Exceeding Patients’ Healthcare Needs Through Exceptional Communication
by Mitchell Kocen, Writer at Geisinger Health Plan
Healthcare in the US has been getting a bad rap lately. Plagued by the rising costs of premiums and copays, patient confidence is at an all-time low, with many people opting to skip the doctor’s office altogether. In response, healthcare companies are trying to boost their reputation and win back patient favor through massive communication campaigns — often with mixed results.
A lot of people in the healthcare industry simply don’t “get it” when it comes to the way patients receive information. Some communications are technical and difficult to understand. The rest is written with total disregard for the audience it is intended for. Boring newsletters are deleted without ever being opened. Information that is intended to help patients stay healthy is disregarded because it’s buried in mounds of copy.
If you wouldn’t want to receive the customer communications you’re sending, then why are you sending it?
For Geisinger Health Plan, the question became: “How do we take the stuff that helps our members with decisions and make it direct and informative?” This question lit a fire for me. After joining Geisinger, I never wanted to send communications to members that they couldn’t do something with. Every letter that came across my desk, I wanted to make sure it was information I’d want to receive or that I’d want my family to receive. We wanted to not only be very clear, but helpful with every communication we sent to our members. Unfortunately, when I came on board, we didn’t have the flexibility to make that happen.
Starting in the Technological Stone Age
When I started here, developing communications consisted of writing documents in Word and then doing a mail merge to send them out or ordering letters from a difficult to use system. This system left us with little flexibility. Members told us they wanted to have the choice in how they received our communications. Some wanted print versions mailed to them, while others preferred electronic. We needed a system that would allow us to send communication electronically based on their preference, but in a way that was still secure. After all, we couldn’t send private health information over the internet.
We also wanted communication management software that would allow us to consolidate all of our documents and make editing a trivial process. Back then, there were a number of letters in the system that were signed by the previous Vice President of Customer Service, someone who no longer worked with the company. Each letter needed to be changed individually to: “Sincerely, Customer Service Team,” a process that seemed to go on for weeks. With the way we had structured our communications, we couldn’t do a simple mass edit. It had to happen manually on every individual document. We desperately needed a way to change our communications on the fly without consuming our entire day.
Narrowing Down the Solution
By the time I arrived at Geisinger, we had gathered a short list of possible communication management software providers. Right off the bat, some did not interpret communication preference well, so out the window they went. Once we had a pared down short list, we looked at the software, made a list of what we wanted to see happen and what features we were looking for. After each presentation, we took our list of must-haves, want-to-haves, and could-live-withouts, and checked off what each provider had to offer.
Based on our simple list of criteria, Quadient emerged as the perfect solution to our communication management problems. I was first impressed by the interactivity of the platform. The streamlined drag-and-drop text editor interface would make creating individual templates a breeze. They also offered an interface where we could set up templates for myself or other members of our team. Each of these letters would already include sections that could be adapted to an individual situation, along with sections that were locked down. Even better, users could pull from a pool of paragraphs that have been pre-approved by marketing and compliance.
Rolling Out
Completely restructuring the way we send out communications has not been easy. I spent weeks training with Quadient and got to sit with another company who was a year further into the process than we were. Their biggest advice? Do what Quadient’s professional services team tells you to do.
It seems so simple, but too many organizations hire experts to help them turn around some aspect of their business and then blow past any evidence-based practices and do whatever they want. We were determined to follow everything Quadient told us to do, as closely as possible.
First, we were told we should start building templates to streamline our processes…
Read the full story here.
