Essential Guide to Digital Patient Experience Transformation

May 22, 2023

5 fundamental steps to accelerate digital PX innovation

Prior to COVID-19, leading healthcare organizations had taken steps to digitalize patient experience (PX). But the pandemic catapulted “digital transformation” from boardroom buzzword to industry imperative. As patients, caregivers, and healthcare leaders align on a new normal—where telehealth is flourishing and consumer platforms like Google My Business are lifelines for communication—organizations that lack a robust, well-defined digital transformation strategy will lose ground to consumer-focused competitors.

Today, digital transformation is vital for healthcare leaders looking to drive patient satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. Patients evaluate the full spectrum of their experience, not just the episode of care. But 50% encounter friction before they even see a doctor. Delivering world-class PX hinges on continually collecting patient feedback, measuring sentiment, and improving every step of the patient journey—and thereby improving the overall quality of care. Digital transformation is a key building block of this new patient experience, helping healthcare organizations understand patient behaviors, expectations, wants, and needs like never before.

What Is Patient Experience?

Today, "patient experience” has taken a much broader definition. While historically patient experience was thought of as what happens inside your walls, organizations must view true PX more holistically, including what happens before and after an episode of care.

5 Essential Steps to Accelerate Digital Patient Experience (PX) Transformation

1. Digitalize Data Capture: Digital engagement tools statistically yield a higher volume of responses, representing a greater cross section of the population and providing the data needed for more powerful and deeper insights.
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2. Collect Real-Time Patient Feedback Across the Digital Journey: The rise of digital touchpoints in the patient journey opens an invaluable opportunity to capture real-time data beyond the episode of care—revealing actionable insights into patient acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.
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3. Segment for Rich, Meaningful Data: Get to know the human behind the data. Every data point is a person. Deeper data analysis by demographic helps you understand and care for them as individuals.
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4. Build and Optimize the Digital Patient Care Journey: Drive patient acquisition by digitalizing every step. Then earn trust by streamlining the journey to care and all points of access.
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5. Integrate Analytics and Action: Connect patient experience feedback to the employee experience (EX) and other data points across the organization. Understand the end-to-end patient experience as well as the experience of the staff providing care to drive sustainable improvement.
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The patient experience landscape has changed. The pandemic realities of the last few years have fused with shifting consumer preferences, expediting the need for total digital transformation. CXOs have a massive opportunity to revolutionize their relationship with consumers and lead the next generation of patient experience.

These five pillars support digital transformation and improving patient experience sustainably as healthcare evolves along with patient and consumer expectations. Digitally transforming the patient experience is key to staying on the cutting edge of patient and consumer trends—and making massive improvements to the patient and healthcare employee journeys.