Winning at Patient and Customer Experience with Customer xDNA

by Dr. Rob Nelson –

Hospitals, Health Systems, and healthcare organizations of all types have been working on patient and customer engagement strategies for decades. In the past two decades, the healthcare industry has undergone tremendous disruptions in technology, science, and business models.

So, what’s new?

More than ever, the sands of what is essential are shifting as to what is a priority for most CEOs and their teams – from financial and clinical outcomes not to winning experiences and building loyalty. Patient and Customer Experience has truly changed even amid the pandemic. Consumer demand is the colossal driving need for digital, self-service engagement across the lifetime of the customer and patient experience.

While healthcare leaders have worried about escalating healthcare costs, payers have used insights from big data to negotiate a shift from a traditional fee-for-service model to capitated, bundled, value-based, and risk-sharing reimbursement models. Under the new arrangements, providers face tremendous pressure to maintain or increase the quality of care while holding down costs or boosting revenues. Inventive revenue streams aside, there is a clear need for new technologies that measure, analyze, and report on both quality and costs. And, revenue is overtaking the priority to organizations as a priority that directly ties to engagement. Proactively driving and having visibility to true customer experience and engagement across the lifetime of the customer/patient journey that is where the action is very much focused now.

Consider the explosion in demand:

Explosion in telehealth demand
Adoption of AI and intelligent automation (and the one-click expectation set by Amazon)
Broad adoption and use of mobile and connectivity: almost everything we do these days involves an app and a mobile device
Data, data, and more data
AI and Intelligent Automation is more pragmatic and scalable
Increased shortage of healthcare workers
Shortage in AI and Data Science workers
Healthcare Consumerism
Regulation
Rapid technology innovation and the need to be hyper-responsive

These trends and the need to understand customers/patients and drive winning experiences are relevant in all significant healthcare organizations:

Healthcare Provider Organizations: focused on patient engagement synchronized with workforce engagement.
Life Sciences Organizations including MedTech/HealthTech, BioPharma: focused on bringing solutions faster, better, cheaper to market and engaging their customers and the care ecosystem
Payors: focused on better, more effective care and competitive engagement strategies through the ecosystem
Healthcare Industry Groups: focused on helping key stakeholders remove roadblocks and drive acceleration of digital transformation, better outcomes and members satisfaction.

Winning and keeping customers through amazing experiences is key to winning in the marketplace, no matter the type of healthcare organization you are in. And, the reality is that cost and margin, and revenue is directly related to the things that will help create a winning, predictive and proactive customer experience that delights patients and customers.

With digital transformation, the emergence of Sentient Enterprises, technology will ultimately enable the best patient and customer experiences. Organizations need to look for ways to implement these technologies in the new digital assets, processes, and capabilities and then look for ways to integrate them back into their legacy to get all the jobs done required by prospective patients and customers.

With hyper-personalization and Amazon.com one-click convenience as a priority, organizations must strategically roll out new capabilities to focus on excellence at every job to be done for a customer or patient in the journey—as an integrated and holistic experience. As healthcare leaders, we can help transform how patients, as customers, engage with our organizations. As healthcare organizations ride this tidal wave of change, they find that traditional operating models, structures, and processes are being stretched to their limits. To meet these unprecedented challenges, many forward-thinking enterprises are now going through a digital transformation. Creating a flexible, profitable, and sustainable healthcare enterprise will require strategic resource planning and business process reengineering in today’s environment.

This is where Customer xDNA comes in as a platform for healthcare Organizations to optimize Customer Experience that intelligent, predictive, responsive, and actionable at the moment is comprised of :

Customer understanding/segmentation
A robust CxDNA Framework that is implemented and actioned with intelligence and real-time insight with the Sentient Enterprise as a Platform
Data and Insight Agility, Data Refinery and pipeline and Trusted Data Foundation (TDF) that enables the organization
Intelligent automation, conversational AI, and more

Dr. Eric Brown, Chief Data Scientist at RCG Global Services, recently highlighted some of the key and exciting developments in Machine Learning, Advanced Analytics, and Operations Research that can help enable the Sentient Enterprise and be prioritized and driven and even able a CxDNA Roadmap and transformation.

“Increasingly, CxDNA is expected to serve in many areas. CxDNA is a basis for both computation and discussion, and forms a bridge between conceptual domains whose relationship is defined by actual customer trends.” – Dr. Eric Brown, Chief Data Scientist, RCG Global Services

With CxDNA, market and customer-focused business leaders can understand and proactively design their customer experience performance, key drivers, and impact of investment decisions empowered by real-time intelligent analytics, intelligent automation as a Sentient Enterprise. Moreover, they can use this to drive costs down, increase conversion, loyalty, reduce churn and increase revenues. No longer should a patient or customer experience be fragmented and suboptimal.

Your success strategy is wholly intertwined with a Customer Experience strategy for 2021 and beyond. We have pressed the limits of our business models, channels, and full-on omnichannel transformation. 78% of customers preferred to use different channels depending on their context. Responding to this demand seamlessly in a frictionless and consistent manner is no easy task – and it does not happen by luck.

So, honestly, how do you deliver what customers need and want in 2021 and beyond?

CxDNA helps enable everything from a digital strategy/roadmap to AI Blueprint to end-to-end customer lifecycle engagement. From intelligent mobile apps that will allow both customer/patient and workforce engagement to process optimization to customer segmentation and persona development to advance AI to drive engagement, outcomes, and experience.

We are an exciting start-up that brings reality to revolutionizing healthcare through AI and Voice.

Here are just two examples:

Take a new venture called “Care Angel,” an intelligent “virtual nurse assistant” designed to uniquely manage population health engagement at scale, driving better medical outcomes at a lower cost. This start-up is already working with some of the world’s most influential health plans, representing 600,000 members monthly. The platform helps millions of high prices, high-risk patients to receive affordable, quality remote monitoring from home. AI + voice-enabled conversations provide patients with personalized health management, monitoring, and tailored care that focuses on longitudinal and interdependent health/well-being and mental/behavioral, environmental, social, and holistic health. In May 2020 alone, ANGEL made over 3,980,883 calls to check in on at-risk members related to COVID-19 and hospital discharges.
Or consider the exciting use of AI in Medical Tech and Patient Care and Customer Engagement, where RCG automated the creation of prospective client business cases for specialty pharmacies. Pharmacy data is ingested, analyzed, and presented to the client’s prospective customers in an easy-to-understand, adjustable model demonstrating the business case for partnering with them. The model utilizes pharmacy information and patient characteristics to predict whether patients would fall into non-adherence to their prescribed medical regimens. Frameworks that address a spectrum of at-risk conditions, as measured by patient readmissions, mortality, and other health care quality metrics, have been enabled. Since the practice utilizes AutoML, a large amount of human effort is abstracted away. The solution deploys to scalable, high-performance Web API via a version-controlled, Continuous-Integration/Continuous Deployment system.

Between these two examples, you start to get a picture of the many possibilities available to transform care delivery and the actual patient and customer experience. RCG’s Chief Data Scientist points out a practice we see every day in enabling analytics to support interacting and engaging experiences as driven by a CxDNA framework:

“Analytics can learn a lot from the Software-as-a-Service model. In order to provide analytical results to web streams, we employ an Analytics-as-a-Service model and emphasize standards and maximum analytics capability. Nearly every programming environment has a web framework, and it is even possible to use statistical languages to host standards compliant REST APIs.” – Dr. Brown

To learn more on how to get started using CxDNA and AI to accelerate your customer/patient engagement experience check out the following resources:

Most provider organizations have already started to think about their patients as customers. Payors and Life Science companies must carefully look at the entire ecosystem of engagement focusing on their own customers and their customer’s patients and providers. This is step one: prioritizing customers and patient’s and understanding them. Now, it’s important to begin to strategically and tactically leverage your technology investments to address immediate needs and also be a platform for more effective engagement and experience strategies. As healthcare is one of the fastest growing markets today, organizations must find a way to use these technology investments as a catalyst to drive the transformation work. CxDNA is a compelling opportunity to help you drive acceleration.

Want to learn more? At RCG Global Services, we would love to help. Would you like to brainstorm with us? We have intelligent people, methods, and tools, and we will help you realize your customer experience and digital transformation ambitions.

2021 is a landmark year in the adventure into the new healthcare frontier of “healthcare unchained. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Send a note to Rob.Nelson@rcggs.com