In the final part of this series on improving patient experiences with AI-powered technology, it’s time to turn the spotlight on strategy and explore the critical importance of having a single, omnichannel platform for patient engagement.
Jane’s completing a patient registration by answering questions on the phone as she’s driving to work. The system offers to send her an SMS with a link where she can upload a picture of her insurance card and gives her the option to reply to the text with the picture. When she parks at her office, she sends the photo and gets a message saying her patient registration is complete.
It’s simple, convenient experiences like these that patients crave—but rarely receive.
In a recent survey of U.S. consumers, 61% of respondents said they’d like their interactions with healthcare providers to be more like using a convenient online app, like Uber or Instacart.1 And 69% said they’d consider switching to another provider that offers more appealing services.
Of course, we don’t really need surveys to tell us that many patient experiences need to be better. We all know the kinds of convenient, frictionless experiences we’d like to receive as patients. And we’ve all experienced the frustrating and inefficient interactions that are so common in the healthcare sector.
As we’ve seen throughout this series of articles, there are AI-powered technology solutions that can help improve patient experiences. But the pressure to respond to the latest patient engagement challenge or opportunity can lead healthcare organizations to adopt a tactical, rather than strategic, approach that has adverse impacts on patient experience and operational efficiency.
Patient experiences—and organizational complexity—get worse
Over time, many organizations accumulate multiple point solutions that result in disjointed experiences and difficult vendor management. They also often find these solutions don’t deliver everything they initially promised. For example, the virtual agent isn’t truly intelligent, prescription refill automation requires clinicians to use a new workflow, or appointment reminders don’t use real-time data, so patients receive reminders for visits they’ve recently canceled.
In many cases, healthcare leaders can simply feel overwhelmed by the scale of the patient engagement challenge—struggling to know where to start, or how to find the IT staff and budget to build, implement, and maintain the solutions they need.
A strategic approach to patient engagement
Another more strategic approach is to choose a single, omnichannel platform for patient engagement, with multiple, pre-built applications for use cases that are already integrated and just need to be configured.
Such a unified platform is essential to accomplish patient engagement goals in the areas I’ve explored in my recent articles:
- Supporting access to the patient portal
- Enabling self-service appointment scheduling and prescription refills
- Answering patient FAQs
- Helping clinicians manage patient care
Improving experiences and reducing complexity with Nuance Patient Engagement Solutions
When organizations choose our own single patient engagement platform, they get AI-powered omnichannel capabilities (the same engagement technologies trusted by 75% of Fortune 100 companies) from a single vendor to deliver consistent, intelligent patient experiences. And those experiences will only get more intelligent as we continue to integrate Large Language Models and generative AI with our conversational AI solutions.
But from a strategic point of view, Nuance customers get so much more than market-leading functionality.
A strategic partner for patient experience transformation
With Nuance’s long experience in designing technology that fits into healthcare workflows, and our deep connections in the healthcare ecosystem, we can provide advice on best practices and compliance. We can also help you identify the right opportunities to target first and create a patient engagement transformation roadmap that builds long-term value—for patients, clinicians, and the organization.
Nuance customers also benefit from the simplicity of a platform that works with their existing solutions, including EHR, customer resource management (CRM), and revenue management systems, as well as third-party contact center infrastructure.
What’s more, rapid deployment of intelligence-infused, configurable turnkey solutions—with no IT maintenance resources required—makes it easy to quickly add new capabilities that expand self-service and increase efficiency.
Let’s leave the final word to one of our customers, Josh Wilda, Chief Digital, and Information Officer at University of Michigan Health-West.
Explaining why his organization chose Nuance Patient Engagement Solutions, Josh says, “By bringing together its deep vertical experience in healthcare with its long history of providing exceptional experiences across other industries, Nuance has created a solution to not only improve the overall patient experience and drive better clinical outcomes, but also enhance the financial performance of healthcare organizations.”
“Nuance patient engagement is a great story because it’s an ecosystem of products, not pieces and parts,” Josh adds. “It’s really looking at the entire patient experience and what interactions can be offloaded to artificial intelligence and automation—and knowing when to hand off an interaction for a human touch. The flexibility of patient experience that Nuance provides was the number one differentiator.”
Sources:
1Survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Tegria from January 4-6, 2022 among 2,019 US adults
