point and the lack of follow through or confusion or whatever. So I think that is a really important point in the process is the end, or maybe not the end, but the beginning of the next phase of care. I don't know, Andy, if you wanna add anything to that.

- [Andy] Well, I was just gonna say, one thing we didn't talk about that I think warrants just a little bit of a quick touchpoint is, if you think about provider search and match, the single most important relationship and contact point that happens in this whole process is that patient provider relationship. And even though we think about that dominantly being face-to-face and all that, there still are some important digital components to that specifically around assessing fit and determining which provider someone wants to see, especially if they're starting a journey with your health system for the first time. And we've talked to dozens of patients in the last year and one of the first things they'll say when you ask 'em to start at the beginning of the journey and tell us about it is, they'll say, well, there is some stuff that I'm looking for in healthcare providers and oftentimes, the way that systems would introduce providers to me, their websites doesn't tell me the things that were important to me. And so I had to go look in alternate information sources. So I say, I think the takeaway from that is even things that we think about as predominantly being face-to-face, in-person, high-touch experiences, being thoughtful about how we can support those and make sure those are as good as possible using digital tools and thinking intentionally about the ways that people leverage digital tools at every point in their journey. There's a lot of opportunity there.

- [Prabha] Absolutely, Andy. And I think that segues very nicely into kind of, one of the things we do is to say, okay, so we put ourselves in the consumer shoes, but now let's just turn around and say as a health system, what is that that we as health systems have gone through or faced? And how do we make it thoughtful? So on the next slide here, we'll see the fact that health systems have also gone our own journey, right, all the executives invested in digital really saying, how do we make a change, because we want to be presenting ourselves to the consumer, to the patient in that very thoughtful way and fulfilling their expectations and their needs. And when you think about the digital journey or the digital front door journey that many, many health systems have gone through, right? As soon as there's a acceptance that we need to start getting a digital persona up or a digital footprint up, first thing everyone recognizes is that scheduling. It's like, how do I find the right provider and how do I schedule on their time? And so there's investments in online scheduling, self-service, also some telehealth features. And the pandemic actually pushed us towards really using telehealth and virtual at a heightened level, though, post pandemic, we are seeing some of those numbers drop, but they're still elevated compared to pre pandemic. So in a way, as consumers and as health systems, we've kind of aligned around the fact that we are gonna be more digital in our interactions and that's gonna keep increasing over time though, not like the pandemic where overnight it went up by like a 1000%, right? Because things became virtual, but you still needed care services. And then as we start offering more online presence, obviously there's this thought of, people come through healthcare maybe five times a year on an average, but can we actually engage with them more from a wellness standpoint, not just a healthcare standpoint and solving a problem, but how do you make that more holistic? And that's where a lot of friction starts evolving because the minute you want to reach out for a person or engage with them, you're gonna have a lot more messages and alerts going through. So you come up with alert fatigue or you come up with many constituents or many departments trying to access the same individual but not coordinated. So on the end of, from a consumer standpoint, you get hit by too many messages, you probably miss out on important information that's coming through. Then you move forward and the health systems realize that we need to figure out how do you make this better? How do you think about a digital front door, which makes it easy for people to come in online, but also like navigate the system in a good way. And guess what? Automation always helps with cost. If you have the right experience, people will start using it more and then will also enable the care team via their elbow without increasing additional costs. So that's kind of the normal journey. And then all of a sudden, depending on the investments that are made, are the priorities, you may have one, many, or like five, six different front doors, which don't always navigate the system the same way. So you have disconnected experiences and then there is a need. There is definitely a realization that how do we make this more connected either through a platform in identifying an ecosystem of capabilities, how do we bring it together such that that journey is seamless? So I think health systems and leaders really face this question about how do we connect ourselves? How do we use our current infrastructure, our assets, and our limited dollars that we can invest in it to make the experience the best one. But we also know that it's a complex system and we have many stages of maturity in the applications and capabilities and how do we like move forward and create more of a connected single experience as well.

- [Danny] John Glaser from Harvard wrote an article just a couple years ago titled "Five Principles to Improving Patient Experience." And one of the takeaways for me was, he proposed that we changed the phrase digital front door and just call it journey to health, right? It isn't a single thing, it's not something that people are going to walk through. It is a more of a concept and I really like that, but I like this idea of understanding where you are as an organization enabling, getting everybody to the table to talk about, are we on the same page? Are we at the same path in the journey as an organization? I think that's really critical. Anything you wanna add to this, Andy?

- [Andy] No, I think that's a great point to make a digital front door that's not just the front door. The very phrase does kind of imply that what comes behind it is not, it's distinct from that. And so I really think that was a great point to make.

- [Danny] Yeah. Prabha, continue on with the idea behind this design tenets here.

- [Prabha] Yes. So, one of the core thinking that we have evolved within our Optum family, I would call it that, is this concept of having four tenets or principles here around how do you think about forming the right platform or an ecosystem for any health system. And that is absolutely from a consumer centricity, we talked about this a lot, curation, personalization and simplification, right? Like simple choices, but they're curated and personalized such that it seems easy for a consumer to say, okay, based on what I'm looking for, here are the recommendations and here's a health system who I trust in making those recommendations. So I have a high degree of confidence around when I pick one of those or any of those that I will be able to get the outcomes that I am seeking for this need that I have. But we know that to make it simple upfront, there's a lot of things that need to happen in the backend. It's almost like a duck, right? Which floats around in the water, but those feet are like going like crazy to be able to keep them moving forward. So it's similar like within the health system, what do you need to do, right. To orchestrate the right kind of information, the right kind of capabilities to come through, it's having that interoperability, it's having the persistence of data to go through, but it also is recognizing that you have to simplify the technical and the workflow architecture that exists in the system. A health system that I was recently working at, just to keep basic operations going, required 750 different applications, just basic operations, right? And on top of it, if you wanna add more for experience or more for specialization or more for just any sort of engagement, it's on top of it. So the technology architecture area is getting more and more complex, especially with things around security and cyber that you need to actually fend off for. But more importantly, as you look across a digitally enabling this journey of these processes, it is about having multiple choices, right? Omnichannel, as we talk about it. So the transition from self-service to, if I still have a question, I need to talk to somebody has to be seamless, that has to work well, right? So it has to work well every single time that option is offered. So if you go to the next slide, Danny, a couple of slides that I wanna use to kind of bring home the point. What we try to depict here is all those gray dots are potential areas that a interaction happens between an individual and a health system. And depending on what that journey is for, it could be any of these combinations. So which we know right, translates into tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands in here. But for all of that to seem seamless, whether I'm coming in for a regular wellness care or I wanna go and schedule a diagnostic argument for something more specialty care related, there's a core platform that needs to perform very specific things around unified access and experience, having data and managing those insights such that the person doesn't have to provide the same kind of information at every step of the process, right? How do you take that forward? How do you bring branding and content to be associated with your health system such that when they go through it, they shouldn't care whether you have three different best in class solutions that you're using to power this journey or it's just one. And then just being very mindful about the investments and the capabilities you have around security and I would say keeping the information private, confidential, and proprietary, especially the healthcare information which we all abide by with our HIPAA rules. And then finally while this is the orchestration of getting through the journey, when you think about it, how can we do that? We can only do that if we know our customer. So if you go to the next slide, Danny. And this is some of the work that the three of us have worked on closely, it's really being able to use the data that's available within a health system or within the ecosystem to really understand who is coming through this care journey for us and in what stage of their their need. So what that means is really think, as I go through the journey, are there very specific points in this that are going to define for me whether I'm going to stick through this that I find this journey to be simple and the fact that I get the outcome that I need and we call them moments of truth, right? So an example might be, let's just take a mom with multiple kids as an example, we could use any other persona too. What matters for her as she schedules an appointment is the timeliness of it, like how soon can she get it, whether it's for herself or for one of her kids, but more importantly honoring the arrangement when she's been given the slot so that she can actually land her other depending interactions and life that she has got planned that she doesn't miss out on those or those don't get delayed. So I think that's a moment of truth for when a mom comes in with a kid and a health system has to be committed to keeping the time slot, providing her the interaction with the provider that she's seeking and then letting her get on forward. Because if that doesn't happen in a good way or there's a delay and she's not informed of it, that's when the dissatisfaction comes in and that's when that loyalty that we talked about, which is always in question in today's world and how do you keep it, really starts getting questioned. So I think there's many ways to talk through this, but at the end of the day, it's about knowing the individual and knowing how they're going through the journey and for what purpose and who can actually make them feel like they are engaged with them, and then get them on the other side with the best outcomes. I'm sorry, Danny.

- [Danny] Yeah. No. You know, this is really near and dear to my heart is understanding who we're speaking to, who we're trying to solve problems for. And anecdotally, some of the mistakes that we see made often are trying to build personas off who comes to your website instead of thinking about all of the people that you might need to serve, right? Or thinking about them from a demographic standpoint first, rather than a problem solving standpoint. Because you may have people with very different demographics who are essentially trying to solve the same problem. And then I guess the third one I would mention is really around having better data, like things like predictive models that can add to your personas or enhance maybe existing personas that you're working with and take those to another level. So just a few insights there.

- [Andy] Yeah, I just wanna touch on, I think one of the things, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who's perhaps watching this webinar, I think we've pretty much delivered the message so far, customer experience is really important, customer expectations are really high, healthcare is not meeting them. And at this point, my head would start to swell and perhaps explode. And I think one of the really practical uses of these things is not only better meeting consumer needs, but being, taking a really thoughtful approach to segmentation and consumer journey mapping can really help you focus your effort. 'Cause the takeaway here can't be, you need to be all things to all people because inevitably you will fail.

- Exactly.

- And we know the resource constraints that systems and system leaders are operating under right now. We get it. And I think the one of other thing that you said that really resonated with me was, you can't talk about folks, you're not doing a demographic based segmentation because you need to understand how they think. So one of the things that just came back as I was thinking about that mother is, we did a series of interviews and deep research on some consumers in the last few years. And one of the groups, one of the personas that we identified in network was that there were a group of people that defined their relationship with their health system primarily on the family level. And the people that were likely to do that often prioritized the relationship, the care needs and the experiences of other families above those of their own. So that applies to that mom who might be taking a kid to an urgent care, but it could just as easily apply to someone who's facilitating the care of an elderly parent or an ailing partner. And so it's a very different way of thinking about what kind of digital tools you might give them or how you might help them on that journey. But you can see how it applies to some distinct groups that wouldn't show up in the same bucket of 35 to 45 on the website visitors, right?

- [Danny] Yep, yep. Great point. Andy, do you wanna tee us up on the next theme?

- [Andy] Yeah, happily. Take us forward if you would.

- [Danny] Sure.

- [Andy] So as we think about those journeys, we talk about it at the experience, at the interaction. Are we on the title?

- [Danny] We're on the three paths slide, what I'm seeing.

- [Andy] I'm sorry, my screen is lagging. I apologize for that. So the upshot here is that getting one journey right is not enough. And well, it's true that one terrible experience could lose you a customer. The flip side is also true, one good experience is not going to win you a lifetime patient. So when we think about journeys, we think they need to be both obvious and easy. And what I mean by that is each step should be easy. The next step after that experience should be obvious and easy to take. So if I think about a couple of examples, what that looks like in practice, and it's possible for us to trip up at multiple points in here. One is we can think about Prabha sitting back in the exam room at the end of her visit, right? That last step in the journey, certainly easy to get up and walk down the hall and see yourself out, this is a person who's had decades of experience in health systems. So that wasn't hard, but the next step wasn't obvious and that created a moment of friction even for someone who has spent more time in health systems and hospitals than a lot of other people. Two other things I think about, we heard a couple of people in interviews that I looked at last year that described very different experiences in the transition in a triage process from moving from urgent care to an emergency department situation. In one situation, someone talked about going to an urgent care that was co-located with the emergency department, literally across the hall. And they did the urgent care process and the urgent care. A provider said, oh, you should really go to the ED. So they walk across the hall and the experience they had is they were met like they were someone who just walked in off the street, they were at the back of the line and they were even asked to fill out the same kind of intake forms, right? Contrast that with somebody else who told us about a story, she presented to a standalone urgent care center and then was transferred similar situation, oh, you should really go to the emergency department. She gets to the emergency department, which is located at a different address, different facility, walks through the front door is basically met there by a greeter or one of the welcoming staff and said, are you Sharon? And she said, yes, I am Sharon, how'd you know? She said, oh, well, urgent care called ahead told me to look for someone about your height in a long floral print dress here, come on back, we got you already, right? And that's an example where the next step was obvious in both cases, but in that second one, the next step was both obvious and easy. So that's really what we're looking for in these kinds, we think about journeys, is you gotta know what to do next and then that process, that transition has to be as easy as possible.

- [Danny] Makes sense.

- [Andy] Sorry, I'm gonna have to refresh.

- Sure, no problem.

- Yeah.

- [Danny] So I think where we wanna go next, maybe Andy is talking about how this translates to satisfaction and, Prabha, you wanna jump in and...

- [Andy] Are you with me now?

- [Danny] Yep. Oh, Andy. Yep, you're back.

- [Andy] I apologize for that everyone. There was a little bit of a lag on the slide. So when we think about that journey satisfaction being only the first step, I think one of the things which comes out is, when we talk about customers that defect and we talked about the start of the presentation, they don't always flash a lot of signs, right? We think about, oh, were you satisfied with your last experience? And they'll say, sure. Well, most of the customers that do defect actually will tell you that they are satisfied with that last experience. So putting those things together, satisfaction is not sufficient. We gotta help show 'em the path and we gotta make sure that that path is easy. And so they have to know to get the service, they have to be motivated to get the service, they have to think to return to you, and then they have to take action to schedule and get care. That taking action is only the last step in a very long process. And that's where I think there's a really interesting interaction between how you think about precision marketing, how you think about patient engagement, how you think about patient acquisition. It's not just a one time thing. So, Danny, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more, I know this is your area of expertise, how you think about those things and how they relate to each other and what a system has to do to facilitate outstanding experience there.

- [Danny] Yeah. So, Andy, I appreciate that tee up. I think a couple of things that we wanna leave folks with is, one, another way to look at this is what are the journeys that you want patients and consumers to take across the health system, right? So a way of thinking about this is as a health system, some of the essential needs or priorities are obviously to drive new patients, to create new customers for the organization. And you do that through a series of marketing and precision marketing strategies that are aimed at consumers who aren't necessarily patients today or who you're interested in bringing on is new patients. The other three paths tend to fall into areas around current customer or current patient engagement. So think of things like enhancing member or patient communication and engagement around care coordination. They're already in the system, you're touching them in some way or touching their life in some way, and you wanna simply improve that communication or improve that engagement with them. Another is more advanced thinking around wellness and population health management. So that tends to be a major business driver that we see healthcare organizations taking or investing in. And then the fourth is really more around that ongoing customer engagement, right? So retention, long-term lifetime value, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that are important when you think about retaining customers and also having them go out and talk about who you are as an organization. All of this requires really deep understanding of who you're talking to, right? What communication channels do you use with them? What customized messages are gonna get their attention? What things are most relevant at the right time? Which messages are gonna persuade action or change behaviors? You can think of things like next best actions, you can think about nurturing campaigns. These are all require a deeper level of planning and intentional design around the consumer and patient experience. And they require really deep, unified customer data. So you need more data to support all of this from a planning perspective. And that data has to be current, it has to be unified in one location or at least accessible in one location and it needs to be actionable. And so gets into things like realtime data and integrating things like automation or using, I mentioned predictive data to augment what you know about audiences and what their needs are or how likely they are to take certain actions or certain behaviors. So this goes way beyond what is typically done in a lot of organizations today, simply because we tend to be siloed with our customer data. We tend to rely on tools like a CRM or an electronic medical record that aren't really built to handle a bigger call to action. They're not really there to be a comprehensive customer or patient intelligence capability. And that's what organizations now need. And so one of the trends that we're seeing is a move away from strategies that are things like CRM initiatives that have been siloed in one place, like the marketing department. Those are now moving to enterprise initiatives where multiple departments are drawing on the same data or they're pooling data together. They're using different tools and technology to enable that and they need more resources to power some of these things. So tools like customer data platforms, marketing automation platforms, better consumer data, all of that is gonna be important to creating more of a customer intelligence approach that can fuel all the things that Prabha and Andy were talking about along the patient journey and how we do that from an organizational standpoint. And I'll just take one second to call out. Sometimes, this isn't new or different technology. Prabha, you and Andy and I were talking about this earlier today. Sometimes, it's not new or different technology and it's not even sexy technology. Things like the call center or a contact center, which frankly healthcare organizations have maybe undervalued or underestimated in, certainly underinvested in. I think those are gonna be hugely important in the future. When you think about healthcare being high touch, when you think about needing to engage with consumers remotely, care anywhere, digital applications, apps, there's gonna be a tremendous need for support. And contact centers, not just phone, but email, chat, texting can be a really powerful way of staying in touch with customers and patients. And so I'm a big advocate that I think health systems that are investing in their contact center capability or outsourcing to an organization that has expertise in that are really gonna find that they're gonna make huge strides with their patient experience. So a little bit of a soapbox there, but wanted to share that one observation. As we move into the last little bit of time here, let's talk for a second about some of the things that the participants can take back to their organization or start to engage in a conversation around. Prabha, do you wanna talk about this for a second?

- [Prabha] Absolutely. Thanks, Danny. And I think one thing as I realized that we are coming to the end of our webinar is we've shared a lot, right? We've shared a lot because this is an area that each of us feels so passionate about, is invested in making a change, and really helping our healthcare organizations in their journey. We know it's hard, but we also know the fact that there's so much potential to make this better, make this better for us as individuals, but also as serving our customers. So I would say the sum total of all this we all understand is that we need to have more centricity around like really what matters in an interaction, how do you make it pleasant? And to Andy's point, right, how do you make it easy and obvious together every single time? And to start down that path, really talking about a really stepping back and evaluating, what is our enterprise organization's digital savviness as we call it, right? 'Cause we know digital is going to be part of that experience in all shapes and sizes and forms. So are we as an organization future ready? Are we going to be mobile first? Are we gonna have self-services, the primary mode of interaction? Is it gonna be low effort? So really stepping back and doing a self-evaluation around where are we today and where do we need to go and why does it matter to a health system? It matters because it comes back to how can you one be an agile health system, one that's functioning well and in the green, get better margins is, are you losing patients today because they walked away? Or the fact that some of the referrals you made did not get fulfilled in the right way so you lost some business either to a different health system or one of the new disruptors. And finally, while it's not obvious, really understanding who the critical stakeholders to drive success on this digital journey and on this consumer experience journey. And it's interesting because as an individual, as a consumer, it's amazing how much they wanna be part of that solution, defining that solution and helping a health system form the right solutions versus just being told work with what we have. So I think engaging all the critical stakeholders from within your organization, but also engaging the individual is gonna be important. So those are the three takeaways that we kind of thought through would be more of importance for you as you mull through this through the rest of your day and think about how are you gonna take this consumer digital engagement forward

- [Danny] That's awesome. Prabha, we've got just a minute or two left. On behalf of Optum, we wanna thank you for joining us today. We'd love to hear from you, send us your thoughts, send us what's working, questions you have, all three of us are happy to engage in a conversation about what's happening in the marketplace and just brainstorm ideas. You can reach Prabha and Andy if their email addresses below or hit us up on LinkedIn. Likewise, if there's something about data and technology you're interested in, would love to hear from you as well. With just a minute or two left, Andy, Prabha, let me give you a chance to just say one last closing thought or a piece of advice for folks, and then we'll wrap it up and say thanks and let people go. But I'll start with you, Andy, any last thoughts or words of wisdom for the folks?

- [Andy] The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. I know this can be overwhelming when you look at the totality of all the people that you have to serve and all the things that have to flow together and happen just right to have that frictionless digital experience. But don't let that overwhelm and you really can't go wrong by starting the journey. It's only gonna become more important in the years to come.

- [Danny] And Andy has lots of nature shots of photographs, so I'm happy to provide those for your presentations. Prabha, let me ask you the same, any words of wisdom or final thoughts as we wrap up?

- [Prabha] Absolutely, and I think I'd like to build on what Andy said is, you cannot tackle all the problems at a single time. Choose your priorities, pick the very specific changes you want to make and make them well. And I think investing the time, the dollars, and the energy there will actually realize in value added, not only from an experience standpoint, but that will come in in terms of loyalty from the consumers and ultimately turn into revenues for the system. So I think it's really being thoughtful about where we invest, where we prioritize, and realizing the results of those investments in both financial aspects, but also just from a engagement standpoint, which is the values beyond just the dollars that coming into the health system.

- [Danny] Nice closing thoughts. Thank you, Andy Wallmeyer, K. R. Prabha. Thank you so much for being on with us today. I'm Danny Fell and, again, on behalf of Optum, thank you all for joining us and for your time and interest in this topic. We look forward to having you join us again on future webinars. Have a great week. I'll turn it to you.

- Thank you, Danny. It was a pleasure.

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