Decades ago, the health care system operated in one dimension: You’d see your family doctor, who’d examine you, make a diagnosis, issue a prescription and possibly give you the name of a specialist for a followup. There was little choice and almost no other information readily available.
Today, we live in a multidimensional health care world that’s placing increasing responsibility on people to make their own health care choices. The internet has flooded us with medical information. Health care is available from more places, including urgent care centers and new businesses aiming to take the friction out of the process for a seamless experience, like Capsule or Hims. Recent laws are creating more price transparency, and insurance companies are increasing deductibles, hoping that if patients have to spend their own money they’ll buy only the care they need.
People need a guide to this complex landscape. But the person who once filled that role — the family doctor — is no longer the go-to entry point to the health care system. In a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 26% of adults said they didn’t have a family care provider. Of them, nearly half (45%) were 18- to 29-year-olds.
This shift is due to more than just changes in insurance and regulation. Patients — especially millennials — are seeking speed and convenience. They don’t want to wait days for an appointment and then lose more time in a waiting room. Urgent care centers, chain-drugstore clinics and even emergency rooms can get them treatment and a prescription faster and more easily.
But whatever the cause, the burden falls on the patients. They’re making more choices with more unfiltered information, and it’s not clear which trusted authority they should turn to.
Welcome to the Age of Self-Serve Health Care.
It’s looking a lot more like the consumer goods marketplace than the health care sector — more competitive and transparent, with choices in the hands of non-experts. To succeed, health care brands will need to learn from consumer brands, adopting new strategies and priorities in their marketing and communications. Here are three ways to start that change:
1. Make the customer experience personal.
Imagine buying a cell phone and, a week later, it stops charging. You want to go back to the store where you bought it, but you have to wait weeks for an appointment. There’s a customer care hotline, but it’s only available during working hours when you don’t have time to call. And there’s an online forum, but you have to register and get a welcome packet in the mail before you can use it.
That’s three customer service channels — none of them helpful. For patients who might be confused or depressed by a new diagnosis, that kind of inconvenience is especially difficult to navigate. In the real world, phone manufacturers have multiple ways to help their customers throughout every stage of using the device — from activation until they upgrade to the next model.
For health care companies, patient support should be just as seamless, comprehensive and easily accessible. Support needs to help with a wide range of issues — from prescription through ongoing support, disease education, community building, access to medical experts and more. And it needs to reach patients in the channels they already use, including email, text, chat, voice, video and social media.
This will require changes in the way companies operate. In return, their brands can become more than just names on boxes and bottles. By delivering a compelling customer experience during these moments that matter, they’ll have the opportunity to build trust and goodwill.
2. Be authentic and transparent.
For consumer brands, every product and customer interaction can be publicly scrutinized on places like Yelp, Amazon and social media. Health care brands have to be prepared for the same level of examination. This process has already begun, with people discussing their medications in Facebook groups and other social media, and sites like Zocdoc rating and reviewing health care professionals (HCPs). As self-serve health care grows, the discussion will only get louder.
And more information does not always mean better information. The web is overflowing with medical advice, both good and bad. Patients who use Google for self-diagnosis may be annoying to their doctors, but anti-vaccination advocates and other people pushing dubious cures represent a public health risk to entire populations.
When brands adopt an authentic and transparent style, they can change the way they communicate to be more empathetic and proactive with information.
3. Start with behavioral data to show up where your customers are.
Behavioral data is a critical information source for understanding the patient journey and identifying the “moments that matter” that a brand can support. Often times, consumer behavioral data is dismissed as not applicable to health care, but I’d argue that brands can’t effectively go to market in today’s performance-driven world without it.
Behavioral data does not rely on assumptions that go into the development of custom quantitative and qualitative attitudinal studies. By digging into behavioral data first, marketers have a deeper understanding of who their target audience really is and can then layer on attitudinal studies to further shape communication and marketing strategies. This two-pronged approach reduces the time and money spent to figure out who the right customers really are and where to find them.
The Goal: A More Modern Health Care Experience
For health care brands, these three ideas may seem like a big shift from the way marketing has always been approached. Patients (or, in other words, health care consumers) have come to expect frictionless, seamless experiences everywhere else in their lives. It should be the same for their health care. The brands that focus on customer experience, moments that matter and show up authentically and transparently will be the ones that patients trust and come back to time and again. In the age of self-serve health care, this is not just a challenge; it’s a huge opportunity.
