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Patients first – digital transformation in healthcare

Scott Manghillis
2021-11-26

Digitalizing healthcare is driving frictionless patient, member, and customer experience across the digital healthcare ecosystem.

For a year or more now, organizations in just about every sector, and in just about every part of the world, have been recalibrating. The pandemic has created supply chain issues, and it’s caused financial disruption, but one of its greatest effects has been on the way organizations interact – with employees, with partners, and especially with their customers.

Organizations have needed to find new and better ways to communicate at scale, all while building and maintaining individual relationships. After all, no one – no partner, no employee, no customer – wants to be treated as a number.

The healthcare sector is a prime example of this. While the pandemic has increased the caseload, the regular flow of patient contact hasn’t gone away. People want and expect their healthcare providers to know them, to understand their needs, and to be able to provide information and treatment that is appropriate to their circumstances. In return, providers need to ensure that each interaction with a patient adds to their knowledge of that person so they can continue to improve personalization of the customer journey.

Paramount for this digital transformation are intelligent, integrated systems that can provide a basis for communication that is knowledgeable and personal, and that feels natural.

Smart, seamless, digital – and human

Capgemini’s approach aims to achieve exactly this. It may be smart, seamless, and digital – but it’s also human. Its aim is to help healthcare providers understand and respond to the whole person for whom they are caring, and not just to that person’s medical conditions.

Our solution is a connected healthcare ecosystem built on, what we call, our CARE approach – Convenience, Advice, and Reach:

  • Convenience – make it easy for everyone – address patients’ challenges with speed and ease, enabling them to interact via any channel, and on their terms
  • Advice – make it intelligent – predict people’s needs, and suggest relevant solutions through an AI-enabled self-service model. At the same time, make use of analytical data and real-time feedback to improve their experience
  • Reach – make it available – enable interactions and transactions from any device, at any time of day or night, and make it straightforward to add new functionality rapidly through agile, scalable cloud solutions.

Patients benefit… and organizations benefit too

Patients receive care and attention that is timely, informed, consistent, and professional, and that is tailored to their needs and concerns as individuals.  They can make contact across the channels that suit them best, including phone, email, chatbots, healthcare apps, self-service portals, and social media.  What’s more, because the care they receive is holistic and personal, improved clinical outcomes are a likely result.

This smart, frictionless approach also delivers a number of benefits to healthcare service providers. Patient engagement is improved, boosting satisfaction scores, and adding value to the brand. Our clients have realized Net Promoter Score increases of 15%. Also, a frictionless, connected approach means operational efficiency is increased, reducing costs by 40% over three years, creating reductions of up to 80% in process handling times, and achieving 35% costs savings by digitizing claims.

Making a difference

There is, of course, another, perhaps less tangible benefit to an approach such as this. Organizations don’t just provide a better customer experience, and improve their internal efficiency – they also increase their sense of self-worth. Healthcare service providers and the people they employ can feel good about the work they do, and the care they give. They can see that they’re making lives better – that they’re making a difference.

As we all gradually emerge from one of the worst health crises the world has seen in many years, that is a great thing to know, and a great feeling to have.