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+--- Thread: The Next Phase of Consumerization in Healthcare (/showthread.php?tid=2137)
The Next Phase of Consumerization in Healthcare - Rachel Franzmann - 03-26-2025
In recent years, health systems have sought to deliver more consumer-centric experiences for patients, leading to major investments in digital transformation. While significant progress has been made, three key trends have emerged that highlight the challenges of creating a truly seamless patient experience on par with other consumer driven industries.
1. A Shift from Point Solutions to Platforms
Historically, health systems have implemented point solutions to address individual consumer experience challenges, from scheduling and virtual care to outreach and communication. However, organizations are increasingly looking for platforms that provide customizable capabilities to meet a wide array of patient journeys. Solution vendors have responded through mergers and acquisitions and re-positioning themselves as a platform. Today, a variety of platform categories are gaining traction, including:
- Consumer Data Platforms (CDP): Used by marketing teams to segment and target patient populations for outbound campaigns and propensity to need care.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: Manage ongoing patient engagement often focused on call center and outreach capabilities, but typically lack personalized attributes, patient preferences, or prompts to drive actions in digital channels. If they do have these capabilities, they are typically based on segments or models, not on actual patient data.
- Scheduling and Virtual Care Platforms: Facilitate self-service patient access, self-service scheduling, and on-demand care modalities.
- Outreach and Communication Tools: Facilitate email, SMS, and chatbot-driven interactions.
- Education Pathway Tools: Designed to keep patients engaged throughout a care journey – spanning from new patient acquisition through complex cancer care management.
2. The Proliferation of Emerging AI-Driven Offerings
AI-driven solutions, such as chatbots and voice bots, have introduced new ways for patients to communicate with health systems. However, this has also led to a fragmented ecosystem where:
- Multiple vendors manage overlapping communication channels — email, text, chat, phone, and voice bots — and lack coordination with each other, often sending duplicate or conflicting messages.
- Patient preferences for communication channels are not centrally managed, leading to inconsistent, duplicative, and unwanted interactions.
Without a unified orchestration layer, AI tools are situated to add complexity to patient engagement, rather than simplifying it.
3. Stagnation of Digital Front Doors
Digital front doors were once seen as the key to modernizing patient access, promising to centralize interactions in a single mobile or web-based entry point. However, in practice:
- Digital front doors are often managed by marketing teams focused only on driving patient conversion rather than ensuring a seamless, digitally enabled transaction-ready care journey.
- Integration of new offerings, such as ancillary services, patient portals, point solutions, and personalized data, is often constrained by expensive custom development, ongoing maintenance, and internal resource prioritization challenges.
- While most health systems have deployed mobile applications, they often simply replicate a health system’s website — with limited capabilities beyond provider search, virtual care access, and a portal login without true integration. Without consistent updates and new features, these mobile applications often struggle to achieve their full promise and ROI.
As a result, patients still face friction and bifurcated experiences when trying to navigate their care needs.
The Need for Consumer Experience Orchestration
While consumerization of the patient experience remains a pressing priority for health systems, delivering a seamless, single patient experience is becoming increasingly complex to deliver across cross-functional teams. The various platforms, point solutions, and operational teams involved in patient experience are not integrated, leading to siloed and disconnected interactions.
Health systems must lay the foundation for Consumer Experience Orchestration, ensuring that all patient touch points are coordinated and personalized. This means:
- Connecting CDP and CRM Data with Digital Front Doors: Patient insights should inform what users see on websites and mobile apps, ensuring relevance and personalization to support both new patient acquisition and conversion along with ongoing care journeys for established patients.
- Coordinating Communications Across Channels: Chat bots, voice bots, SMS, email, and push notifications should work together in an integrated, preference-enabled approach. Each modality needs to be considered when reviewing the call to action of each given message (e.g. SMS messages are the ideal modality to confirm an appointment, while push notifications in a logged-in portal are best for driving transactions.)
- Driving Users into an Authenticated Experience: Seamless authentication should reduce friction, enabling personalized recommendations and higher conversion rates. The biggest drop off often surfaces when routing patients to login to a long-forgotten account to make an outbound call.
- Integrating Digital Front Doors with Core Digital Capabilities: Patients should have a single place to manage their care, with integrations spanning patient portals, EHRs, scheduling systems, point solutions, and ancillary services.
- Bringing Educational Materials into an Orchestrated Patient Journey: Complex patient journeys need to be integrated with digital capabilities (Rx refills, provider scheduling, lab orders, imaging referrals, provider messaging, etc.) to support both planned and dynamic patient journeys as care plans expand or contract based on needs.
Introducing a New Solution Category: Consumer Experience Orchestration
Consumer Experience Orchestration is an emerging category designed to unify and optimize the patient journey across multiple digital and operational touchpoints. By offering SDK- and API-first solutions with pre-integrated connections to CRMs, patient portals, EHRs, and ancillary service providers, Praia Health is uniquely positioned to help health systems navigate this transformation. By working within existing digital front doors and with existing solution vendors, Praia Health is able to minimize switching costs while maximizing value from existing solutions that are deployed across multiple departments.
Rather than continuing to layer new point solutions on top of an already-fragmented ecosystem, healthcare organizations — ranging from payors, health systems, pharmacies, and event employers — should invest in orchestration capabilities that bring these solutions together. The future of healthcare consumerization lies not in the next standalone digital tool, but in the ability to seamlessly connect, personalize, and optimize the entire patient experience.