Kyruus Blog

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:

There are so many digital marketing metrics to track, it can leave marketers with a serious case of TMI. Having too much data is overwhelming and looking at the wrong data is a waste of time. The key is to find the data that illustrates the new website visitors you’ve acquired, but also shows opportunity for meaningful optimizations. That raises the question: what metrics matter most for your hospital or health system?

Our nation's healthcare system suffers from a mismatch between patient demand and provider supply, something that we refer to as the "Patient Access Paradox". Almost everyone has had a personal experience with the problem of long appointment wait times, which range between 3 and 30 weeks across the country for both primary and specialist care. Yet at the same time, our hospital clients experience as low as 50-60% physician productivity, struggling to "unlock" the capacity that is buried somewhere in their provider networks.

Thanks to their star player, Johns Hopkins’ pancreatic surgical team has a batting average of .980. This is no small feat.

A health system CEO once told me that anyone who tells you she knows what “population health management” means is lying. While I wouldn’t use similarly strong language to make that point, I have had many conversations with health system and health plan leaders about “population health management”, and through those conversations have come to understand that we do not nearly have a uniform definition of what the term even means. The absence of a uniform definition for population health management can be attributed to market variability, i.e. my population is different from yours, and therefore implies a different approach to managing it.

Rapidly advancing technology is enabling the production and consumption of healthcare data in a way not previously possible. With so much at stake in medicine, can Big Data help us decide on the “right” doctor to meet our medical needs?