Choose your difficult: Transform or Decline

Is AI the catalyst to accelerate Digital Transformation in Healthcare..?

62% of PX (Patient Experience) Leaders in Healthcare view AI as crucial to their organisation's future. Only 20% healthcare organisations have a mature digital PX presence. Forrester 2024

What implications does this hold for healthcare decision makers? #HealthcareInnovation #AIinHealthcare#DigitalTransformation#PatientExperience

Digital Transformation in Healthcare, is for sure a difficult & costly undertaking. Investment approvals, creating the right team, aligning on requirements, RFP process, channel strategy are a few of the significant set-up challenges. Then 12-36 months of heavy lifting begins: Design, Build, Test, Deploy, Embed, Run.

Why do a significant portion of Healthcare providers still have a crucial decision to make: Digitise or.....

Having been a Workforce Planning and Customer Experience Thought Leader in the service industry (2000 to 2018). I've experienced huge digital shift. The digital channels (My account, FAQs, Social Media, Live Chat, Chat Bots, Whatsapp, SMS....) we now use to do our shopping or banking for EG. have enabled these organisations to handoff significant effort to their websites, leaving just the valuable contacts to be handled by their biggest asset 'employees'. In doing so, they've reduced operational costs and improved customer satisfaction. As consumers, this is what we've become used to.

Call Miner - Consumer Trends White Paper - 2024

Traditional barriers: legacy systems, complex patient journeys, compliance and trust in technology, have played a role in slowing digital progress in patient management.

Motivation, has been another. 'It works now, why invest so much in harmonising our systems. Let's defer until next year'. To an extent, this is understandable. Banks, Retailers, Utilities etc, spend significantly more on servicing costs. In one of my former Workforce Planning roles I was responsible for 5 contact centres, employing between 900 and 1500 FTEs depending on seasonality. The budget was £100m plus.

Whilst larger Private Health organisations have followed the CX trend, many Patient Service Providers will look after a cohort of patients. The scale of which is thousands of patients versus millions of customers. Therefore the scale of the workforce is relatively lower and so is the cost saving.

The explosion of AI now provides the motivation. Healthcare was never motivated to lose people. With a global shortage of nurses and clinicians, the industry needs to be able to do more with less to cope with growing demand and diminished resources. When applied with the right principles, both Digitisation and AI will bring: Quicker decision making, quicker diagnoses, self-serve, automation and can bring industry wide operational excellence.

So now really is the right time to choose your difficult: 1) Transform and be better or 2) stay as you are. Option 1 is difficult but brings you a sustainable organisation making you join the 20% already in a good position to do more in the market. Potentially nudging those who don't out.