According to NRC Health’s mission of Human Understanding, behind every person is a story—and those stories drive the vast amounts of data NRC Health receives daily from consumers.
If healthcare organizations are serious about future-proofing their business, they’ll need to embrace Human Understanding and truly hear from each of their customers. Consumers are the fastest-growing group of payers for healthcare services, and healthcare organizations need to look at new research to understand why they’re so frustrated with pricing transparency.
Ryan Donohue, thought leader in healthcare consumerism at NRC Health and co-author of Patient No Longer: Why Healthcare Must Deliver the Care Experience That Consumers Want and Expect, suggests that healthcare leaders should pay attention to shifting factors among their consumer base. Here are the research takeaways from NRC Health’s Market Insights study on price transparency—a study drawing on the largest consumer database of its kind in the United States, analyzing sentiment from more than 300 national markets.
Consumers want healthcare systems toengage and build trust with them as patients, and understand their stories. Therefore, Donohue says, organizations must humanize the element of price transparency and acknowledge that behind every bill is a patient, behind every patient is a person, and behind every person is a story.
“As soon as we give up our clothes and put on that gown, it’s like we give up control,” he says. “This psychology is so important to understand, because there’s another anxiety-producing issue to address after what you are being seen for—and that’s cost. It’s essential that we engage the consumer better in the future, that we build a relationship with them as a patient, that we have a human connection with the people we serve.”
NRC Health’s Market Insights study on price transparency reveals what consumers want most in a pricing tool:
· Ability to see total cost, out-of-pocket fees, and what insurance contributes
· Ability to compare out-of-pocket costs for different care options (e.g., urgent care vs. ER)
· Ability to calculate out-of-pocket costs based on insurance type
· Ability to contrast out-of-pocket costs for in-network and out-of-network providers
Addressing the Increase in Care Delay
Nationally, healthcare organizations are seeing delays in care, and not just because of COVID-19. In 2019, nearly a quarter of consumers deferred getting treatment. In 2020, that number skyrocketed: at one point, half the country was putting off care, and for the year, a record 33% of Americans delayed care.
The truth is, patients vote with their feet. COVID-19 placed a heavy financial burden on many consumers and wreaked havoc on their finances. While many people are now returning to standard care patterns, many are not—because of costs. The risks involved in having so many people opt out of care are as yet unmeasured, but the biggest problem with delayed care is that diagnoses don’t take days off as patients do.
Prioritizing Technology Efforts
Consumers want healthcare organizations to prioritize the modernization of a simple, fluid, user-friendly pricing tool on their websites to allow them to search, compare, and contrast pricing options.
The healthcare industry usually ranks technology as its top barrier to mastering price transparency, even though it agrees with consumers conceptually that it should share prices openly. The industry also sees, as consumers do, that cost has an impact on where patients go. Given that 70% of consumers feel that cost impacts where they go for healthcare and how they select care, it’s time for healthcare organizations to figure out the technology.
525% Returns on Patients When Feedback and Transparency Are Addressed
“As people come out of COVID-19, they’re going to try and shop healthcare, because they shop in every other facet of their life,” Donohue says. “And what are they going to find? I’m afraid they’re going to find a pre-COVID world of very, very difficult prices.” He advises healthcare organizations to start thinking, “Okay, the shoppers are coming, how do we deal with this? How can we be receptive to this? How do we show them that the world is different, and that healthcare is coming around on price?”
Meeting the needs of consumers starts with listening to what patients have to say. For example, when COVID-19 hit, OrthoNebraska faced an urgent need for telehealth services, which caused its leadership team to make difficult decisions about usability, experience design, and patient recruitment, all in a matter of weeks.
Using NRC Health’s Real-time Feedback and Transparency solutions, OrthoNebraska immediately saw a higher number of returns from patients—an increase of 525%—as well as increased usage of online appointments. OrthoNebraska also saw internal cultural changes, with increased organic coaching and leadership being more engaged with the data regularly.
2020 was a devastating year for the healthcare system. But it was also elucidating.
While the stresses and strains of COVID-19 were undeniably costly, they also helped healthcare organizations find new competencies and strengths. Among these, perhaps the most influential is the advent of telehealth.
Over the pandemic, telehealth has firmly asserted itself as an essential part of the healthcare mainstream. According to NRC Health data, year-over-year telehealth usage has nearly tripled, from 7.8% of consumers in 2019 to 27% in 2020.
With such a significant share of the healthcare marketplace at stake, healthcare leaders are keen to get the telehealth experience right. But what makes a telehealth encounter succeed, or fail?
NRC Health’s consumer-feedback database, drawing upon over 150,000 virtual-care encounters, has some insights.
Consumerslove virtual care—but do they love your virtual care?
First, some good news: by and large, consumers love the telehealth experience.
An overwhelming majority of patients—92%—report positive sentiments about their first experiences with virtual care.
Consumers praise the modality’s convenience, of course. But they’re also happy about the attentiveness of providers and the amount of facetime they have with clinicians.
This is perhaps why enthusiasm for telehealth keeps rising: 47.2% of consumers said they were excited about telehealth in 2018, and today 54.9% say so. And it may be why nearly a third of respondents plan to make virtual care a staple of their healthcare consumption in the future.
All of this sounds like great news. However, consumer excitement about telehealth as a category does not necessarily translate to loyalty for a particular organization’s virtual-care approach. And as virtual care continues to saturate the market, the mere presence of a telehealth offering won’t impress experienced patients.
So how can healthcare organizations distinguish their virtual care from everyone else’s?
Eliminate the negative
When trying to improve an experience that 92% of people already enjoy, leaders must look for opportunities at the margins—and to start with, it may be best to focus on eliminating some of the common causes for complaint.
Here, according to NRC Health’s database, are the biggest pain points for telehealth consumers.
1. Technical/connectivity issues
A stuttering video feed. Misheard words. Lags on either end of the conversation. These are the first things that consumers mention disliking about their telehealth encounters. Such issues are not always an easy fix for healthcare organizations—especially those without ready access to high-caliber networking tools—but they’re essential nonetheless.
2. A perceived dip in professionalism
Telehealth completely transforms the healthcare setting: sometimes, the patient and provider both experience the encounter from their living rooms! While patients have the liberty to be a little more casual, however, clinicians must do their best to uphold professionalism. Appropriate dress, a neutral background, and reigning in children or pets are all important markers to many patients.
3. A perceived dip in courtesy and respect
This is by far the most serious concern around telehealth. Some telehealth patients believe that their clinicians fail to register a respectful tone. This can be a major challenge, especially because so many of the usual non-verbal signs of courtesy are lost over video. Telehealth providers must learn to communicate courtesy with their words, their faces, and their tone.
4. A lack of emotional support
If courtesy is difficult to signal over Zoom, emotional support is harder still. Providers must make explicit all the empathetic gestures that they normally take for granted, and find verbal substitutes for human touches like sympathetic nods, meaningful eye contact, or a hand on the shoulder.
5. Fears about insurance and fees
Finally, there’s the question of money. Widespread telehealth is so new, and its compensation structures are so opaque, that telehealth consumers are often uncertain about what they might owe. Organizations should do their best to make this clear, via means such as mapping rates to patients’ insurance plans.
The work is ongoing
What consumers want is a seamless telehealth experience—one complete with robust technology, clinicians who are well-trained in the art of video-call conversation, and transparent, upfront pricing.
Meeting these needs will help you elevate your virtual-care experience above your competitors’. But remember: this will always be a work in progress. In telehealth, as in every arena of medicine, staying ahead of the curve means listening to what your consumers have to say—and adjusting your approach to meet their demands.