Addictive Marketing Podcast
Telehealth is no longer a plan on the long term patient experience road map. COVID-19 has changed the way physicians and patients connect. In this podcast episode, Dan and I discuss the implications of this new dynamic, and how marketers can get ahead of the curve.
Transcript
Dave:
I had a telehealth experience with my daughter a few weeks ago. It was awful trying to get to the point where I can get a video with the doctor. The problem is the doctor's office had no idea how to use my chart. It's not their thing. All they know is how to treat you and see you. So there was this technology barrier between myself, my daughter, and a cure. And the technology was making ... It's such a hassle, it was unbelievable. I think for something that maybe could have taken five minutes to do, it took me a good half an hour research, find out what I'm doing wrong, contact people at my chart, do you know XYZ?
Dan:
In fairness, it's early days. Everybody's just trying to scramble to get a solution together and it's going to be a little bit messy in a while. But you do bring up a very interesting point. What technology really should be for and how it should be helpful.
Dave:
Right. And I just thought I'm really passionate about it right now, because I'm thinking if I'm going through this on this level, maybe there are even more people out there who are doing the same thing. So what I wanted to do was shift the conversation over and talk about a couple of things. First of all, what technology should and should not be? And I know you have some pretty strong opinions on that topic, and then maybe what telehealth should look like in the future, probably near future going forward?
Dan:
Yeah, I think you bring up a good point. You had what I would call a high friction experience. When you're with your first a telehealth appointment. What I mean by high friction is when technology gets in the way, it makes things harder, not easier, you end up frustrated. There's a Gartner study recently came out about how, your customers are 10 times more likely to leave you if they have a high friction experience. So yeah, I mean this is early days for telehealth, but if these types of experiences continue, there's going to be problems and patients are going to seek out the better experiences.
Dan:
Which brings me to the question of, why we have technology in our lives to begin with? And it's not necessarily the most obvious question, but to me the answer is that, technology for the sake of technology is not worthwhile. But why it's here is to try to make our lives better and easier in some way. Dave, we were talking earlier about great examples of this. You remember the old days of this is dating myself, but when we used to have folding maps in the car, in order to get you where you had to unfold this crazy thing and you actually needed some form of a sense of direction in order to get anywhere. The one good thing about the maps is that, you remembered how to get places once you went there. Because it took a lot ... You had to be a really engaged, to make it.
Dan:
I think it was MapQuest was one of the first online maps that I remember thinking, wow, this is crazy that they've actually charted all of these roads and they can give me directions to where I'm going to go. That was pretty amazing, butut there are still a lot of things about it that were really hard to use. There wasn't really any GPS at that time, or the GPS that was around was very expensive. MapQuest got us started and that was pretty neat, when it worked. But then, suddenly GPS technology steps in. I'll never forget the first time I was in a car with GPS thinking, wow this is really cool. How does it know where we are, and knows directions, and where to get us? That was really pretty amazing.
Dan:
And then it kept getting a little bit better once somebody understood that, hey, it should be voice activated instead of having to use one of these crazy car interfaces to get the information in there. That was an improvement. And you're still seeing improvements, it were that the technology that really makes our lives better wins. So I think a good example of that is so many people started using Waze, because they were the first to really understand how to use traffic to get you places. Because what good are directions if we're going to send you into the world's largest traffic jam, which in Boston of course we're famous for.
Dan:
So, to me that's a good example of the path that technology took and how the companies that really did well started to improve the experience and I like to say that the best technology should be invisible to you. You shouldn't realize it. As soon as you realize the technology is there, it has ceased to be helpful in your life.
Dave:
Because it presents a problem. It gets in the way of the flow of whatever it is you're trying to do. And I know we had just put together ... I know you had put together a blog on the website. If folks want to, go to whiterhino.com and check out our blog site. We had just put up a blog about a ... And the title of it is, "The Big Telehealth Disconnect."
Dan:
A lot of these hospitals have been forced into telehealth and it's going to be a good thing for them. Ultimately it will be more revenue streams for them, but it should be seen as a way to make life easier for their patients. One of the interesting effects is that it makes the world a little bit smaller. I live in Boston, but if I wanted to get an appointment with the Mayo clinic, it's a hell of a lot easier than it was just a couple of weeks ago. The point is, a low effort, or frictionless experience is going to be an important differentiator.
Dan:
I think a big part of is going to be, how easy it is to have this telehealth experience? So, first you have to register to be a patient, then you have to register for something like My Chart, the patient portal, which is not always easy, not always straightforward. Then you have to make an appointment by phone for telehealth. Then you have to download something like zoom, which is the easiest of most of them, but it still is not always easy for everyone. Then you have to go to the website, you have to log into back to My Chart, or whatever the portal is. You then have to open up your portal messages, find your appointment confirmation and then you have to enter your zoom ID and password in zoom itself,and I won't even get into what happens after you've actually logged on.
Dan:
Now compare that high friction process with a low friction process where you choose an open time slot just like you would for open table for a restaurant, and then you receive a text message with a secure, please join us now link and that's it. Which one would you choose Dave, as a consumer, especially based on what you've been through recently?
Dave:
Well yeah, I want to go back to the one that's easier to use. You just want to see your doctor. You're talking about nine steps versus three steps. It's a no brainer, but how long do you think the hospital has, as far as the level of patience that somebody has before they're going to recognize there's an issue and then move on? I feel like with this whole COVID thing, we're a little bit more forgiving, but at what point do people get left behind if they don't fix this?
Dan:
Oh sure, no it's a great question. It took Amazon about nine years before they got the experience to the point where it was seamless for most people. And there's going to be, definitely a grace period for hospitals where people were willing to forgive. But at some point, and I think we'll know it when we see it, it might be a year from now, it might be two years from now. I don't think it'll be much more than that because I think as we've seen, technology can move at warp speed once something is adopted. We have clients who were not thinking about doing telehealth for another two to three years, but now, this week have rolled it out.
Dan:
I think it's going to take a while and what's going to be interesting is that, I think the consumers will know very quickly, and recognize what an easy experience is, and what a not so easy experience is. But I would say that in no more than two years, there's going to be some really good telehealth solutions out there.
Dave:
Well there's even another layer to that. And I know that most marketers are thinking in this direction anyway, but I want to bring it up because, Google recently announced it's going to make it easier to connect with providers that are offering telehealth directly from search results. So if you can get that right, the search engines are going to recognize you a lot more easily and you'll move up in the search results. So you've got two things. You've got the l aspects of making the patient journey better, but then you also have the technology side where Google is going to actually reward you for a better experience.
Dan:
Yeah, it's just like right now Google rewards you if you've got a responsively designed mobile site. But it goes beyond that. In the beginning it was just, do you have a mobile site? And then Google would rank you higher, then it was, do you have responsive mobile site? And it would rank you higher. Then it was, do you have a really fluid responsive site? And they would rank higher. And then it really comes down to what is the overall experience of your site, and how relevant is it? How much is it being shared? All of those things are going to go into where your hospital gets ranked on Google in the future. They're going to look at the overall experience and the more low friction your experiences, the higher you're going to be ranked on Google.
Dave:
It's interesting, I'm looking at the blog post now, and again, folks go to whiterhino.com and check out the blogs we have posted. What we're talking about right now happens to be The Big Telehealth Disconnect. Within the post we’ve put up a representation of what the patient journey looks like, and where telemedicine actually falls in. We wanted to give you an idea of what it is we're thinking in context of the big picture with telemedicine.
Dave:
But Dan, we've been talking here for about 15 minutes. I wanted to keep this short and sweet, talk about the technology, and how things have changed. What are your thoughts on the market, and what's that going to look like as we move forward? Or what the end result might be?
Dan:
That's such a big question. There's a lot to think about, and just a reminder that we're having a virtual round table regarding telehealth and the future of medicine, this Thursday. So people might want to check that out. But I think that one of the things that Amazon got right was that they were smart enough to know not to send you to a separate website to place an order. And what I mean by that, in healthcare, we know that the patient portal is generally the place that most of that kind of thing happens. And why is it entirely separate experiences for most hospitals? I think we're going to see that begin to merge into one experience would be my guess.
Dan:
And it's the same reason with Uber. They don't make you log in every time you want to check the status of your car to see where it is on the map. You just open it up and there it is. That’s putting yourself in your consumer’s shoes. If Google were in charge of doing this or Amazon were in charge of making this happen, what would they do? How would they invent the experience? And yes, I realize that most hospitals are not even close to Amazon, but nothing can stop you from dreaming like Amazon would dream and then put a roadmap in place to make it happen. I also think about things like, what is telehealth going to look like in the future?
Dan:
Are there going to be different flavors of it, or is there really only one major flavor? For example, if I choose to see a nurse practitioner, is that going to be faster for me? Is there a bot that can answer some questions for me that can be really cheap? Five or 10 bucks and I'm getting some help? Another problem is that people are finding out that they have to wait sometimes 45 minutes for the doctor, only to find out that they really need an X Ray before anything else can happen. So I think what we're going to see assessment tools, these sort of assessment triage tools on the front end of these that are going to help you identify, what your diagnosis might be, what you need to do now, and whether or not your next step really is telehealth or if it's something else.
Dan:
You’ll see a much more seamless experience that's going to really have some empathy for what the patient is going through. Another way to think about it is, what about on the clinician side of things? What are they seeing on their end? Because that's a big part of it. We know that nine out of 10 doctors really don't love their jobs anymore. It's become so administratively ridden with work and chores that they just don't love it anymore. Maybe this is a chance for them to get some joy back into their job. Is there a way that telehealth can lead to taking away some of the stuff that you alluded to earlier? Maybe some of the conversations can be recorded and transcribed live, so we'll have all that information.
Dan:
Or imagine that the physician can spend more time with you because, let's say for example, you're wearing an Apple watch and he or she can see your heart rate, temperature, even an EKG reading. Maybe you're even having chest pains and right away the physician can see that everything's fine. It's just a little bit of temporary tachycardia, but it's not a heart attack, nothing to worry about. Imagine making better use of all these tools to make your life better. That's kind of where I'm beginning to start to envision what the future looks like. What about you?
Dave:
I'm thinking the same thing, but now I'm thinking like in a global level. So, you've got the visiting Nurses Association. Maybe the visiting nurses can't get in to see you, but they can still do their virtual rounds. Maybe there is an opportunity on a larger scope. We talked to somebody the other day in the medical field who wants to make a difference in Africa. But what if you can use that telehealth experience to reach people en masse?
Dave:
So you can reach villages, you can reach whomever it is you are trying to connect with. It's really a whole new frontier.
Dan:
Think about this, one of the things that's been really sad about the COVID phenomenon is that, people's families have not been allowed to visit somebody who's sick in the hospital. And that is really sad on all sides, there's just no other way to think about it. Is there a way to use telehealth in another way to connect families and patients? Can that be part of the offering now and in the future?
Dan:
And perhaps another way to use it is, have you ever had the experience where, you're visiting someone in the hospital and you're trying to find their attending physician to find out what's going on with your mother or whoever it is. And you can't find the attending physician or you hear something like, "Oh, she'll be around in about three or four hours usually." So yet somehow you never seem to intersect with seeing that person.
Dan:
The best you can do is you get a download from a nurse who may not have been on the case and doesn't really know all the details. Well, is there a way to use telehealth so that any of the conversations that have been had between the physician and the patient or perhaps the physician can make a general diagnosis or a statement of how the surgery went, where the procedure went that is allowed to be shared with the family. That would be another great use of telehealth in my opinion. There's so many things that we can do to make people's lives better with telehealth, it's almost like we could do a few podcasts just on that alone.
Dan:
I would say that the takeaway from this podcast is, how do we make the experiences as friction free as possible?
Dave:
All right. On that note, you've been listening to Addictive Marketing. Again, my name is Dave. I'm with Dan Greenwald, who's our CEO and chief creative officer. If you guys want to reach us, you can do so at AddictiveMarketing@whiterhino.com, or reach out to Dan directly. Dan@whiterhino.com or Dave@whiterhino.com . Happy to answer any questions that you might have. We're getting through this COVID-19 thing and we'll do it together.
