Reach out and touchpoint a patient

If you are under 50 years old, you probably never was this commercial.

Now, among all the technophilia, industries are rethinking about ways to reach out and touch their customers online. The US sick care industry is no exception.

Now, as we are dealing with the next phase of COVID, people are being told to actually make a phone call to a friend or colleague. Why? The grief we’ve endured this past year has undermined the importance of small talk, and getting over this hump is the key to re-learning how to talk to each other.

Here are some key takeaways in case you forgot how to use your phone to talk:

• A phone call is more personal than a video call.
• Always show up as your authentic self.
• While communication is important, so are boundaries. 
• It’s easy to lose touch. Make check-ins a priority.

The purpose of sick care information and communications technologies should be to scale humans, not replace them. People want people to solve their problems and listen to them. A recent article suggests:

1. Automate transactional interactions, while facilitating human connections. Grab-and-go shopping, or giving customers the option of hailing an Uber or Lyft, reporting a pothole, or ordering a pizza from a mobile device, improves service quality by making transactions easier and faster to accomplish. However, companies shouldn’t strand customers in a digital transaction.

AI chatbots are are replacing humans for triage and screening during the pandemic.

A startup building health kiosks deployed in grocery stores raised funding from an unusual source — another startup. Higi closed a $30 million series B round led by Babylon Health, a London-based startup that has developed a health triage chatbot. Previous investors including 7Wire Ventures, Flare Capital Partners and Jumpstart Capital also participated in the round.

2. Support employees without getting in their way. There are many opportunities to create technologies that support employees’ efforts to create value for customers. The trick is how to design these solutions so that they don’t undermine the human connection that people are uniquely equipped to make.

3. Enhance customer and employee engagement. Service can be more efficient and satisfying when customers and employees are visible to one another. Rather than increasing the gap between customers and employees, technology can be used to enhance the connection.

4. Engage customers in ways that won’t make human service providers cringe. If an action would be seen as annoying when performed by a person, chances are it will be annoying when performed by technology. Applying this simple heuristic will help managers avoid a broad array of common-sense technological transgressions.

Research into connected strategies revealed four distinct approaches that organizations use to reduce the friction within the customer journey–i.e., four types of connected customer experiences. These customer experiences are distinguished by the part of the customer journey they affect.

• The Respond-to-Desire connected customer experience starts at the point in the journey when a customer knows precisely what he or she wants. The company’s goal then is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to order, pay for, and receive the desired product in the desired quantity. Thus, respond-to-desire smoothens the “Respond” part of the customer journey.
• The Curated Offering customer experience acts further upstream in the journey by helping the customer find the best possible option that would fulfill his or her needs; it helps with the request. Both respond-to-desire and curated offering experiences can only work if customers are aware of their needs.
• Firms creating a Coach Behavior customer experience help their customers at exactly that part of their journey: they raise awareness of needs and nudge the customer into action, essentially helping with the Recognize stage of the customer journey.
• Lastly, when the firm becomes aware of a customer need even before the customer is aware of it, it is possible to create an Automatic Execution customer experience, where the firm solves the need of the customer proactively. In this case, the company can short-cut the customer journey tremendously.

Retail is rethinking how they touch customers and, perhaps, sick care can learn some lessons.

1. The most important factor for customer service was having agents at the end of the phone who spoke the caller’s language fluently. Understanding your customers and responding to them in a relevant way continues to be the most important quality of any experience, no matter how technology evolves. Use terms patients can understand.

2. Create experiences where your brand adapts to each touchpoint of the patient experience in tandem with the emotion of the brand at the right time at the right place. How is your blood pressure this morning? Here's a map of a walking tour of your neighborhood.

3. Another way companies can be more human is by invoking the power of simplicity. Brands must respect the fact that customers have limited time and attention, and they must build simple, clear experiences that resonate. Please enter how you are doing on the patient-reported outcomes app we recommended. It will only take 10 seconds so do it now.

4. Many organizations are led by people who don’t understand how to unearth or develop good ideas. You thus have a lot of people in the middle of an organization trying to get suggestions for change to the powers that be, who don’t always listen. This can be frustrating, so the people in the middle tend to leave and take all the good ideas with them. Listen to everyone's ideas.

5. Examine the entire patient experience, not just the product. Improve your pre-visit and post-visit/surgery experience.

6. Patients fundamentally want to be part of a community, which also speaks to that human connection. Adding new channels, such as social, opens that possibility. Create ways for them to connect to others just like them.

7. Personalization is the baseline, not just in medical treatment, but in experience and decision making as well

8. Data is powerful. Use it. There could be workarounds for that, particularly around persona. A brand can ask patients, “Who are you?” And based on who they say they are, the brand can tell patients what they are likely to want, and why.

In the U.S. market, Deloitte identified six segments: “content and compliant,” “sick and savvy,” “casual and cautious,” “online and on board,” “shop and save,” and “out and about.” The “content and compliant” and “sick and savvy” tend to behave like “patients,” not particularly inclined to challenge a professional’s recommendation and query clinicians. The “casual and cautious” are simply not engaged because they don’t see the need. The other three segments show characteristics of activism, often disruptive to a system more comfortable with patients than consumers. “Out and about” actively seek and use an alternative, non-Western medicine, often without the knowledge of their clinicians; “online and onboard” use online tools and mobile applications to assess providers and compare treatment options and provider competence; and “shop and save” is the value purchaser and is not content with paying more than necessary under any non-emergency scenario. 

Despite all this, several realities will disintermediate or obviate the need for a healthcare professional to give sick care or health care advice-1) technology and rise of AI and bots, 2) the fact that many patients don't need professional advice and can take advantage of DIY platforms to take care of themselves and not waste resources or make unnecessary appointments, and 3) there are simply not enough people to take care of all the patients who want to talk to them, particularly those with behavioral health problems. Consequently, we will see a cheaper, commoditized whole product digital health solution for those patients who can safely use it that has the VAST business model. Getting there, though, will take patients who are willing and able to do it and have the tools and incentives to take control.

Here are the clinical, legal and ethical aspects of artificial intelligence using assisted conversational agents.

These researchers summarized the takeaway from their study in all of four words: text less, talk more. But other research adds an addendum to that simple message: Consider choosing the phone over Zoom more often too. 

The laying on of hands has therapeutic value. On the other hand, amid a pandemic, the laying on of hands can be lethal. So, what's the answer? Talk more, text less.

Why not use all the tools in the black bag?

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@SoPEOfficial and Facebook