Kyruus Blog

How to read this graph: The boxes represent if a term appeared in the top 10 condition-based search terms for a day within a given week, while the darkness of the color represents the volume of the searches for those terms.*

As of this week, the CDC reported more than 1M confirmed cases of COVID-19 and close to 70K deaths across the United States. Yet, despite these grim figures, data indicates that several states may have reached their peaks, including former hotspot, New York City, where there has been a continued decline in both deaths and hospitalizations due to COVID-19. Meanwhile, other states have already begun the process of reopening their economies. So now the conversation for health systems is starting to shift from simply how to respond to the pandemic to what steps to take to move forward and open up more access for unrelated appointment needs.

Since the COVID-19 virus emerged in the U.S., the country’s health systems and hospitals have felt a significant strain on their resources and staff as they continue to face rising volumes of patients. Amid this chaos, many organizations have risen to the challenge, using technology to expand access and relieve some of the pressure on their limited resources. Here are some of the ways health systems are using technology to expand access to care during the pandemic:

How to read this graph: The bars illustrate the total number of searches for a term (e.g. diabetes) over the month via the Kyruus ProviderMatch platform and the heatmap breaks the data out by week.

While people across the world have had to adjust their lives in the face of the coronavirus crisis, hospitals, health systems, their staff, and the patients turning to them for care have undoubtedly felt the greatest impact. Healthcare organizations face the tough task of not only caring for the influx of patients needing assessment and care for coronavirus, but also ensuring they effectively facilitate care for patients in their communities with non-COVID-related medical needs, such as chronic conditions, mental health, and cancer.

As the world becomes increasingly digitized, patients are looking to interact with healthcare the same way they look for flights on Kayak or make a dinner reservation on OpenTable–with speed and convenience. And as health systems look to respond, understanding consumer behavior and the patient journey will be critical to delivering a user experience that successfully meets patients’ needs and expectations.

Whether your organization is looking to do so by revamping your website or building a new mobile app, here are a few design best practices from our work with consumers to help your team deliver user experiences that delight.

While healthcare continues to play catch-up to other customer-obsessed and digital-first industries, 2019 became the year in which many health systems started to align their organization around a commitment to improving the patient experience. This is certainly clear looking at our most popular content pieces from 2019–healthcare leaders want analytics to measure patient access, insight into how consumers make care decisions, and best practices for partnering with their organization to execute consumerism initiatives, like online scheduling.

To transform access and experience in 2020, check out the list below of the four most downloaded resources from 2019:

Whether it was looking for a repairman or deciding which PCP to book with, the way we shopped for products and services was drastically different 10 years ago. Historically, many of us relied on family members and friends for recommendations and few, if any, comparison tools existed to validate those options. However, as the internet matured rapidly, consumer behavior started to change. We became less focused on brick-in-mortar experiences and more focused on digital ones. And today’s online patient behavior is no different. Patients want to weigh their options and they are looking to health systems to make information about their providers and services easily accessible online. Adapting to this shift and treating patients as savvy consumers will be imperative to maintaining relevance in an evolving–and increasingly competitive–digital landscape.

Last week, members of our team attended the Becker’s Annual Meeting in Chicago and had the opportunity to hear from health system executives and other industry leaders about the challenges they face and the opportunities they see around the evolving healthcare landscape. Across sessions, discussions focused on the ways in which health systems are rethinking patient engagement strategies and innovating to better meet the needs of today’s healthcare consumers. In particular, the following emerged as key themes:

As health systems pursue strategic initiatives around improving patient experience and expanding access, capturing the right metrics is critical to ensuring their goals are met. Historically, health system access centers have used "call time" data to measure their efficiency and value, attempting to keep patient calls short in order to handle a higher volume of calls. And while this metric may make sense for other consumer industries, a call time KPI is no longer the most important metric to track for health systems. Why? With market competition rising and consumers prioritizing experience, access centers should instead measure how easy it is for a patient to get to the right provider at the right time.

2018 marked a year of disruption across the healthcare landscape. From the entrance of new players, like Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway, to the mergers of prominent health systems, like Mercy Health and Bon Secours, organizations across the space were driven by a desire to meet consumer expectations for a more connected, patient-centric experience.

Analytics are becoming increasingly important in healthcare: marketers use it to optimize their campaigns, population health researchers use it to identify at-risk populations, and physicians use it to decide which drugs to prescribe. However, with healthcare organizations and patients generating so much data, it’s sometimes impossible to make sense of it–or make the data actionable. In fact, the amount of health information produced is doubling every three years, and by 2020 it is estimated to double every 73 days.¹ And while the quantity of data is intimidating for most, it also offers health systems an opportunity to drive change, especially to improve patient access.

As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve and patients seek out convenient and affordable care, being able to leverage existing data will be critical to expanding access to care and maintaining patient loyalty. Here’s how to use your data to lay the foundation for enhanced access: