Find out how healthcare insurers and providers can use customer analytics to increase patient loyalty.
McKinsey’s study compared several companies that had implemented customer analytics solutions into their businesses with their competitors that didn’t use customer analytics. The result revealed that customer analytics users are three times more likely to generate above-average revenue growth and over twice as likely to get a higher return on investment (ROI) from their marketing strategies.
Why Do Organizations Use Customer Analytics?
A company that wants to attract new customers and retain existing ones uses special analytics solutions. They collect, verify, interpret, and analyze customer data to identify and understand their motivations, habits, and preferences. With the help of customer analytics, companies can better understand their clients and offer them more personalized services, products, and care.
How Does Customer Analytics Benefit Healthcare Organizations?
Personalization of healthcare services is no longer just a nice feature of any healthcare company. It is a strategic imperative for every business that grows in this industry. Patients are no longer willing to accept low-quality healthcare services and prefer to exchange poor services for effective ones that meet their expectations. Customer analytics is useful for any medical organization, but its greatest use is in insurance and healthcare.
Patients want a high-quality experience at every stage of their healthcare journey. If they choose a medical provider or a health insurance company, they expect this “collaboration” will be seamless: transparent, understandable, and convenient for the customer. Also, it is important for the patient that the healthcare company hears their feedback from using services.
Healthcare Providers
A healthcare provider’s inattention to client needs, experiences, and expectations can lead to customer churn. Oak Street Health cites a survey from the Altarum Institute Center for Consumer Choice in Health Care and emphasizes that patients most often want to change doctors to get “better treatment or service”. Only 39% of patients say they are truly satisfied with the care they receive, while 76% of doctors believe their patients are satisfied with their treatment.
How does customer analytics benefit healthcare providers?
Healthcare providers may implement customer analytics to improve the customer experience and develop effective communication and marketing strategies. It identifies events that have occurred and their causes and uses historical data and patterns to predict what will happen in the future. In addition, it can highlight what needs to be done to achieve or avoid certain results in the future.
Customer analytics not only collects data from electronic health records (EHR) and healthcare claims data but also expands the base for analysis by including clinical trial info and patient survey data. The EHR contains info about laboratory results, past diagnoses and treatments, and current treatment plans and medications prescribed. Patient survey data contains opinions and experiences that patients have formed from the treatments and other healthcare services they have received. Clinical trial info includes data on the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions such as vaccinations, drug treatments, medical device placement, etc. Clinical studies on humans are organized to collect this data.
View what a healthcare provider can do if they implement customer analytics solutions into their business.
Minimize the need for readmission to the hospital
Dmitry Baraishuk, the Chief Innovation Officer of the software development company Belitsoft with 20 years of HealthTech expertise, emphasizes that healthcare business intelligence can determine factors that lead to readmissions, e.g., how carefully the patient takes medications according to the doctor’s prescriptions. This allows the provider to effectively plan the care and follow-up of the patient after discharge. This strategy preempts the need for readmission and reduces overall hospital care costs and burdens.
Determine the specific healthcare needs of patients
Client analytics can help healthcare providers determine what lifestyle clients lead, how often they visit the doctor, what diagnoses, and what risk factors they have. The provider can identify patients at high risk of chronic diseases via analytics reports and organize preventive measures.
Increase patient loyalty
Customer analytics collects and analyzes data about the full interaction cycle between each patient and the provider’s services. In addition, the provider can expand the range and improve the quality of its services based on patient feedback. The opportunity to be heard increases customer loyalty.
Healthcare Insurance
XMI’s Consumer Study found that 84% of respondents were satisfied with how the right insurance plans for them were found and selected. 83% appreciated the fact that they received help with their health through the insurance company. 75% of respondents were satisfied with their experience submitting and managing claims. Overall, the average ranking of health insurers has declined since 2019 (8th out of 20 industries), and by the end of 2023, health insurers ranked 16th out of 20 industries included in this study.
How is customer analytics useful for healthcare insurance?
Customer analytics allows healthcare insurance to monitor the current state of customer experience (CX) in real-time, identify “hot spots” that require attention, improve them, and increase their rating among customers. Read about how customer analytics can benefit healthcare insurers.
Provide personalized patient care
Through customer analytics, insurers can create patient profiles to gain a holistic view of each patient’s personality. Customer analytics can also take data for profile creation from a customer relationship management (CRM) system. An agent studies what a patient values, what problems they face, and more. Then they will be able to offer the patient more personalized service. For example, a patient hasn’t been to their primary care doctor in over a year. The insurer can offer them options for their doctor-tailored course of action based on age, complete medical history, time since their previous doctor visit, etc.
Remind about an upcoming doctor’s visit
Some patients often miss doctor’s appointments for many reasons, e.g., forgetting about them. If they don’t take full advantage of the plan’s ability to see a doctor regularly, they can change their current insurance plan to a lower coverage plan or cancel it. The insurer can use customer analytics data to provide targeted interventions. For example, offer to remind the patient about an upcoming visit to the doctor. This way, the insurance company reduces the risk that the patient will miss an appointment, increases patient satisfaction from using the insurance plan, and reduces the outflow of clients with the risk of cancellation.
Increase the level of vaccination of the population
Insurance companies seek to improve registration rates for seasonal vaccinations, as a lack of prevention can lead to serious complications, especially in older people. Complications from illnesses increase healthcare costs for both insurance companies and patients themselves. Through customer analytics, the insurer can identify groups of people at risk of health complications and personally invite them to register for vaccination. For other groups of people identified by the analytics, the insurance company may offer to vaccinate their elderly relatives and friends.
Bottom Line
When a healthcare company maintains customer history and uses analytics from that data, it gains insight into how customer segments interact with it and its services. Customers can be passive and limit their feedback to only criticism or praise of the healthcare company. However, customer analytics can structure and interpret all the collected data to highlight problem areas. The healthcare organization may use this data to improve or update its services and products.
