Digital patient experiences can take cues from consumer-centric companies such as Netflix

Photo: Jeff Lagasse/Healthcare Finance News

LAS VEGAS - Consumers are demanding a better healthcare experience, and it's largely due to the business practices of some non-healthcare organizations that have become a daily presence in people's lives. Digital-first companies like Netflix and Amazon have cracked the code of consumer engagement, and increasingly the healthcare industry will need to follow suit in order to remain relevant.

But the question remains: How does healthcare achieve this goal?

That was what Andy Harlen attempted to answer during the HIMSS21 conference in Las Vegas. Harlen, head of platform partnerships in strategy and new business development at cloud technology company League, spoke remotely in a session titled "What Healthcare Can Learn from Netflix."

As it turns out, healthcare can learn a lot from the streaming giant, particularly when it comes to engagement.

When Netflix began, it offered DVD-by-mail services that engaged with its user base on a monthly or perhaps weekly basis. This is analogous to the typical approach of healthcare providers, which is to touch base with patients only a couple of times in a given year.

Flash forward to today, and Netflix engages with its users on a daily basis through content streaming, with customers able to access content at home or on their devices anywhere in the world. It's a model healthcare should emulate, said Harlen.

"The healthcare system looks more like my grandparents' old-fashioned cable TV, when people want Netflix," he said. "You need to expand your mindset and your addressable market."

To do so Harlen suggested thinking about a tenfold increase in interactions per year. The idea is to stop thinking of people as patients and consider them instead consumers who should be known entities to hospitals and health systems before they need care.

The numbers drive home the importance of this approach: 70% of digital traffic occurs on phones, according to Harlen, and 90% of it occurs on an app. Providers and caregivers are competing for the home screen, and he expects that organizations that adopt this principle will have three times more engagement if they can muscle into that digital real estate.

One of the most important aspects of this shift in thinking is the concept of personalization, which Harlen called the "jet fuel of engagement." 

"What if you can harness all the data in your system of record and combine it with wearables data? What if patients engage with their health app the same way they engage with their Netflix watch list? We need an engagement strategy," he said. "Be digital-first and offer unique services."

The real competition is not other hospitals and health systems, he said, but rather Amazon, Peloton and Apple. If healthcare doesn't focus on individual experiences unique to each person, and customized experience that feels fresh, the industry is in danger of losing that race.

"This is a race, and the race is on," said Harlen. "And you have one major thing they don't have: trust. Trust is in your side, and should buy you some time."