It doesn’t require sophisticated data analytics to realize there’s a major disconnect somewhere.
I believe there are a variety of reasons for this: the pace of change, changing consumer expectations, integration challenges, and technology silos are chief among them. But the biggest obstacle of all? Technology vendors that haven’t learned how to play particularly well with others.
Every company in the healthcare financial engagement market should understand the criticality of orchestrating every touchpoint in the patient’s financial journey from before someone becomes a patient, throughout their healthcare engagement(s), and, of course, during the subsequent billing, accounts receivable and reconciliation process. In other words, they should be thinking about “Engagement Everywhere.”
Engagement Everywhere means everything is carefully integrated and built to work together with no gaps in the customer experience. End-to-end engagement is the most elegant solution but it’s not always the most practical. Providers often cannot source everything they need from a single partner. They may have existing contracts that preclude a single vendor solution or have multiple source systems as a result of hospital system consolidation. Others have made a conscious decision to embrace a “best in breed” approach.
Whatever the reasons, vendors need to support the choices of providers. This means building products and creating solutions that are easy to integrate with other systems and products. In other words, technology needs to be open because technology’s opportunity, and responsibility, is to unify the patient experience. Whether we do it by owning the full patient engagement experience –i.e., “Engagement Everywhere”- or by providing the necessary tools, the onus is on vendors to make it easy for solutions to be integrated into a cohesive patient experience.
That’s a key distinction. Being one piece of the engagement ecosystem doesn’t remove the burden of integration with other solutions that comprise the patient journey. Onboarding solutions, billing statements, digital engagement, EMR/EHRs, call center systems, patient portals, payment devices, and back-end support systemsall need to work together.
IT healthcare teams are extraordinarily pressed for time and this was exacerbated by the recent pandemic. Like their colleagues on the clinical side, staying on top of the needs of patients and the healthcare organizations they work for is a daunting task. Financial communications technology that is purpose-built to work together and to be open makes it easier for IT teams to manage and integrate, which is better for patients and providers. Integration should be a key buying criteria.
How we got here
Probably the biggest challenge in healthcare engagement and payments today is the pace of change.
Silos in healthcare are another major challenge. Add in the need to do more with less, a move toward systems consolidation, the tremendous pressure to increase payments and reduce costs, and it’s painfully clear: something has to give.
Without integration of multiple systems and products, it’s impossible to meet strategic objectives like optimizing experiences and improving payments. For those with a best of breed strategy, a best of integration strategy must follow. Otherwise, solutions are crudely cobbled together resulting in a disjointed patient experience. That’s why it makes sense to build an open solutions architecture that allows you to plug and play to meet all the patient and system needs.
How do we get there?
It starts with coordinating all the data and bringing it together across disparate systems to make it more actionable. One view of the patient is key. These are the foundational pillarsfor providing a common patient experience. Providers will then be able to do a better job of knowing their patients and not asking questions of the patients when they already should know the answers.
The ultimate goals must be supporting the physical health of patients and how they can meaningfully contribute financially to their own care. Maybe that sounds altruistic coming from someone involved in product development for a major vendor, but it’s truly what I believe.
At the most basic level, we can no longer hold providers hostage with data we’ve collected in our own product-based silos. And we need to integrate in a more real-world fashion. I’m talking about APIs and webhooks, so providers don’t need to wait for a file to come back to learn what happened yesterday. A 24-hour latency period is not acceptable today.
When it comes to payments, flexibility is more important than ever. Patients want to be able to pay using whatever method works best for them: credit cards, Apple Pay, paper checks, whatever. There are many alternative payment methods now and that means building a flexible payment architecture.
It’s the same with patient portals, which can include lots of distinct information: appointment details, lab results, outstanding bills, even wellness program data. In the past all of this disparate data would be driven from different applications that would be a mashup in the portal.
Now it’s critical that various vendors build those applications knowing they will be integrated in a larger system, which means making them open so they can integrate seamlessly, and information can be exchanged in real time. The goal should be reduced latency or even eliminated latency.
Accessibility and security also are key. No matter if a patient is engaging on a tablet, laptop, or phone, they should be able to pull up patient-facing applications easily and securely. Additionally, it is vital to remove barriers to engagement, making information accessible to the patient—when they want it and on whatever device they want to access it—greatly enhances patient engagement, patient satisfaction and improves provider outcomes.
For those of us who go back many years in this industry, it’s clear I’m talking about a major sea change. Older architectures were not built to be open. Recent startups are much more flexible and oriented toward digital, but that only represents a small part of the industry today.
Getting where we need to go as an industry means people need to change as much as architectures and work flows. Ironically, due to the pandemic, we may have reached the tipping point. Change was forced upon us and now there’s an opportunity for everyone, especially vendors, to rethink how things need to work—together.
