Your Digital Front Door – Meeting Consumers Where They Are

A new eHealthcare Strategy & Trends webinar for healthcare marketers and strategists

Presented October 6, 2022

This webinar is free for members of eHealthcare Strategy & Trends

Your Presenter
Ben Dillon, Chief Strategy Officer, Geonetric

Sponsored by Geonetric
This event is free to attend thanks to our sponsor.

Coming out of the pandemic we’re in a very different healthcare world. Consumer expectations for easily and conveniently working with all businesses have leveled-up and healthcare is no exception.

As your organization is developing its plans to improve user experiences on your site and create a digital front door, you need insights into how and where consumers want to engage with healthcare organizations throughout the care journey, what’s important as they select care options, and how you stand up alongside a growing number of healthcare disrupters.

Geonetric’s latest consumer survey delivers just that.

After this webinar, attendees will be able to answer critical questions, including:

• What are consumers’ preferred ways to engage with health organizations throughout their journey?
• How are consumers researching health conditions (and what information your health system needs to be delivering)?
• How has patient loyalty changed and what are the most important factors as patients are making healthcare choices for every healthcare encounter?
• What are consumers’ perspectives on personalized digital experiences in an era of greater awareness of the threats to data privacy?

Your Presenter

Transcript

0:01
Welcome to today's webinar, Your Digital Front Door, Meeting Consumers, where they Are.
0:06
I'm Jane Weber Brubaker, Executive Editor of Plain English Healthcare, or the Publishers of Strategic Healthcare Working in Healthcare Strategy Insurance and producers of the eHealthcare Leadership Awards.
0:17
Geonetrics New Consumer Survey gives us a glimpse into how consumer attitudes have changed over the past two tumultuous years.
0:26
What are consumer preferences and priorities today?
0:29
How the health Systems Stack Up against new market entrants. When it comes to considering new care options like Telehealth.
0:35
How loyal are consumers to providers.
0:38
These are just a few of the survey highlights we'll share with you today.
0:42
And now, I would like to briefly introduce our speaker, Ben Dillon is Chief Strategy Officer of Geonetric.
0:48
A sought after speaker, writer, and blogger. Ben is an Influential Voice in Health Care Marketing, helping organizations embrace online strategies to engage health consumers.
0:59
He serves on the editorial advisory board of eHealthcare Strategy and Trends and is a past president of ....
1:05
Today's presentation will be approximately 45 minutes, followed by a 10 to 15 minute Q&A.
1:10
We'll hold your questions until the end, but feel free to submit them at any time during the presentation.
1:16
Immediately following today's webinar, we'll send out a PDF of the presentation slides, and, in a couple of days, you'll receive the link to view the recording.
1:24
And now, we'd like to turn it over to Ben for today's presentation. Then, please, go ahead.
1:30
Thank you, Jane, and a big thanks to all the folks at healthcare strategy and trends for giving us the opportunity to share our most recent research with all of you. And thanks also for everyone joining us today.
1:42
We're, This is our first opportunity to talk about this and really excited to, to see if it works for you, the way that it's working for us.
1:50
So, wanted to start with a little bit of background on why we put this survey together and, and kind of how we got to here.
1:58
There have been a few trends that we've been watching closely for a, while, you know, while friend, for some of these, like, consumerism has been several years and certainly we're seeing consumerism.
2:12
Being a growing force within Health care, we've also been watching, particularly over the course of the pandemic.
2:19
The way that technology and consumers growing expectations about technologies are impacting how they feel about the things that we're doing and again over the course, the pandemic consumers engaged with brands in ways they never had before through technology was sort of forced upon us. And what does that mean for where we are today in terms of, is health care engaging with consumers this way?
2:46
And then also, as we as we think about where we're going with this stuff, what, what are the places consumers want us to be engaging with them.
2:55
And the third is patient loyalty.
2:56
And I think we've, that's been a little more recent thing that we've been watching closely.
3:03
I think there was some evidence that patient loyalty to care provider organizations was in decline before the pandemic.
3:12
But and then the pandemic hit and a lot of things happen and I think we've all talked about some of these things.
3:17
But it has had a market impact on health care loyalty.
3:25
We coupled that with the growing number of care options available to consumers.
3:30
and the result is just for we're competing more and more for every healthcare dollar out there in ways that I think five years ago wasn't really on our radar.
3:42
So when we put those things together, we see that there's been a shift in the competitive battleground.
3:49
And, increasingly, that shift is to experience that shift is to convenience and then that shifted to the ability to bring solutions to consumers that are grounded in technology and connectivity.
4:05
Now, the term de jour that I think is mostly kicked around for this within healthcare now is the digital front door. If you're attending health care conferences, again, you're hearing a lot of talk about what's underway from the provider side of the equation. And the solution provider equation is we try to adapt to these things.
4:25
But we wanted to understand, the other side of that.
4:27
We really wanted to do some research to understand how healthcare consumers were looking at the range of technologies and communication platforms available now.
4:39
And, and how those consumers want to engage with health systems, why they're making the care choices that they're making.
4:47
And, how do they view this growing range of new competitors that are entering this space as well.
4:53
So, that's, that's, that's sort of what was in our minds as we set up this piece of research and dove in and this is consumer research we used and an online solution to, to gather the little over 600 health care consumer perspectives. Here, it was a, you know, one of these panel, that, the outcome or the platform that we're using puts together. So, you know, there, there is a little bit of a bias admittedly to this.
5:23
You know, people who'd who don't use the internet are very much not represented within us. But for those people who are using the Internet and doing that, this is what we think is a pretty representative sample in a lot of ways.
5:36
Now, we included a number of questions here.
5:38
If you, if you've followed our work on our industry survey work, that we've done many years in the past, We like to cut that data and look at it in some different ways, and understand not just what's going on at a global perspective, but to really understand some of the key groups, and how their behaviors and attitudes are different. And we've done the same thing here. We had a couple of different questions that we looked at to try to see where there might be some granularity there.
6:08
And the two that really jumped out, as we were doing the analysis, was looking at age, age of respondents, and to look at technology adoption patterns. And so, we had, we asked people to self identify, are you an early adopter of new technology, late adopter of new technology, or you're somewhere in the middle of that range?
6:27
And those were the areas where we really saw the, the biggest differences in approach and opinion.
6:34
Now, internally, we sort of expected those two groups, maybe to be pretty similar, in terms of the way they break out, and there's certainly some correlation between them.
6:43
Early Tech adapter groups tend to be a little bit younger. Later, technology adoption groups tend to be a little bit older, but it's certainly not a 1 to 1. We have young people who are not early tech adaptors. You have seniors who are very much on, on the cutting edge, or near the cutting edge of technology and like, the new toys, as well.
7:05
And so, you know, there is some correlation there, but it's it's definitely not 1 to 1 You cannot look at the two groups as entirely the same.
7:14
Now, as you saw in the previous slide, We've got a little bit of extra group within that, that 25 to 44 age group.
7:22
I think about half of respondents found the 25 to 44 age group, So, wouldn't take the, the actual kind of predicted average ages here as gospel in any way, but it gives us an idea of what we're talking about, in terms of what, you know, how these two factors map together. We certainly have some, some age alignment here, but it's, it's absolutely not 1 to 1 here, either.
7:45
So, this is, there's only 1 or 2 situations, where the, you know, some of that, some of that this over representation within that group. As a factor of this, is, this is one of those places, but if we hit any other kind of, call that out at that point as well.
8:02
All right, let's, let's talk about the research itself.
8:05
We decided here to begin with, with the journey, right?
8:10
And so, we've started with a fairly generic healthcare journey, and really wanted to map things along that journey, from a consumer perspective, to understand how they feel about different parts of that journey, and where, from a technology perspective, they felt it was most appropriate to be doing some of the steps in that journey, and then we take individual steps in that journey, and dig in new. It'll make sense as we go along here.
8:37
So this was the journey that we started with right, beginning with self diagnosing and researching care options, You know, getting wait times, actually picking a doctor, doing the scheduling, maybe understanding costs in this, doing your pre appointment paperwork, getting, Reminders, actually, actually having the appointment, holding the appointment.
9:00
And then things that happened after that, right? Some lab results, paying your bill, and then asking questions of the provider of the provider's office between care encounters.
9:11
So, pretty generic journey, but I think Representative of kind of a lot of the core pieces that most people deal with when they're when they're doing this And was, you know, at a level that I think most consumers could, understand without us having to go into a lot of time explaining what different stages look like.
9:30
So we started with this journey, and we began by looking at a number of different interaction channels and said, hey, you know, which of these channels do you prefer using?
9:39
For? these? interactions? To understand where, where consumers will want to be.
9:44
What makes most sense to them, as they as they want to engage with the health system and, and we did definitely find that at different stages of the journey, the preferred channels really moved a lot when you use the website as kind of our baseline data. So, as we throw other lines up here, we'll have one consistent line, so you can, you can kind of compare and contrast as we go through this.
10:08
So, the website overall had kind of the strongest interest as, as a channel to engage. Not individually, for every point was at the highest but over overall was, was the highest for most of this.
10:23
Overwhelmingly, people were starting this journey online, researching issues, self diagnosis, researching care options there. they're doing that through through the web, And then, you know, it kind of varies as we go along here.
10:40
So, for purposes of comparison, let's throw out the phone, right, We think, hey, there's, there's a lot of people who, who still like to pick up the phone.
10:48
And there are, but, at different stages of the process, that channel makes more or less sense, right? So when researching health issues and self diagnosing and things like that, not a lot of interest in the phone as a channel and that makes sense.
11:03
So, you know, I think for most people, unless you're calling maybe a nursing line or something like that, it's not the ideal place to do that kind of discovery work.
11:12
When we get to appointment scheduling, though, we're in a in a virtual tie between the website and the phone phone, maybe taking a little bit of a lead on that point, and when trying to communicate with the care provider or their office, between in person encounters.
11:33
There were some, some interest in the phone there, but you can see throughout the whole process, there were, there were a few places where where there was, there was greater interest rate. You know, just like, there's a lot of telehealth. Now, A lot of people were very open to holding appointments on the phone, but For the most part, people were Not looking at the phone is as the answer to those problems with, with a couple of those exceptions.
12:02
Contrast that with texting. Ryan, you know, we say hey, the young kids love their texting and you know, so many situations you don't, you know, use the text instead of a phone call instead of an e-mail to the center of the other. And again, there's, there's a clear use case here that everyone thought texting was the ideal answer. Right.
12:21
And then that is for appointment reminders, That was, that was clear, clear winner for for using usage for texting.
12:30
For a lot of these other things. A lot less interest, and again, it makes sense.
12:35
People didn't like the idea to some degree of asking questions of the office through texting. That seems like a use case that had some traction out there.
12:46
But while there were, some people who wanted to get the lab results by tax to pay bills by tax, for the most part, interest, in texting across most of this journey, was relatively limited.
12:57
So, you know, 1 or 2 use cases where there's a clear match there, for the most part, probably not, the channel for a lot of these other interactions.
13:10
Mobile apps is another one that we really were curious what the answer would be.
13:14
We're getting to a place where it seems like a lot of organizations are talking a lot about, we need an app, or how do we, how do we build out our app?
13:22
Or, you know, where are the places that we should be adding functionality to something that we may be doing with with my are my chart app or something else out there and apps absolutely Have their place in this mix. I think I've had some people accuse me of being anti app before, and I'm not not true.
13:40
I'm, I'm all for apps, but you just need to align that app technology with the right problems in order to really have a winner here.
13:49
So if you're trying to do an app as a health system for researching health conditions and for self diagnosis, it's going to be a little bit more of a niche audience that's going to be excited about that, and again, it's a, it's not no one, right, It's, but it is certainly a more niche audience.
14:11
Traditional web, ... is a place that that people seem to prefer to do that kind of activity.
14:18
The place where the app really kinda catches up with some other things, and maybe get some some traction, is at the point when, maybe we have appointment scheduling, or when we have appointment reminders.
14:32
Right in, I see that is the point where there's a real relationship there between the health system and the consumer.
14:41
Right, the, when the consumer starts putting on that patient hand, it makes more sense for them to be using an app did something else and again, it makes a certain amount of sense. There are a number of additional hoops that you need to jump through.
14:56
When you're using an app, right, you need to go out and find it. You need to download it, it takes up space on your phone.
15:03
You need to go and open it most of the time, you know, there's usually some level of onboarding involved. People need to be invested in this experience, So, that makes sense.
15:14
When that consumer has a need for it, when there can committed to this relationship at some level.
15:22
But, consumers aren't going to go out in, do all those additional steps for every care option that might exist in their market.
15:30
They have to have a certain amount of engagement that, you know, they really kind of have to be in that patient mode for the most part, before, they're really going to get excited about that. And it makes a lot of sense for that interaction happen.
15:46
All right, so, we now, I'm gonna pick some of the steps along that journey and dig in a little bit more deeply, and we're going to start at the top there, We're researching health information, looking at how consumers research that health information. So, we asked when, when they're researching health conditions online, how likely are they to use each of these following channels. And, you know, we just simply have not likely, somewhat likely very likely.
16:13
Uh, consumers use a lot of different channels during new searches.
16:19
While there are a lot of channels in use, though, the search engines certainly dominate.
16:24
It does seem to continue to be the place where people overwhelmingly are starting this kind of search out there, um.
16:35
That isn't really a surprise, I think that's been the answer that we've seen for quite a while here, but there is a question about you know, a certain number of people will search on Google for instance And just get the answer on Google without having to go anywhere else.
16:47
Most people are clicking off, and, you know, using some other sites to then further explore that topic.
16:55
So, um, know, where they go. It seems like there's a, a biased towards some national healthcare information, sites, things like web indi.
17:09
There is a bias towards some of the condition specific sites, things like Diabetes, or cancer dot org.
17:17
And so, those, those tend to be sort of preferred first and foremost when people are doing this kind of research.
17:27
Interestingly.
17:30
Down at the low end of the list, you know, we look at voice search, even like social media, they're at the bottom of the list, but still, we had more than 50% of respondents say, hey, I'm somewhat likely or very likely to be using this at some point in my career.
17:46
So, even the ones where, where, where they fall lower on the list, it doesn't mean that they're not getting use, but they're not going to use equally across all of these.
18:00
Now, local hospitals and health systems fell kind of squarely in the middle.
18:04
Interestingly, felt a little below National Hospital and Health System websites, like mayo clinic dot com, That was a little bit of a surprise to us. Although I think we we then had some debate about whether Mayo clinic dot com is really viewed as a general healthcare information site. And in the same way, maybe maybe crosses categories and wasn't the best example that was there.
18:25
But what does this mean for what, what you may be doing with your digital efforts?
18:30
Well, I think this kind of information gives us, you know, that causes us to take a step back and say, Where, where do we play? What role do we play as, as a Health System website?
18:44
Is it the most useful thing for us to have a comprehensive health library? Is that a role that we should be playing? Or is that role covered somewhere else more effectively? Or if we're going to use it, how do we use it in a way that it makes sense as part of the journey that we're creating?
19:02
So, let's look a little bit here at who's using what channels we scored. We scored that stuff out because it's difficult to have too many different dimensions on one graph and we looked at some of those different breakouts that we talked about. So, you know, the age group breakouts and the tech adoption breakouts, and I pulled just a selection of those out.
19:21
So we've got overall here in the middle, we've got early adopter, 18 to 24. They tend to be higher up. They've pretty high interest in many, many of these different research options.
19:36
And we had, you know, our seniors are 65 plus group and are late technology adopters and, you know, they tended to be a little bit less interested in, in pretty much all of these technology options.
19:49
Whoa, not yet an uninteresting, Not uninteresting, but certainly, a lower level of interest kind of across the board and all these different technologies.
19:58
Um, they pretty much all started to start a search engine, though, so if we start over there on the left, everyone is, you know, if they're going to use digital to do this, they're pretty much starting with the search engine, just the beginning part here. Young consumers do show a bit of a bias towards some health system sourced information over general purpose health information sites or condition specific sites.
20:26
It was kind of a difference to the pattern from some of the other groups that we looked at, though.
20:31
Um, the, the seniors, the late tech adopters, they really do fall off in their interest levels as we proceed along kind of this spectrum here, though, right there, they're starting at search engines, And maybe you have some interest in general health information sites. Maybe your local health site, to some extent. But by then, we've really started to see the interest level dropped off by fairmount. Once we get to some of the shiny objects, right, those social media voice search, they've, they've largely lost interest.
21:04
But, even again, even though, the overall numbers for something like social media are not as strong, when we look at early adopters, there's still, there's still quite strong install, a lot of them using those technologies as part of their search process.
21:21
And they're much more likely to be using a wide, wide range of these different technologies, more different kinds of websites out there as they're doing the research.
21:33
True down then, too.
21:36
How consumers are Selecting Care Options, right?
21:39
How do consumers, hec What's important to them in that process?
21:46
So we asked, When you last site care, how important were different factors out there?
21:51
We looked at the relative importance, and the results broke into a few different tiers.
21:58
If you will, at the top of that, we had sort of what we're thinking of, is the must haves, right?
22:05
If the provider doesn't take my insurance, they're not really in my consideration set if they don't have appointments available or if it's not obvious, they have appointments available.
22:14
That pretty much out of my consideration set, Right. So, pretty quickly, they start to filter down to the group of providers that they're even really looking at or evaluating in this process.
22:28
Interesting to us, though. The next set of items here was price and quality.
22:33
And health care, in general has been, has been decent at presenting quality information.
22:40
Bye.
22:41
The availability of pricing information in ways that is really meaningful to consumers is still a pretty big challenge for most healthcare organizations.
22:52
I was also pretty surprised that provider ratings and reviews wasn't in the mix with these. I think we've tended to think of those things altogether.
23:02
And you know, is kinda the transparency stool, if you will, the three legged stool there. And really, they, that felt quite a bit further down the list there.
23:17
Another surprise in this mix is that convenience was really the next set of information, the next set of criteria there, right? So, beyond the ability to see prices or understand what my costs are going to look like.
23:31
Kind of quality kind of information, Um, you know, is it a good location, are they open the hours that I want them to be?
23:39
Is it easy to make appointments search for options?
23:45
There was sort of that next grouping there.
23:48
And most importantly, was above, things like the existing relationship with the doctor and the ratings and reviews from other consumers, right? And so, you know, this is, I think, a different way for us to think about things here, as we talk about that health care loyalty challenge.
24:10
This is, this is that Healthcare Loyalty Challenge, right? The fact that I've got a relationship with the doctor is now maybe less important to me.
24:17
Then are they opening on the evenings, right, I will, I will go somewhere where they're open in the evenings, even if it's not my doctor because it's more convenient for me and that's, this may be one of the shifts that we've seen here over the course of the last couple of years.
24:36
Then, finally, all of that information that we have on providers kinda came in at the bottom right?
24:44
The availability of telehealth, your personal information, maybe the ratings and reviews here.
24:50
Um, you know, the doctors, photos and videos, things like that, you know, we tend to put a lot of effort into those and I'm not sure that we shouldn't sell, but it is definitely further down the list and all these other things.
25:02
Now, from a marketer's perspective, most of us don't have an opportunity to really design the product so to speak, right. We don't. We don't get to decide what insurance they they take. We don't get to pick where the locations are.
25:19
So when it comes to where we have the opportunity to really go out and sell our providers and their availability, this is where that's going to happen.
25:32
I think what comes clear to me through this is, you know, it's sort of that lipstick on a pig thing.
25:37
You, you can't fix fundamental issues you might have with the product, through better marketing.
25:45
However, other things being equal, this may be a place where a lot of that combat, actually, or who that competition actually plays out.
26:01
All right, so the last time you saw care, how important are each of these factors?
26:07
We scored this out and again, this is ordered by importance, so we've we've scored this out so that we can look at the breakout for these other groupings out here.
26:19
So, again, as we look at our Are laggards are Late technology adopters, everything kind of came out less important.
26:31
They were they were less excited about all of these things.
26:34
Um, the H groups really kind of start fairly clustered together though, Um, and really don't start to break out until we get to things like scheduling appointments online, right? That was the first place where that 65 plus group really started to drop off and interest.
26:54
Up until that point across age groups.
26:57
You know, accepting of insurance and pricing transparency and convenience, those things were all pretty closely, pretty closely aligned pretty tightly clustered there when we get to the ability to schedule appointments.
27:09
So, that was a place where the older group became less excited about it, and it's also a place where that there's technology adopters, sort of dropped off a little bit more, as well.
27:27
I'll call your attention also, to this existing relationship between providers, sorry.
27:34
There are existing relationship with providers, so, again, this is, this is far down the list, in terms of total priorities.
27:44
But as we see, when this is graphed out in this way, you know, the total Drop Office is not that big. And honestly, this is a place where our 65 plus group actually kinda has has a big jump up there. They're much more interested in this. It's a place where the technology laggards come back a little bit in terms of their their score here as well.
28:08
And so, it is interesting that it falls so far down the list, but at the same time, there's, there's less gap there between some of our different audiences. There's less variation there between our audiences, in terms of how important they feel this is.
28:25
The areas where we didn't see those big gaps, the availability of telehealth appointments, online scheduling, doctor photos and videos, and then ageist, the ability to schedule appointments online as well.
28:41
So, these were, these were all areas where we did see really big differences in behavior between folks like those early technology adopters and see the late technology adopters or our senior audience.
29:00
So, this leads us to kinda the natural question, how, how much are people changing providers out there?
29:07
Why are they changing?
29:08
You know, it's it's this core loyalty question, again, there's not a single accepted way to look at patient loyalty, right? It's not, it's not that clearly defined out there. I've seen different research over a number of years, trying to look at this question, they've all approached a little bit differently.
29:24
So, we looked at consumers receiving care from new providers or new health systems over the past two years.
29:34
And, again, wanted to get a better understanding of how much of that was going on, and why it's happening.
29:40
And just because someone's seeing a new provider doesn't necessarily mean that there's a loyalty challenge there, but in many cases, we found that that, that was, that was true.
29:52
So, right off the bat, 43% of consumers in the survey received care from a new provider or a new health system in the past two years.
30:02
And I felt like a lot to us.
30:07
But when we did some of the breakouts, the early tech doctors, it was, that number was even higher was more than more than half of that group actually received care from the new provider health system in the past few years.
30:21
So we asked why, and we had, this is an open-ended question, so, you know, we had to go through and encode those answers.
30:28
Not everyone's answers were, we're always presented in the same way, but there were a couple of themes that jumped out as sort of our top two things.
30:38
The first one doesn't necessarily indicate a loyalty challenge, right?
30:43
People's health care needs change, Right? So this could be a new diagnosis, it could be an injury, it could be a disease.
30:50
It could be a referral from someone's primary care physician through any number of reasons there.
30:57
People may have seen a new doctor, because they, they just had a new challenge, and the required someone that they weren't seeing already.
31:05
So, you know that, that's a normal piece of the puzzle and not something that's really a cause for concern.
31:12
The second major theme that we saw, and really, these were, in terms of the number of times, we saw these were very, very close, Was a general desire for something better, or something different?
31:24
Right, and, again, people approached this.
31:27
If you've coded open-ended answers, I don't mean they approach this in a lot of her ways. So, we had some very specific things, right?
31:34
She wouldn't give me pain meds, and maybe either there's, there's other problems besides which, which care provider they're seeing there, but most were much more general, right. We had a lot of people saying, I was looking for something better. I was looking for better service.
31:49
I needed better options, or it was time to try something new, right, so there was a certain degree of people who know without necessarily having a Very clear distinct. This is the one reason why? If you could fix parking, I would. I would come back kind of thing.
32:06
Um, but they were just indicating, Hey, like, I'm just not happy with what I'm getting here, and it was time for me to look at some other options out there.
32:16
And we did a lot of other items that, you know, popped up within that list as well. And some of them could could fit into one of those themes also, but we kept them separate. Because from a coding perspective, it felt it felt right to do that.
32:31
We had a number of people who moved, or in some cases where their providers' offices moved, we had a lot of things related to price cost payment.
32:42
Right, so people's insurance, changing, or for some other reason, their provider no longer took their insurance, again, that was, that was number one on the list.
32:52
Previously, if you don't take my insurance, I'm not going to continue to see you as a provider, The world of other references to price and cost though.
33:01
And it did seem like some of that was an inability to know what the price was And some of that was just that, that the cost of some of the routine things that people were looking for was too high from whatever their traditional provider was.
33:15
We also had a surprising number of consumers where, it was sort of like the doctor abandoned them, right, The document's away. The doctor retired, the doctor died, the doctors leaving medical practice. And, you know, certainly, in any given year, you'd have some of that.
33:31
Out of, you know, 600 people who took the survey, and, you know, the portion of those, the 40% that, that changed providers, or saw a new provider, during that time?
33:42
We had maybe 30 or 35 that were in this bucket.
33:45
It was this, a surprisingly large number of folks, who had to find a new doctor, because their existing doctor went away.
33:54
So, you know, I think it's an indication of what a lot of us are seeing from the other side.
33:59
When there's a lot of staffing challenges, doctors have been more mobile, doctors leaving practice, doctors, you know, retiring, you know, a lot of those sorts of things. I will just tell you there that's being felt by consumers as well.
34:14
And there are certainly some people requesting a need for greater convenience and that expresses itself in a lot of different ways, including people seeking telehealth options we put in that bucket as well.
34:31
We also dug into an area that all referred to here is personalization and privacy.
34:39
And we're really looking at a couple of different questions here.
34:41
one, to understand if consumers saw the lack of personalization in most healthcare websites as being a problem. Right now, are they frustrated?
34:52
When we're not personalizing the experience, are they frustrated if we're not tailoring the digital experience to them individually in some way?
35:03
Do they frankly expect us to be doing that? Do they want us to be doing that?
35:08
And do they trust health care organizations to protect their information through this process?
35:14
And, again, this is questions that we hear from health systems that are thinking about this all the time.
35:20
They don't know to what extent consumers want this.
35:23
We get A, we have a very vocal group of people out there who are very insistent upon privacy and are very concerned about privacy. We're not sure if that group is large enough to make people unhappy.
35:36
If we have to use some information about the consumer in order to personalize the experience, so we wanted to dig into this and get a sense of how much these things are really a factor for actual consumers out there.
35:49
Started with that frustration question, raise a frustrating, when healthcare websites show recommended information or actions that aren't relevant to me.
35:57
And, so, the answer is yes, and me, for the most part, people were, we're frustrated by that.
36:05
Two thirds of respondents indicated that they're frustrated with health care websites, show irrelevant information, or irrelevant calls to action. There is some correlation here, with tech adoption.
36:19
All right, almost three quarters of early adopters were in this boat, whereas, you know, that much, much, much lower for our late technology adopters here, not as much of a clear pattern going on from an age perspective here.
36:36
So this, this represents, the problem, write frustration with, this is the problem, The solution, we think, is to create experiences that are more targeted, more personalized.
36:49
However, I think there's been a lot of concern, right?
36:52
There's, again, a very vocal group of folks out there who are very concerned about collecting data about people who are using the web for healthcare research and things like that.
37:04
You know, there's, there's concern that personalization can get creepy very, very quickly.
37:09
It's the things that are fine for travel, the things that are fine, for retail and other spaces where people may be engaging with this stuff and really want these technologies.
37:18
Do they have the same concerns with health care?
37:22
And so, you know, so we asked a second question here really saying, hey, like, do you expect us to be personalizing the experience?
37:33
And again, you know, here, the answer was a pretty resounding yes, Consumers want personalized healthcare web experiences.
37:40
Nearly four out of five consumers either agreed or strongly agreed, that they expect health care websites to personalize their experience.
37:48
And while again, these these percent didn't correlate really cleanly with age, they do very, very closely to technology adoption patterns. So more than 90% of folks who begin self identifying this early tech adopters want personalized health care web experiences.
38:06
For late adopters, it's barely more than 50% of the as 50, 50, 152%.
38:12
We're in that boat.
38:14
So, you know, we certainly still have variation here.
38:17
But even even the people who are in that late adoption category, more than half of them didn't want this kind of personalization.
38:27
And when they didn't want it, the reaction was not unhappiness rate is not strong disagreement. It's indifference.
38:35
Right?
38:36
Only 2% disagreed less than 1% strongly disagreed that this was something they wanted. So, you know, there's there's a large number of people who say, yes, I want it.
38:47
There's a modest number of people who say, I don't really care, There are very few people who say, I actively don't want you personalizing my experience, here. So, I think this was a pretty resounding voted in the affirmative for desiring personalized experiences out there.
39:05
Then, if we're going to personalize the experience, we need to be working with a lot more data about these, these consumers.
39:12
And so, there has been a concern about, um, you know, do people have more concerned about the, the ability of health care organizations to protect the privacy of that information? And, is that something that's going to get in the way?
39:26
And, again, here, 73% of consumers indicated that they largely trust health or health care websites to protect this information.
39:35
Um, A large number.
39:38
It does leave no more than one in four who have, are again, either indifferent or have some concerns around it, but for the most people, for the most part, consumers do trust us to be managing this information appropriately.
39:55
Interesting to me, and again, you know, we, we've been looking at the fact that early tech, adaptors and age do not always correlate.
40:03
Young consumers and 18 to 24 age group express the greatest concerns, again, amongst age groups, at least, about trust in its information, less than 60% indicated that they trusted health care websites to protect this appropriately.
40:21
This was very, very close to what we saw amongst the late technology doctor groups which was just a smidge lower.
40:28
I think 57%, expressed that they have that trust, and that's still more than half in both cases.
40:34
And the next step was largely kind of indifference, not unhappiness.
40:39
But it was clearly the area where we had the most concern about these topics.
40:46
The highest level of trust, here, again, with those early technology adopters.
40:49
They tend to the most confident in, in our ability to protect, they're the most excited about, the prospects of having some of this, personalization.
41:01
They're the ones who are willing to try new things, and, and, you know, are trusting that. That's going to be OK.
41:12
On the topic of trust, we also wanted to understand a little bit more about how much consumers trust some of the new players that were entering the space.
41:25
We have more and more different places that consumers can get care now than ever before.
41:33
This was a tough one to figure out how to ask the question, right? Because each of these different startups, or, you know, pharmacies, or Wal-Mart, they're all doing different things, But something that's fairly consistent throughout, most of them is some sort of a telehealth component.
41:50
So, we use that as kind of that the consistent bar, upon which to rate all, all of these different options that existed out there.
41:59
And so, our, you know, we were looking for, this is a general. how much do I trust these people giving me your question, but we actually asked it in the lens of telehealth.
42:09
So, rate your comfort of getting care through telehealth by one of these different players.
42:18
So, we've got both, you know, incumbent players, the local health system.
42:25
You know, we're seeing the insurance companies come in and offering more and more care options directly to their members.
42:32
We're seeing other kind of adjacent health care organizations, pharmacies.
42:37
In particular, it very involved in urgent care and primary care.
42:44
But we're also, again, seeing more new entrants to this field, right. Retail brands, Wal-Mart, has made a huge push. Amazon's made some key acquisitions to try to get more and more into this space.
42:58
We're also seeing like established health care brands out there, reaching out and using some of these new technologies to expand that footprint.
43:07
And of course, we're seeing tech firms and new startups kind of get involved there as well.
43:12
Um, Today, local health systems still have something of an advantage from a trust perspective.
43:20
Right, The relationship does exist, The brand is known, as gotten care, and, therefore, it is the place that has the greatest level of trust today.
43:30
Will say, though, that the difference, particularly between my local health care system and my insurance company, was smaller than we would, that we then anticipated, we thought that there would be a greater gap there.
43:45
Even as these things fall off, we do see that, you know, pharmacies in particular are also very competitive from this perspective.
43:53
Um, and over time, we'll really have to watch to see if some of these newer, incumbent's, people coming from other spaces can make up that, that trust gap.
44:03
Or, how do they get people to use the product once or twice to gain that confidence, and that's, I think, the challenge that they face right now.
44:13
Again, we kind of square these out, so we can break this out into some different segments here because that advantage that we see for local health systems, not surprisingly, is inconsistent across all of our consumer groups.
44:28
So at the outset here, for some reason, my overall line disappeared on this one at the outset here.
44:35
Seniors and late tech adopters just have a lower level of comfort in telehealth, no matter who's delivering it, right?
44:43
So, they're, they're closer to a lot of the other groups in terms of, you know, they're interested in the local health care system or the insurance company.
44:52
It does fall off really fast as we look at their confidence and some of these other players out there.
44:59
Um.
45:02
Interestingly, many of the groups here have some higher confidence in their insurance company.
45:11
Then, even in their local providers, right, That was true 65 plus That's true, a Lotus smaller extent to those late technology adopters.
45:21
But for some of those audiences, the uh, the trust level amongst the insurance company is equal to or a little bit better than even the local healthcare system.
45:34
For seniors, in fact, this was by a pretty wide margin.
45:37
The highest level of comfort that they had here was with their insurance company out there.
45:44
Now, early adopters, as we might expect, are the most comfortable with all of these options out there.
45:52
We might expect our young group to follow suit.
45:57
They do lag a little bit behind across the board.
45:59
Interestingly, though, their local health system was almost their lowest item here. Or maybe it was almost the lowest item here, in terms of their trust, maybe below only new startup companies there. So, they don't come in with a relationship, they often don't have a lot of experience with somebody's health care providers.
46:21
They do have a lot of experience with a lot of these other players who are offering them options now.
46:27
So, I think it falls to the health systems to do the confidence building with that younger audience, to get to a place where they're as comfortable receiving care from you as they might be from, from Wal-Mart, or from CVS, or from their insurance company.
46:48
All right. So, hopefully this, this data has been useful to you.
46:52
We have more information in the actual report that I think, healthcare strategy trends, I think there's also sending out the full, the full report to you. But we do have some time for some questions and answers here, as well.
47:12
We come back online now. That was group. And it's always interesting to hear these, these survey results, and especially the differences between the age groups. So it has been said, we'll be sending a link to the survey.
47:21
So you can download the complete study, you'll get that in the e-mail that you get up in the webinar, So we do have a bunch of questions. So let's, let's get to that.
47:29
How about the questions here?
47:34
OK, it says, It seems like there's a lot of interest in text.
47:38
It's low in the survey, but a lot of organizations are interested in sending texts. So, do you think there's a disconnect in that?
47:46
I think we need to be really careful that the way that we're using these technologies is, is being driven by consumer interest in consumer demand. Again, it seems like the low hanging fruit on this is appointment reminders, and I think a lot of organizations have been using it in that way.
48:03
Um, no.
48:05
I think, I think I would be cautious using Texting in a lot of those other applications without going out and really doing some research with consumers to see if that's something that they're excited about.
48:19
Or Continuing, at least, to have other options that the consumer can can select as their way of of engaging around some of those things. So, I think, you know, a lot of us have gotten frustrated because we get so many e-mails every day for everyone that it becomes a little bit overwhelming.
48:37
Texts have been a little bit more, I think of a protected world. And I think, you know, people are a little bit concerned that they're, they're going to end up in that same place with text messages.
48:47
That they have bandwidth with some other communication channels where they just get so overwhelmed that it's, it's hard to tease out the things that, uh, that they really are interested in out there.
49:00
That's just an spam, OK, so, given the insurance companies, keep coming up, and people's interest in having, they're curious, is the top of the list there, how should healthcare marketers respond?
49:14
How can insurance be part of the patient experience?
49:19
I mean, I think that's a fair question right away, and we're really looking at it.
49:24
Mostly from the perspective of, do we have to worry about what insurance companies are doing or if people trust their insurance companies as an alternative?
49:33
I know many, many people are signing up for their annual insurance and they get information about, you know, telehealth for urgent care kinds of applications and things of that nature.
49:45
All that, of course, you know, presents a, an alternative, a competitive alternative to primary care options that may already exist out there.
49:55
I do think that, you know, there's a number of kind of bigger strategies that health systems can engage in there, right?
50:01
If you are, uh, working closely with some of your insurance companies, are there opportunities for you to be providing some of those services to them.
50:11
Or, if you kind of recognize that they're, you know, that urgent care level or that, that quick care level, if there's a lot of different alternatives out there that people are going to engage with.
50:22
Whether that's through, again, pharmacies or it's through, you know, standalone urgent cares or it's through something that insurance companies in the market are offering out there.
50:36
How do you make sure that when they're forwarding people on for, know, for specialty care, and for follow up, and for other things that aren't appropriate for those environments, that you're within their option set? And that, that means understanding who the players in your market are.
50:56
And some of them, again, are, or not, are not physical, you know, physical properties.
51:02
And so, you need to really understand, what are people being handed during the benefits process?
51:07
Where, you know, what are the things that are, that people feel are in their options set out there in that, and work with those folks to make sure that they understand?
51:17
Um, what services are appropriate to send to you when it goes beyond what they can do within that urgent care environment, or that telehealth environment.
51:27
Or, you know, if there's, if there's no additional levels of care, follow up, that are required there.
51:35
Partners, Partner, it seems to be extra energy.
51:37
I think in a lot of these areas, seems like price is the, the underlying reason they're so interested in insurance. Until price transparency then, becomes like a bigger issue, too, for people to pay attention to. I mean, certainly want to have a competitive factors writing.
51:50
You know, a lot of these places are offering a much more limited set of services.
51:56
But, if you, if that's the service you need, understanding very clearly that this is going to be $35, or $50, or whatever that number is, Versus walking in, and really not knowing, or understanding when it's going to be let alone, Being competitive on what your costs look like for those consumers. I think, I think, is, a huge reason why, why people are moving to some of these other alternatives, while, why they will pick them first.
52:25
So, to the extent that you can provide some of that transparency around the areas that are well defined, I think it's, you know, it's a good competitive move for a lot of organizations. We're not seeing a lot of that going on right now.
52:39
We could turn to see this.
52:42
This whole question.
52:45
Um, it's not showing up. It seems like a good kind of so that it's gotten, if you could re-enter the question. seems to have gotten cut off. So I can't I can't see the rest of the road as good for you.
52:59
All right, let's go back.
53:02
What services or options do you think people had in mind when they wanted to quote something better?
53:08
People wanted better care, or they wanted something different or better?
53:13
I think it's a good question, and I knew it'd be great if we had the opportunity to follow up with those folks and get a little bit more out of them.
53:20
But, you know, I think I interpreted that to be sort of a level of indifference about their care that was sufficient, that they just decided anything else is fine, too. Right?
53:34
So, you know, we know that there are a lot of organizations out there trying to create great experiences and building real loyalty with their, their consumers, with their buyers through that process. And we tend to be focused on a lot of things in healthcare.
53:51
But, experience for some organizations is making it on that list, but for a lot of organizations, it hasn't been walking through what that whole experience looks like and can really tailor it out.
54:02
Um, to me, it was.
54:04
It was good reminder that that are good validation.
54:09
that experience is the place where a lot of this stuff is happening, but, you know, the people would get care and at the end of it, they wouldn't necessarily feel that strongly about the experience that they've had.
54:22
So it's not it's not.
54:25
It is frustratingly non-specific, but.
54:31
But but, you know, I think as we looked at it, we really felt like it was it was an indication that somewhere within this, we're failing to create that, that stickiness and that loyalty in the process and whether that's that communication, um, approach of the particular provider that was involved.
54:51
Whether it was other parts of the experience, right?
54:54
I mean, we get a lot of data through other, you know, patient surveys that the health systems are running and things like that.
55:01
I think no organizations can dig in and say, what is it that makes the experience kind of mess four for consumers here?
55:09
Or where is it that they're, they're not feeling that, that you're finding in that connection.
55:16
If your organization is not sort of taking that data and actively working to, to try and work on the experiences that you're creating as a result, I think, you're probably missing out on Africa.
55:30
So just the key takeaway there is, there'll be no, I did get Scott's question when it came to consumers wanting convenient hours.
55:38
Were there any findings as specifically called out the ability on weekends?
55:43
So yeah, we didn't think that deep. We're We're covering a lot of ground, and we really wanted to keep the length of the survey manageable. So, So we did not, we did not get into that level of detail.
55:56
You know, we really put in that, Hey, like our appointments available or they convenient.
56:01
We wanted to keep it at a level where we weren't trying to deal with individual situations, but kind of look at sort of the, the broader trends of, of, you know, Are we, are we putting things where, where people need?
56:14
I would also say, you know, one of the things that we, we looked at as SA, possible way, that we could split things that got a little too complicated. And, you know, wasn't, wasn't necessarily being really clear, was things like geography.
56:29
And looking at rural and urban, and some things like that.
56:32
And we just weren't able to pull it together with some of the structures that we had in the data, But we certainly know from work that we do with health systems, that two different health systems.
56:44
Like what makes convenience in different markets with different people, is often not the same.
56:49
So, you know, I think that that is a great question to be asking in your own research to be understanding your consumers and the audiences that you serve.
57:00
You know, we see convenience in different ways. Looking, you know, we have some, some places where it's just hard to get around.
57:08
And so, you know, if you're in a big city and trafficks terrible, and things like that, you know, convenient convenient to me. It's a very different thing.
57:17
In some cases, whereas, you know, in some markets, it's really mostly about hours of operation and some of those kinds of things.
57:25
So, lots of different factors, but I think I think at a certain level of detail, it's going to be different from health system to health system and, and if you've got a big footprint, maybe from Market To Market your org, OK, so one of the things that the survey does address is age differences. So given that there are some big gaps and how different age groups behave or what they're interested in, Do you have any recommendations on how to address each group?
57:51
All of them have health needs.
57:54
Yeah, all of them have needs.
57:55
You know, I think, no.
57:58
There's a lot of focus, right now on on digital front door efforts. There's a lot of focus on how do we build things that are really going to connect with consumers.
58:08
And I think our thinking on this was to understand that the consumers aren't all the same, and that the needs of those different groups are going to be different.
58:17
So, first off, I think there is a need to make sure that the traditional channels that we have for communicating, those aren't gonna go away. Right?
58:25
You know, even even though phone rated low and a lot of areas. I think the ability to call your doctor's office when you have a challenge, that's that's not likely something that should go away.
58:36
But it'd be great if we could supplement it. Because a lot of people would prefer not to call, or, you know, we would opt not to call if it was, if it was easier, Faster, more convenient, right?
58:47
And so, um, when you're designing experiences around particular services, I think you can really look at who is it that you're trying to reach with those services, and use some of this data to identify where, where is makes the most sense to connect with them?
59:08
Right?
59:09
If you've got, you know, service areas that are are really focused on, know, teens and young adults, like that's just going to be, again, I think that the data shows, there's just different places to connect with them. New. there's more interest in engaging in social media, there's more interest in, you know, using some different kinds of technology for connecting there. They're more comfortable with certain things.
59:32
If you've got services that are really targeted at 65 plus, I think there are places where you can put technology in there. And there are certainly seniors who are very excited to be embracing that technology. We need to make sure that you're offsetting that with some other options, because you may have a larger portion of those groups that that aren't, aren't necessarily as open, to adopting some of those things in the process.
59:56
So, just understanding the audience, and targeting and segmenting correctly. So, we have one quick question before we can close it out, and it has to do with the sample size. So, can you get back to the slide with the sample size? Looks like it's in the slide.
1:00:14
Yeah. It had the breakout of the, the age groups.
1:00:20
Yeah.
1:00:22
So, we had 601 consumer responses that ended up in in the results.
1:00:30
Um, we did have, as I mentioned, a little bit of over representation in that 25 to 44 age group.
1:00:38
Our tech adoption was pretty spread, maybe not surprisingly, we were a little under represented in our late tech adaptors, because they maybe are less likely to be taking online surveys and engaging online in this way.
1:00:50
Um.
1:00:57
Do the comments about it.
1:00:58
Did you freeze? Did I know that? I didn't know. I didn't know if there was something more specific that they were, they were curious about. It just missed the beginning of the Just want to just see what the, what the, the, the, the book has a little bit more break out of some of the, details of the, demographics, of the people and things of that nature.
1:01:21
More in the in the full report.
1:01:23
OK, Sounds good, So, there's all the time we have for questions, and, so, I'd like to thank Ben, there was a great presentation once again.
1:01:30
Thank you to do the trick for sponsoring today's webinar. So, keep an eye out for the PDF of the presentation slides. You'll get it right after the webinar, and you receive the link to access the recording as soon as it's been processed. And it usually takes a couple of days.
1:01:43
Next webinar will be on October 25th. And it's building that brand reputation through digital platforms, a physician marketing approach. So, I'd like to thank you for attending today's webinar. Enjoy the rest of your day, and we hope to see you at our next webinar.