Healthcare typically lags behind other industries when it comes to digital transformation. However, growing competition in the field means a solid digital consumer experience is becoming more crucial for organizations.

Radio Advisory's Rachel Woods sat down with digital health experts Jordan Angers and Ty Aderhold to discuss what healthcare leaders need to consider when revamping their digital consumer strategy and how to ensure that patients who could benefit most from digital health aren't being left behind.

Read a lightly edited excerpt from the interview below and download the episode for the full conversation.

Rachel Woods: Let's talk about your five areas of focus—functionality, customer service, self-service, personalization, and omnichannel. Now, some of those seem obvious to me. I would hope that anything digital is functional. Maybe you're going to tell me that there's a higher bar for what functional actually means in healthcare, but some of these, I've got to tell you, I'm worried about us being able to actually hit it.

I'm thinking about omnichannel specifically. This is not something that healthcare is necessarily known for. Why is this the right level that we should be aiming for as an industry that frankly is really freaking behind when it comes to anything digital?

Jordan Angers: I agree completely with you that healthcare is not known for having great digital experiences, but at the same time, a good digital experience is a good experience regardless of what industry you're interacting with, and healthcare doesn't get a pass for being healthcare because the patients and the members that are interacting with your healthcare organization are bringing all of the knowledge and experiences that they get from interacting with banking and retail and streaming service and all of those other examples that you hear all the time.

Woods: I completely agree. The bar is set by everything that is not healthcare, not by healthcare experiences themselves. Maybe that's why you decided to look outside of our own industry.

Angers: Exactly. I think for each of the five components that we identified, we do have examples of healthcare organizations who have been able to do it successfully. It shows that it's not impossible for healthcare to achieve that better digital experience.

Ty Aderhold: The only thing I'll add here is you don't have to have all five for a good digital experience to exist. Even if you have one or two, that is likely a better digital experience than a lot of patients and members are getting today, which is not to say don't put an effort here, but it is to say that you don't have to achieve at all five to provide the experience that patients and members would appreciate.

Woods: I'm also guessing that there's some level setting to do within these areas of focus. I'm sure that you are going to tell me that some of your external examples come from the big heavy hitters in retail, the Amazons of the world.

Aderhold: JPMorgan Chase is a great example.

Woods: JPMorgan Chase. Again, things that we use in our everyday lives, but I'm also guessing there's a pared back version of that that is still net better for healthcare. Let's get some examples of these.

Start with my one that I have a question on, which is functional. What is a functional digital consumer experience?

Aderhold: On a base level, I think a functional consumer experience is one that works. Of course everything works, but honestly no, not everything works. I think in particular when you think about functionality, what we're talking about here is not just an app that doesn't freeze or a website that loads. What we're talking about here is an app or a website that lets the user do what they're hoping to do.

You could have an app that works, that you can click around in, but if it doesn't let the user accomplish what they're setting out to do within that app or what you're telling them they could technically do within that app, it's not actually functional.

That's where I think the difference comes in and where there are organizations that have apps that technically function but maybe aren't functional from a consumer experience perspective.

Angers: Our team ran an informal survey with our coworkers and friends and family about good healthcare experiences. The one medical app was a really good example that came up a lot of a good digital experience that actually worked. People could actually schedule their visits when it said schedule here and they could actually pay their bill through the app or they could find the information they were looking for.

Woods: The schedule one is a big one for me because oftentimes, either in an app or on a website, there is an option that says schedule an appointment, but it's not actually scheduling an appointment. It's, "Send an email," "Here's a phone call," "Schedule this and then somebody will call you and tell you that time actually never worked in the first place."

Now, I understand what you mean, Ty, by actually functioning in the way that it is intended to. Scheduling an appointment means actually scheduling the appointment that you're going to have at the end of the day.

Angers: Even though it sounds very basic to have an experience that works, this is the first building block to creating an experience in building that patient trust in the rest of your digital experience.

Woods: We know that that trust can be broken, which is maybe why customer service is something that's important.

Angers: The reason that we included customer service as one of the components in the second component is because I think when a lot of people hear digital, they get worried that they're going to lose that human touch and that human relationship.

The word to emphasize in customer service is service and that you can have that customer service experience even if it is digital, and it's really important to have it to help support your end user throughout their experience.

Woods: This is the biggest pushback that I hear from physicians themselves when they're really guarded against the industry becoming more digitized. Even when we talk about some of the disruptive innovators that Ty has talked about on the podcast before, Amazon being the big one, they say, "But they don't have that patient touch that we do."

Aderhold: I think that's right. Healthcare organizations need to find a way though to bring some of that customer service and patient touch into digital spaces as well. We shouldn't exist in a world where the only way to have some of that touch is through an analog channel as opposed to a digital channel.

Building upon that, and actually, the next thing that I think we're going to talk about here is self-service, it's very different, self-service and customer service. You can have a live person on the other end of a digital platform that you're talking with customer service and I think that is an important distinction. We're not just talking about self-service, a patient doing everything themselves on their own when we talk about a digital experience.

Woods: What's the right balance? Because I don't think we necessarily need to just keep throwing more humans at it or having digital be this weird middle man between eventually getting to a person anyways. What's the right balance between self-service and having that human touch?

Aderhold: I think there are two ways to think about this. One, there are certain activities, and this could depend on your organization, that you never want a patient to self-serve on.

Woods: Like what?

Aderhold: An example would be a patient trying to schedule a specialty visit before they have gone to a PCP consult. That is not something that we want patients going out and self-serving on.

Woods: Right. You're not going to schedule a neurologist visit for headaches on your own.

Aderhold: Exactly. That's a place where we should never have patients self-service. That's one way to cut down on where we think about self-service. The other way to think about it is that we are, I think I would say never, going to reach the place where every patient or member is going to self-serve on anything.

There are always going to be people who want an analog talk to someone or chat to someone option, whether that's because they just prefer that, they want to get the confirmation or have the conversation with someone, or because they may not have the necessary tools, the necessary digital literacy to do the self-service route. We can't completely over-index on self-service and leave people behind who either don't want to have that type of interaction or can't have that interaction.

Woods: This is the moment where every single listener is going to be nodding their heads and thinking, "Yeah, all the old people want to interact with a person." Is that the right way to be thinking about this?

Aderhold: Frankly, yes and no. There are a lot of people out there who just want to pick up the phone call and talk to someone. They feel much more secure in that type of interaction. Another thing to layer in here is trust.

People can trust that interaction in a way they may not trust a digital interaction, but I want to expand this beyond just, "Okay, this is old people and eventually, everyone will age out of this behavior and everyone will just want to self-serve." It's very much not the case.

I think people of all walks of life may have some trust issues, especially with things related to their healthcare data and how they interact with healthcare organizations, and that's something that we need to be aware of and can change or perhaps influence when we should be self-serving or encouraging self-service or not.

Woods: Maybe the fact that it depends so much is one of the reasons why personalization is in your top five. I'm even thinking about experiences in which I want to and should be self-serving as a consumer myself and moments in which I should not and it is possible and perhaps recommended that my organization be able to even personalize that so that I can self-schedule my PCP appointment but not the neurologist appointment that I necessarily want.

Angers: That is a challenge that we heard a lot from provider organizations in that you shouldn't assume that some patients won't want to self-serve or that some patients will know how to self-serve, because what we've seen is that even though people use self-service in every other aspect of their life, like you can deposit a check online, they're not used to it in healthcare so some people just don't know that it's an option and so they don't even try it out or they don't look for it, or on the other hand, they see that it's an option and then it goes back to that trust where they forego that option because they don't believe that it will truly work.

Woods: Jordan, that is such an important point about the complexity of this problem. We already said that the bar is being set by every non-healthcare digital experience that you have, but because the bar is so low within our own industry, even when some of these options exist, patients and consumers don't know that they have access to them, and so, teaching somebody that there is an option for self-service or you can have a personalized experience or there are multiple channels for you to use is an investment that organizations are going to need to make.

Angers: I think that's where the customer service comes in, helping your patients know when and how to use your solution.

Woods: So they're all connected.

Aderhold: Right, they're all connected.