5 revolutionary trends in patient experience for healthcare contact centers

Healthcare providers are at a pivotal moment to reimagine the patient experience.

We talked to almost 700 patients and more than 170 patient experience (PX) professionals to understand the changing dynamics of PX in healthcare. We heard the same thing over and over: patients expect more out of their experience with healthcare providers and the stakes are rising to meet that expectation.

We’re calling it the PX revolution in healthcare.

With this revolution comes the opportunity for healthcare providers to transform their contact centers into strategic assets. Here are the major trends that emerged as we explored the nature of this revolution in our global research survey, conducted among qualified healthcare PX professionals and patients across North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe:

1. Healthcare providers aspire to reimagine PX.

With 75% of patients reporting they are more loyal to healthcare providers that invest in improving PX, 87% of healthcare PX professionals agree they need to differentiate based on PX excellence. The will to improve PX is strong and investments are being made.

2. A fragmented patient journey is costing providers.

Despite providers’ goals, healthcare systems and workflows are currently siloed. Accordingly, only 37% of patients say their provider is capable of providing an excellent experience in a completely digital way. The stakes to address this are high; 67% of patients report that a single poor patient service experience will negatively impact their brand loyalty.

3. Modern contact centers are integral to driving unified and seamless PX.

Healthcare providers are reconsidering how customer service influences PX, and turning to modern cloud contact centers to leverage capabilities that go beyond issue resolution. 69% of PX professionals report that positioning the contact center as a strategic asset is a high priority, but 57% say on-premise systems limit their ability to improve PX. 

4. Contact centers’ new role is care coordination.

The opportunity to elevate the purpose of the contact center from issue resolution to care coordination can supercharge PX transformation. Providers are looking beyond what their contact center does now to imagine how it can facilitate inbound and outbound interactions that proactively serve patient needs, such as providing next-best-action recommendations. Currently, only 28% of providers use AI to fuel recommended actions, but 46% anticipate doing so within two years. 

5. Contact centers can excel at patient and business intelligence.

The pressure is on to extract more data from the contact center to inform strategic business and PX decisions. 73% of PX professionals cite deeper patient insights for the organization as a high priority, and 81% are seeing increased demand for patient feedback from the contact center compared to last year. Modern cloud contact centers can offer a rich, accessible repository of HIPAA-compliant data.

Healthcare providers are at a pivotal moment to reimagine the patient experience. To discover more about what we heard and what you can do to apply the lessons learned, download the full report, The Patient Experience (PX) Revolution in Healthcare.