Consumerization of healthcare: exceeding consumer and patient expectations with user feedback

Healthcare organizations must adapt quickly to meet evolving expectations and to provide efficient and personalized care to patients. 

In this guide, we’ll discuss the impact of consumerization on healthcare organizations and explain the value of consumer and patient feedback. We’ll also share how to capture these insights in the healthcare industry and provide some examples of healthcare organizations that are seeing success.

Consumers want robust digital experiences in healthcare

In this modern age of technology and convenience, the consumerization of healthcare has become an undeniable force. Patients and consumers now expect their healthcare experiences to mirror those in other industries, such as financial services, retail, and travel. 

Traditionally, the healthcare industry has operated on a provider-centric model, where healthcare professionals make decisions and patients follow their guidance. However, with the evolution of technology and access to information, patients are now taking a more active role in managing their health. They demand greater transparency, personalized care, and convenient access to healthcare services. 

Impact on healthcare organizations

The global shift toward user centricity—across all kinds of organizations and experiences—has significant implications for those in the healthcare industry. 

First, it requires healthcare providers to focus on patient-centered care. Patients now have more choices and alternatives when seeking healthcare providers to meet their needs. This means that healthcare organizations must prioritize patient satisfaction, adopting strategies to provide personalized experiences, transparent communication, and increased convenience.

Patients now desire a more active role in their healthcare decision-making process and expect personalized, accessible, and convenient experiences like those enjoyed in other sectors. Healthcare organizations must now shift their mindset and embrace patient-centered care models. This entails reevaluating existing processes, enhancing digital capabilities, and integrating technology to streamline healthcare access. By doing so, organizations can better align their services with patient expectations and establish a competitive advantage.

But how are today’s healthcare organizations doing? Unfortunately, 84% of consumers say their experiences using digital tools and services fall short of expectations, according to Gartner. These negative experiences can create an “empathy gap.” Although healthcare providers care deeply for their patients, the patient’s digital experience makes them feel a lack of care.

When a healthcare organization’s user experience is lacking, it can have serious implications for both patients and providers. Triage errors, missed diagnoses, medication errors, and other adverse events have a negative effect on patients in multiple dimensions. There can be lost revenue due to failed projects, increased labor costs, issues with patient retention, and bad press that affects providers—not to mention potential health-related dangers for patients. 

Of course, when digital experiences match and exceed expectations, patients receive a higher level of care and feel more empathy from the provider. The healthcare organization is also more successful. 

The value of patient insights

To thrive in this era of consumer-centric healthcare, organizations must invest in understanding patient experiences to gain valuable insights into patient preferences, pain points, and expectations. This involves capturing feedback throughout the entire patient journey, from the moment they seek information online to post-treatment follow-ups. These insights can help identify areas for improvement and enable the development of patient-centric strategies and solutions.

One of the primary values of consumer feedback is its ability to foster patient-centricity. By actively seeking and incorporating patient feedback, healthcare providers can tailor their services to align with the expectations set by other consumer-focused industries. This not only improves patient satisfaction but also strengthens the provider-patient relationship, leading to increased patient loyalty and positive word-of-mouth referrals.

How to successfully gather feedback in healthcare

Many healthcare organizations capture insights to improve patient outcomes, lower costs, streamline operations, and increase revenue. For example:

• Healthcare systems are improving patient kiosks and portals, bill pay, scheduling systems, and other digital channels with insights from patients. 
• Pharma, medical device, and medical supply organizations are capturing feedback to improve patient sites and retail outlets, prescriber portals, and apps for diagnosis and treatment, as well as marketing materials and social channels. 
• Health insurers and pharmacy retailers are using feedback to improve member portals, self-service apps, provider, employer, and broker portals, marketing materials, and brand refreshes.

Although there’s much to be gained, capturing patient feedback in healthcare comes with its own challenges stemming from the industry's complex nature. These include sensitive data concerns, the diverse range of stakeholders involved, and finding the right target audiences.  

How can you test in a highly regulated industry?

How can healthcare organizations navigate legal and compliance challenges to gathering feedback possible?

Find your audience

A critical point of any feedback program is finding the people who are representative of your target audience.

It’s important to prioritize behaviors over demographics. Participants don’t always need to reach specific demographic parameters. Look more closely at what people need to do. Target participants based on how they live, what they value, and how they relate to and experience your product or service. Screen for one or two relevant behaviors to ensure you can get enough participants. 

And who is the most representative of your target audience? Your patients, customers, partners, and more. You can invite your users to participate in your tests. Your user base will often be eager and willing to provide feedback on new experiences and more. 

Sometimes, it can be challenging to find participants with the right behaviors or conditions for your study. Consider “caregivers” and “like-minded” participants in these cases. There can be niche personas that are difficult to find, so it’s helpful to find proxies or those with a certain amount of domain knowledge who can be helpful, even if they’re not the users themselves.

When you need to recruit niche and harder-to-find audiences, UserTesting’s Audience Services can help. Gaining insights from the right audience at the right time can help drive business goals. 

"Thanks to custom recruitment with the Audience Services team, we discovered valuable insights from executive-level personas. This feedback improved our understanding of AI's real value to our buyers and demonstrated that investing in recruitment pays off exponentially by helping us make informed decisions for our product strategy."

Andrew Frueh
SVP User Experience 
Health Catalyst

Work with your organization’s legal and compliance teams

First, every organization is different, and you know your organization best. It’s essential to consult with your company’s internal legal counsel and compliance teams to understand what’s important to them, as well as the guidance and procedures they have in place. That said, there are some best practices to follow based on what top healthcare organizations are doing.

In working with your legal and compliance teammates, there are three key tips to follow:

1. Understand. Talk with your compliance team, ask good questions, and listen to what they have to say. Find out what processes are already in place.
2. Share and educate. Collecting patient feedback to improve experiences might be new to them, so it’s crucial for them to understand what you’re doing and why it’s vital to the organization. They may not know the value and how consumer insights can improve the bottom line. Show them how you plan to collect the feedback and the goals it could accomplish. Take the time to share with them
3. Collaborate. Work together to understand the processes so there are no gaps and everyone feels they’re on the same page. Make sure you’re sharing results.

Understand what you can and can’t ask about

Make sure you understand what you can and can’t ask about. You need to ensure patient privacy. There’s Prohibited Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which you should never ask for. This information includes asking about social security numbers, genetic information, biometric identifiers, health plan account numbers, and a number of other sensitive pieces of information.

You can ask about sensitive Protected Health Information (PHI) as long as you allow opt-out, data is stored and shared securely in a HIPAA-compliant system, and vendors and partners have a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA). If you follow these guidelines, you can ask about health diagnoses, names of treatment providers, medical information or history, race or ethnic origin, as well as gender identity.

The UserTesting and UserZoom platforms are HIPPA compliant and are often used by healthcare organizations. If you want to learn more about our approach to HIPAA compliance, visit our guide to collecting insights under HIPAA.

Gain trust with participants

Gaining trust early with participants while gathering feedback is pivotal, particularly because the process can involve sensitive health-related data. Before testing begins, start with a meticulously crafted test plan that outlines the usage of data. This exercise will help you provide a clear and comprehensible consent form for participants. By ensuring that participants fully understand what they agree to, both in terms of what they’ll be asked and how their data will be used, trust can be established before the study even begins. This clarity helps prevent any surprises that could jeopardize the participant's comfort and trust in the process.

During the course of a live study or interview, maintaining this trust requires active and ongoing communication. Checking in with participants to remind them about recording procedures, offer them time to prepare, and answer any lingering questions about the study's privacy measures exemplifies trust-building communication. 

Another approach to help participants feel comfortable when sharing sensitive information is to avoid capturing participants' faces during studies. Instead, organizations can launch tests that aggregate data while opting for alternatives such as screen-only recordings. This method helps to separate participants' personal likenesses from the data collected, enhancing privacy protections and potentially increasing participant comfort and willingness to engage. 

Test prototypes rather than live experiences

Many healthcare organizations get feedback on prototypes rather than live experiences to avoid exposing any Prohibited PII. These environments open up plenty of testing opportunities, and many teams find the quality is just as good as testing with live tools.

Build a business case

There’s a business case for understanding your patient’s experiences as it can improve patient outcomes and positively impact the organization’s bottom line. However, teams still need to gain buy-in from leaders and stakeholders within their organization so that customer feedback is prioritized. 

Start by meeting your stakeholders where they are. Test and optimize the products, services, or campaigns they’re working on and care most about. This can help inform projects that are most relevant to your stakeholders and get buy-in for future tests. 

Qualitative and quantitative data can be used together to make a compelling case and showcase the bottom-line value of patient feedback. Pairing the data can lead to small changes that improve conversions, increase engagement, decrease call center costs, and more. Showing stakeholders the why behind what is happening can be a powerful way to champion the value of insights from consumers.

You don’t always have to make a large business case with an exhaustive study. There are some quick tests you can do to show stakeholders why more investigation is needed into a certain area. For example, you might go to Facebook user groups and see what people are discussing. Stakeholders might learn something new or discover pain points that make it clear conducting further analysis is worthwhile.

Examples of user feedback in healthcare

Healthcare organizations can clearly benefit from a deeper understanding of their patient experiences. But what does this look like in practice? What outcomes are achieved when organizations focus on insights from patients and consumers? 

Remember—you can test a wide array of digital and in-person experiences your customers and users encounter within your organization. 

Improving adoption and usability of digital healthcare experiences

By helping you understand how patients use digital healthcare tools and why, gathering feedback provides the authentic voice of the patient that compliments other types of data. You get critical context about the root of the problem to triage and design solutions effectively. 

By gaining a deeper understanding of their users’ experiences, CoverMyMeds was able to amplify the voice of the patient. Their team identified ways to ease patient pain points and improve the prescription authorization process at a fraction of the time and cost compared to other alternatives. 

"Talking to patients builds empathy for the patients and helps us understand the why behind whatever we decide we are going to build."

Frank Rosile
Product Development Manager
CoverMyMeds

Increasing engagement with clear content that resonates 

Get feedback from your patients or providers on content to optimize web self-service tools like appointment settings, patient portals, online triage, and chatbots. Ensure everyone gets the right information when they need it. 

To ensure medical practitioners have easy access to information, the GSK team watches videos of UserTesting participants interacting with their online channels. This helps GSK further understand how to communicate product information to medical practitioners in ways that resonate with them, equipping them to support patients effectively. 

“I think it's really important to both speak to people and see how people are reacting to digital experiences. With the help of UserTesting, we found out that healthcare professionals not only want information for themselves, they want a platform where they can also find information for patients.”

Katy David
Product Insights & Experience Analyst 
GSK

Discovering ways to turn patient problems into innovation

Capture feedback from your current patient experience to learn what your patients want and need. Prioritize your roadmap and/or tech implementations based on insights from patients. 

To better serve their customers, Cedar wanted to understand the unique needs and problems patients faced outside of the moments they were using Cedar's product. Through connecting with patients, Cedar’s team was able to better understand patients and identify ways to improve their healthcare experience. These insights provided Cedar with a roadmap of future product enhancements.

“Thanks to the insights we collected through UserTesting, we are now able to better understand what patients need during these tough times and can work with healthcare providers to meet these demands.”

Diana Ye 
Product Design Lead
Cedar

Evolving healthcare to meet the needs of a changing patient landscape

The consumerization of healthcare presents both challenges and opportunities for healthcare organizations. By understanding and embracing the evolving expectations of patients and consumers, organizations enhance the quality of their care and patient experience. Consumer feedback plays an integral role in driving these improvements, providing valuable insights, and shaping the future of healthcare delivery.

Ultimately, the value of understanding your patients’ experiences in healthcare extends beyond immediate improvements. It’s a strategic compass for organizations navigating the complex intersection of patient expectations, technological advancements, and evolving policies. 

By investing in programs to capture insights from consumers and patients, healthcare providers not only meet the current needs of their patients but also position themselves to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing and consumer-driven landscape.