Why self-service could be the key for improved patient experiences?

Convenience is what drives today’s consumers. And this is not so different for the healthcare industry as well. With patients willing to prioritize convenience as much as healthcare outcomes, healthcare businesses need to start making efforts to make the healthcare journey as convenient as possible.

Introduction

Take a moment and try to think of the last time you made a call for setting up an appointment or purchase something. Your reservation at the restaurant? Maybe you called ahead or more likely that you set up a reservation using an app or website. Your flight and hotel tickets? Probably done yourself through a travel marketplace to get the best deals. Your food order? Most probably done through a food delivery app.

Given the choice, would you rather call a movie theatre to buy some tickets or do it yourself on their website or platform? It’s not that you’re antisocial or shy, it’s just that it is so much more convenient to do these activities on your time and speed – alone. Self-checkout queues at supermarkets remain popular because sometimes we feel the best when going about our business alone.

Nearly all consumer-facing industries today have self-service options for their customers. It is found in the forms of self-service kiosks, apps with self-checkout, to platforms where you can make your purchase without any company intervention. Nearly all consumer-facing industries today recognize the importance of providing self-service options to their customers. Nearly all except the healthcare industry.



Why self-service?

The healthcare industry has had a strange journey to where it stands today. While many still choose to not accept it, it is widely accepted that the healthcare industry is a customer-facing industry. Patients are not the passive, treatment-receptive individuals that the industry once knew them to be. Today’s patients are active customers who wish to have a choice about their healthcare decisions and want a more active role in their own healthcare journeys.

While this transformative evolution in the way of thinking in the healthcare industry is slowly spreading, the industry itself is slow to change. Despite recognizing that their patients are customers, very few healthcare organizations have taken the initiative to make sure that the customer experience (or patient experience) aspects of the healthcare journey are optimized for giving the highest patient satisfaction levels.

Multiple surveys and research have now shown that 60-70 percent of consumers prefer self-service options for most simple customer service tasks. Despite this, self-service options penetration in the healthcare industry remains very low. Not adding self-service options to their healthcare processes has now started to hurt healthcare businesses.

Patients today expect the same level of service from healthcare organizations as they would from other consumer-facing industries. A Black Book survey found that 93 percent of patients would actually prefer having digital tools to complete simple customer care tasks. These activities and tasks include online patient self scheduling and technology-based payment tools.

How does it help patient experiences?

The reason why self-service helps improve patient satisfaction is that patients today value convenience and speed over the human connection that customers in the earlier decades preferred. While this is not to say that patients want their entire healthcare journey without any human interactions, they certainly would prefer digital tools to complete activities that would otherwise take much longer to accomplish or those tasks that can have a mental strain.

For example, a patient can self-schedule an appointment in less than 90 seconds while doing the same over a call would take nearly 10 minutes. 10 minutes that matter a lot to not just the patient but also to your administrative staff. With 80 percent of patients willing to switch their healthcare providers for convenience alone, as found by a 2019 NRC Health survey, it’s in your best interests to adapt to the changing need of today’s patients. Providing self-service options is an underserviced demand of today’s patients. By providing them with what they need, your healthcare business can quickly improve patient experiences and even drive higher patient engagement levels

Conclusion

The healthcare industry is rapidly changing. Today’s patients want convenience as much as they want results. By choosing to stick to analog processes healthcare businesses significantly decrease patient satisfaction. Simple measures like self-check-in or digitally processed payments can significantly improve patient experiences in the healthcare system. It is not just experienced that is elevated as a result of these changes but accessibility to healthcare also improves at the same time, further driving growth in healthcare businesses.

Patients today want their healthcare experience to be at par with the customer experiences they have in other consumer industries. Convenience, ease of use, and accessibility are factors that healthcare businesses can no longer afford to ignore. Patients today are customers first and foremost. Investing in self-service tools allows healthcare businesses to easily improve patient experiences.

BraveLabs helps healthcare businesses to integrate self-service tools into their healthcare processes. Contact today to learn more about self-service for your healthcare setting.

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