This 1 Thing Must Be Emphasized For Users (Patients) To Adopt Digital Health Platforms
When you ask a patient to tell you about their most recent healthcare experience, whether they visited their physician, had lab testing done, or just called their healthcare provider to make an appointment, I would argue there is certainly one word they would not use to describe their experience:
Convenient.
Health care is a very well-established industry. And despite the fact that over $1B was invested into 71 digital health deals in Q1 of 2017, we’re still a long way from having the consumer consensus be that health care is a convenient relationship between customer and provider.
Let me give you an example.
I recently had a patient of mine come back for their six-week check-up. I asked her what she thought of Pulse, the platform my team and I built to follow up with and monitor patients during recovery following surgery, and she said, “It just makes sense.” Then her husband chimed in and said, “Why don’t more doctors communicate like this with their patients? Texting and digital communication is just the way of life now, but it doesn’t seem like it’s made its way into doctors’ offices.”
This was a large part of our aim in building Pulse, to create a secure, direct messaging relationship between each patient and our team of providers. But to hear it that way, that texting “is just the way of life now,” affirmed what I feel is still one of the biggest issues in healthcare.
Communication is not convenient.
Let’s put healthcare in the context of how the rest of the world operates.
When you want to know what time your kid’s soccer game ends, you text them.
When you have a question about your retirement account, you shoot your financial advisor a quick email.
When you want to look something up, you pull out your phone and you Google it.
The examples go on and on, and the vast majority of them highlight the way our society approaches communication and information consumption — with convenience. We don’t have time to sit on the phone and wait, and even if we did, we wouldn’t want to. We’re past that point. We value our time, and when we have a simple question, we expect to have the ability to get the answer we’re looking for without sacrificing too much of our day.
Healthcare has yet to adopt this mentality.
This is why so many digital health platforms have failed to gain user adoption.
The platforms that either haven’t gained significant traction or have stopped moving forward are the ones that haven’t understood that, at the end of the day, a patient is a consumer. And they need to be engaged in the same way any other company would service their customers. They need to look at the entire relationship, and find ways to get each and every customer what they need, when they need it — or ideally, before they even know they need it. After all, these are the qualities that build any company into a great one.
Imagine for a moment if when you purchased a laptop computer, you pulled it out of its minimalist, luxurious box, opened it up, and then couldn’t effortlessly connect to the Internet. Or you couldn’t figure out how to actually log in. As a consumer, you would instantly feel let down — and would probably take your business elsewhere.
Part of what makes an Apple product so incredible is the intuitive and efficient user experience that comes along with it. Not just the customer support, but the fact the product gives you, the consumer, everything you want even before you know you want it.
That experience is a far cry from what happens in healthcare — and I think we all know it.
In order for a digital health platform to become successful, here’s what needs to happen:
The platform has to be a great experience. Plain and simple.
As both a practicing surgeon and a digital health entrepreneur, this is where I realize the striking difference between those who set out to build healthcare platforms but have very little working knowledge of industry pain points. It’s one thing to say, “We need to make a better digital platform for patients,” and entirely another to talk to patients on a daily basis and hear all the pain points they experience with the current care model.
A great digital health platform is one that leaves a consumer with this overwhelming feeling of, “Wow, that was easy.” In any other industry, this is the expectation: Uber, Amazon, Instacart, all of these companies leave a powerful impression on the customer that they care, simply because of the efficient service they provide.
There have been patients of mine who experienced the standard surgery recovery process before we launched Pulse, and then went through a second surgery after. And because I like to hear unbiased feedback, I don’t tell them I was the developer of the platform. I just want to know whether it’s working.
What I’ve noticed is that patients quickly gravitate toward a few different things.
First, they say they appreciate the education element, helping them understand what to expect as they’re recovering from a surgical procedure.
Second, many shared things like, “I wish this had been around during my first surgery. I really looked forward to reading the notifications every day, because I wanted to know what to expect. It made me feel calm about what was going on.”
But third, and this is the most revealing, I have had many patients say at the two-month mark (when the recovery follow-up process is set to end), “I was kind of disappointed when it stopped.”
When we talk about patient empowerment, especially in digital health, this is the behavioral shift we’re aiming toward. The goal isn’t for the patient to feel like they have one more thing to do in their day. It’s to help them know what to expect each day, and to be proactive instead of reactive.
If today’s digital health entrepreneurs want to make a lasting impact, this is needs to be the driving goal. Because if it’s not convenient, it’s never going to work.
