Seven Positive Disruption Trends for Healthcare
In 2020, technology and other issues will continue to impact – even disrupt – executive leadership and healthcare delivery on a major scale. (Not in healthcare? Read on – many of these trends are also agnostic to industry parameters).
The Continued Rise of Technology Enabled Consumerism Healthcare is personal. Technology-powered personalization, recognition and satisfaction of individual needs, near-instant feedback and interactive communication capacity with other brands and services have changed nearly everything. Patients and families now expect similar service levels from hospitals, clinics and physicians. In response, healthcare executives now include titles like chief patient experience officers, chief data analytics officers and chief population health officers.
How important is this trend? Notes Craig Samitt, MD, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota in Managed Healthcare Executive: “The future of healthcare will require us to develop, nurture and promote those that are inventive, collaborative, forward-looking, customer-oriented and more value-based.” What can happen in 2020 and beyond if healthcare executives don’t respond? “If healthcare doesn’t bring in leadership that will reinvent our industry from the inside out, disruptive innovators from other industries will reinvent it from the outside-in.” A point for marketers? Martech HIPPA-compliant platforms are the standard in 2020 marketing, with hospitals and clinics moving toward an omni-channel star-driven marketing environment, all striving for a seamless customer/patient positive experience.
A new customer-centric requirement
Retail Healthcare Delivery to Expand Competition Serious competition for hospitals, clinics and physicians will continue to grow in the form of healthcare delivery in localized retail outlets like CVS or Walmart. Patients—as healthcare consumers—like and want retail accommodations like ease of access and convenience for services such as routine vaccines (which is expected to grow to a total market value of $72 billion by 2025), sports health exams, and other non-intensive services. As Modern Healthcare put it, “The future of healthcare looks a lot like retail.” Brand loyalty has always been a major consideration in patient retention by hospitals, and now it is even more so. Obviously, healthcare marketers must pay even more careful attention to standard practices of passionate brand development and management.
Getting a Handle on Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age” (social determinants of health) have either a direct positive or negative effect on health outcomes. New rules for Medicare Advantage programs and Part D allow hospitals to shift the regulatory calculation of medical cost ratio (MLR) to medical costs (from administrative), which can provide some innovative capacity to address SDoH issues. Addressing SDoH means more community engagement by healthcare executives, as healthcare delivery costs, growth and outcomes are all impacted by social issues in ways never before considered.
Conversational AI (artificial intelligence) will elevate customer/patient-centric services AI (or machine learning, as some prefer) continues to open possibilities for voice-driven healthcare delivery and augmentation. Whether physicians like it or not, Dr. Google is alive and well, and is increasingly the first source of healthcare information for prospective patients and families (For more information, see “Hey, Alexa – What’s the Protocol for Follicular Neoplasm?” Conversational digital interactivity is already part of the modern healthcare diagnostic experience, and will only grow. Many healthcare groups are already using AI/machine learning to examine copious amounts of healthcare data to support diagnostic processes. This has proven to be a little bumpy, as the Google/Ascension data partnership recently attracted fierce criticism as it reviewed data without notifying patients. One small takeaway? Marketers need to ensure that their patient/customer facing online properties are optimized for voice. Predictive analytics is also a factor here.
In an emerging low-code/no-code environment, everyone is a developer Where hospitals and clinics typically once had to engage an outside developer or programmer to customize software programs (e.g., in the Customer Relationship Management – CRM – world), not so much in the future for certain applications. Low code can mean higher degrees of direct engagement and software application customization by traditionally non-IT personnel, including docs, nurses, PAs and administrators. Who can do what and other regulatory-tinged roles need to be defined.
Value-based healthcare is here to stay As is well-known, hospitals and healthcare providers previously embraced a bifurcated fee-for-service billing model for decades. It’s old news – but still relevant – that different clinics, physician practice groups, surgery centers and others all provided and billed for services separately in a complex maze. This is still a major ongoing transition. Reimbursements on the value-based model basically changed everything, disrupting accounting and billing processes as providers switch from volume-based care to value-based, which can hammer smaller hospitals (particularly in rural areas). However, the news is generally good on the patient front here, as patient quality of care and satisfaction often improve under the value-based model (and increased patient satisfaction can mean higher star ratings and HCAHPS scores, which can translate to higher scores on important ranking websites HeathGrades.com, RateMDs.com and Vitals.com). The point? The move toward value-based delivery—where a whole community of providers is engaged in healthcare delivery to individual patients—continues to gain momentum, bringing with it new standards and operational norms for care management, population identification, secure data and more. A takeaway for healthcare executives and marketers? Communication, communication, communication – internal as well as external, with measurable metrics to determine how effective the communication program is achieving its goals.
Tech issues abound
Hospitals and clinics – large and small – need to be in the cybersecurity business Because of the sensitivity of patient data and records, smaller hospitals in particular represent a high degree of vulnerability to off-shore ransomware criminals (but make no mistake, larger hospitals certainly aren’t immune, particularly from a vendor vulnerability perspective or from software migration, or simply from employees bringing in a flash drive from home). Ransomware unfortunately has become a business model for some (Want proof? Check out this chilling “Anatomy of an Attack” video from Cisco ).
Hospitals and clinics need to consider technical protection from experts (email gateways, in-memory anti-virus protection, unusual file access protocols and much more) and also have in place proactive education about what phishing attacks can look like, the need to keep systems secure and separate and more. Hospital CEOs and PR staff need to have crisis management and communications IN PLACE in the event of a possible cyberattack. Uber learned the hard way about what NOT to do in trying to cover up a cyberattack. Multiple positive case studies on how hospitals can deal with these issues are plentiful. Aggressively investing in your IT security is a must-have in 2020.
These issues on their own can be a bit much, but positive resources are available. Strong and forward-looking leadership represents a key success factor. As Cotiviti CEO Emad Rizk said in a recent interview: “If leaders don’t keep up, or are afraid to make bold choices, they become irrelevant – leaders need a lot of courage and they need to comfortable in taking a risk for something they believe in.”
There’s obviously much more (like IoT trends in data management and diagnostic care, just for starters). Want to discuss additional current trends in healthcare abd healthcare marketing & PR? Give us a call at 317-805-4870 or contact us online.
By Michael Snyder, MEK Managing Principal