How the healthcare user experience improves patient retention

User experience is important across nearly all industries, from website design to automobile design. It paves the way for personalized experiences that lead to happier customers. A focus on user experience means a focus on per-customer outcomes: pairing each customer to a product or service that meets their individual needs.

Organizations prioritize user experience for several reasons. Many seek to improve customer feedback and relationships, since most organizations know there is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and continued sales. Other companies simply seek long-term revenue: ROI on user experience can reach nearly 10,000%.

An emphasis on user experience also helps prevent the alternative: buyers leaving one brand for a competitor more focused on customer needs. 76% of customers get frustrated when they don’t receive a personalized buying experience, leading many companies to continually research customer needs, challenges, and interests.

In healthcare, user experience means more than customer satisfaction; it means considering patients’ complete health profiles in ways that deliver better outcomes. To consider a patient’s complete health profile, providers need access to more information and better information — data that sheds more light into that patient’s unique experience. Depending on the patient, this data could include blood pressure, heart rate, diet, exercise frequency, respiration rate, body temperature, and more.

Delivering a superior and unique, patient experience requires prioritizing a personalized care framework over episodic treatment.

Episodic care and patient experience: An imperfect pair

No matter the industry, a superior customer experience demands detailed customer insight. A hospitality company can’t customize your hotel room’s temperature, view, and refreshments if they don’t know them.

In the same way, a superior healthcare patient experience requires detailed patient information. Providers need better insight to deliver better care. This insight is particularly important for the 60% of adults in the U.S. living with a chronic condition, where more information can lead to better outcomes over time.

The majority of modern medical care is episodic. Outside of routine appointments, many patients only see providers when they need treatment for an isolated disease or condition. In between their health episodes, patients are unattended. This sporadic care model leads to an incomplete perspective on a patient’s background, limiting a provider’s ability to personalize treatment.

Superior patient experience with patients’ complete medical histories, symptoms, lifestyle data, and other insights isn’t a part of most episodic care.

Personalized Care: The key to superior patient experience and retention

The data a provider gathers during an episodic check-up is, at best, a point-in-time snapshot of a patient’s condition and relies on their best recollection of what has happened since the last visit. This method might help improve symptoms, but it doesn’t offer the best patient experience, especially if patients are asked to repeat information over again to multiple care team members.

By contrast, a personalized care model means clinical teams can view patients’ everyday data in their charts alongside the clinical data gathered during a visit. There are no extra software programs to learn, logins to memorize, or data sets to copy and paste.

Personalized care means faster, more efficient, more meaningful care, helping patients feel supported and encouraging them to take greater accountability for their health and well-being. And a positive patient experience quickly contributes to retention rates in meaningful ways.

At Validic, we’re excited to make good on that promise of better, more informed care. For more information about our personalized care solution and device logistics capabilities, email us at hello@validic.com or contact us here. Stay connected with us @Validic on Twitter and LinkedIn.