February 10, 2025

Integrating Experience Begins With Understanding Patients

This month we begin our look at the interconnected patient experience and the transformative opportunities it represents for the people you serve. When patients are top of mind, building an experience that delights them at every touchpoint becomes a driving priority. Not only does this mean increased satisfaction and loyalty, but also better outcomes for providers—a topic we’ll explore in more detail next month.

Ever notice how seamless and easy it is to shop online? Not only can you click on something of interest, most retailers also provide related selections for your consideration. You can pick the right size and color, and receive immediate notification if your choice is not available. Paying and delivery is a breeze, particularly if you’ve shopped there before and allowed the vendor to save your address and payment information. Delivery details can be received via email or text, keeping you updated on when, exactly, to expect your package. You’ll even receive a photo showing where the package was dropped.

This type of integrated experience is what modern consumers crave, which includes their healthcare experience. Integration is the key to a holistic, end-to-end customer experience. Rather than a one-time event, providers must treat patient engagement as a connected journey.

No matter how your organization is structured—or if your work happens in the clinical, operational or revenue cycle department—patients perceive all healthcare touchpoints as one brand experience versus a collection of individual processes based on your org chart. Paying attention to integration reveals opportunities for making every patient experience easy, seamless and empathetic, and for driving a higher yield and stronger ROI for providers.

Building an Integrated Patient Experience

Cohesion begins with understanding what patients experience at every touchpoint: preservice, point-of-service and post-service. Asking probing questions—and acting quickly when gaps are discovered—puts your organization on the road to providing the best possible patient experience: one that is purposefully connected to create ease, convenience and trust. This includes eliminating annoying redundancy by sharing information (with patient permission) throughout your system, giving patients digital options, enabling simple self-service, understanding how your patients behave and generally reducing friction. Consider your patient experience by examining the three major components of their healthcare journey: preservice, point-of-service and post-service.

Preservice

Put yourself in your patients’ shoes and evaluate how easy or difficult it is to find your organization online. Check to see if your website clearly delineates specialty services, what they cost and how to access them. Once an appointment is made, ask:

How do you help busy people remember or change their appointments?
Do patients receive forms and pre-appointment instructions in advance?
Are forms pre-filled with information you already know?
Do you ask for permission to contact them digitally or ask their preferences?
Can patients view an estimate and make initial payments?

Point-of-Service

People want to feel safe and comfortable when they check in. Walking into a room filled with coughing people is enough for some patients to leave. Likewise, when they have no idea how long their wait may be, they may become angry or just give up and skip their appointment altogether. Here are some things to ask as you evaluate what patients experience at the point-of-service:

Do you text them when it’s almost time for them to see their caregiver? If the wait is relatively long, this gives them the option of waiting in their car.
Can they easily take care of co-pays?
How easy is it for them to fill out forms? Do you ask them for information you (or another part of your organization) already has on file?
Have you instituted OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology so they can provide personal information simply by taking and uploading a photo of their insurance and personal identification cards?
Do you ask them how they prefer to communicate and for permission to share that information with other parts of your system?

Post-Service

Now think about your patients’ financial experience. Take a good look at your billing statements to make sure they’re easy to understand, particularly if a patient has multiple care episodes with various departments within your system. Have you integrated these care episodes so patients receive one comprehensive statement, versus multiple statements that may confuse them? Other things to consider:

Have you provided digital payment options for effortless self-service?
Are digital payment options streamlined with a card on file?
Do patients need to keep track of cumbersome passwords?
Are CSRs truly empowered to answer patient questions?
Can CSRs take payments over the phone without hearing a patient’s sensitive information?
Is personal information stored securely?

The Bottom Line

Connecting all touchpoints means harnessing the power of effortless engagement for patients, integrating (and protecting) sensitive data system-wide and always considering how patients are impacted. Ideally, this involves working with a single vendor or just a few vendors that easily integrate with your existing EHR system and each other. With enough insight, empathy and integrated technology, you will find it simple to make every aspect of the patient journey smooth, convenient and effortless—driving patient satisfaction and loyalty at every juncture.