Talkdesk recently released a new report alongside CHIME, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.
The report, named “The Future of Patient Experience: Unifying Interactions Healthcare” explores the core reasons for disconnected patient experiences, and the many consequences.
According to Talkdesk, Healthcare providers have been doubling down on their investments into solutions for enhanced patient care and experience in recent years. Largely, this has involved the adoption of new digital technologies. However, the rapid adoption of disjointed tools is leading to unintended issues, including siloed data, and fragmented interactions.
Rising Issues with Patient Experience Fragmentation
Talkdesk and CHIME believe fragmentation and disconnects between patient interactions are leading to a host of problems, including difficulty addressing care issues, and critical information gaps. Notably, these problems also lead to friction for patient and service staff, driving burnout among employees.
As patients continue to unlock more options for their healthcare interactions, and service expectations accelerate, CHIME believes healthcare vendors need to focus on uniting the patient journey to ensure consistently high-quality interactions. Unifying the various components of patient interactions can lead to more straightforward, and less stressful journeys.
Around 55 percent of the participants surveyed in the study now say integration of patient engagement tools is one of their top priorities for the coming year. However, 84 percent believe this integration cannot be achieved easily with existing platforms.
According to Talkdesk’s VP of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Patty Hayward, a cloud-focused is the best step forward. She said:
“A cloud-based, integration-first platform that supports a range of channels and functional areas offers an alternative to custom integration projects and paves the way to more unified, seamless patient journeys.”
The Most Thought-Provoking Insights from the Talkdesk Report
Overall, Talkdesk and CHIME’s research into the healthcare landscape highlights the vast number of challenges these groups are facing when it comes to enhancing customer experience. Some of the most important findings of the report include:
- 71 percent of the respondents in the study said their organisation has limited or no integration between patient engagement offerings.
- Survey respondents cited disjointed (58 percent) and inconsistent (63 percent) patient experiences as the most significant challenges they currently face.
- Healthcare leaders view decentralized ownership of various related tools and a lack of flexibility between existing technology systems to be the most significant barriers to creating a unified patient journey.
By conducting this research, Talkdesk and CHIME aimed to better understand the issues which are leading to poor patient satisfaction in the current healthcare landscape.
The groups discovered fragmentation and inconsistency between interactions has caused a number of problems not just for patient care, but also for employee engagement and productivity.
The report was based on a quantitative survey conducted online with collaboration from the CHIME Digital Health Analytics team.
Findings are based on a total of 115 global interviews with executive level employees from healthcare systems, ambulatory facilities, nursing facilities, physicians offices, and hospitals.
