Editorial
The Gist
- Navigate the maze. Navigating patients' digital questions requires a healthcare website that quickly provides relevant, direct answers to retain visitor interest.
- Optimize interaction. Efficient content placement and intelligent search are crucial to guide patients smoothly through their online healthcare journey.
- Bridge the gap. Aligning digital content with patients' search behaviors and questions is key to improving healthcare website effectiveness and patient satisfaction.
What can digital customer experience leaders learn from the latest trends in patients' digital customer journeys? A lot, it turns out.
At the heart of a patient's healthcare journey are a lot of open-ended "questions." What does this pain mean? What kind of doctor should I visit? How long will I need to wait for an appointment? What are my treatment options? Will my insurance cover everything?
This uncertainty leaves many patients fraught with stress and anxiety. Let's take a look at patients' digital customer journeys.
When faced with a "question," patients and customers typically turn to the internet. They usually start by asking those questions to “Dr. Google.” Google’s search engine analyzes the “question” for keywords returning results that prioritize authoritative sources, contextual data like user’s location and behavioral data to promote results that were most helpful to others with similar queries.
Along with ads relevant to your question, Google may offer a “featured snippet” at the top of the search results. These snippets aim to offer concise, direct answers to the user's query, sourced from high-quality web pages. Google's algorithm selects the snippet content based on its relevance, accuracy and trustworthiness. Snippets can include brief summaries, bulleted lists or tables that highlight key information related to the health symptoms in question.
And more recently, Google’s Gemini generative AI model may provide an answer to your question including a summary of symptoms, along with potential causes or treatments along with a few sources to get more information.
When faced with search results when looking for answers, patients and customers may end up arriving at your website by clicking on a featured snippet, generative AI reference or even an organic search result, but a lot of that context is lost when they arrive at your website, and unless you address their need for answers relatively quickly, it won’t be long before they click back and move on to the next result.
Digital Customer Journeys: Healthcare Sites Need Work
Most healthcare websites are not adequately prepared for this question-driven context. Whether arriving from a search engine or a referring URL, these websites often overlook the cues patients provide, instead focusing on presenting their services.
The typical content strategy of healthcare sites tends to revolve around showcasing specialties, treatments and facilities rather than directly addressing patient queries. This mismatch creates a gap between what patients are searching for and what healthcare organizations are presenting, resulting in a disconnect that can hinder seamless customer journeys.
To provide a better patient experience, we must put ourselves in their shoes. They arrive with their questions on our landing pages. How can we help them through their journey for answers? How can we reduce the friction they face when seeking them out? And how can we help them take the next step and make an appointment?
Related Article: Understanding the Shift From Customer Journey to Customer Experience
Addressing the Digital Customer Journey for Answers
To craft an experience that assists and supports a patient’s search for answers, we must think through the distinct phases that users may traverse during their interactions with a healthcare platform. Recognizing and responding to these phases strategically can significantly enhance the ability of healthcare organizations to provide tailored and effective answers to patients' questions and avoid them leaving to seek those answers elsewhere.
Landing Phase:
After choosing a search result link or being referred from another site or channel, a patient or customer may arrive on your site. This may be your home page, but often will not be. When they arrive, first impressions matter a lot. That is why it’s so important to think about the patient’s or customer's initial experience when they arrive on your website. Especially if you want to nurture them to engage further on your site and eventually take the next step.
It’s important to note that just getting to this initial stage can be difficult. If you’re not getting enough visitors, it may be worth reviewing your SEO and content strategy. Are you targeting the right keywords to answer the kinds of questions your target patients and caregivers may have? Are the technical aspects of SEO including page performance adequate for your goals? Does your site have the authority in the areas where you are competing as compared to your competitors? Answering these questions may help drive more traffic to the top of your funnel.
Once they arrive on your site, your goal is to prove value and help them to the next step of their digital customer journeys. There are many factors that you have control over that can help improve your chances of success.
How fast the page loads matters. A study by Google found that probability of a visitor leaving your site immediately increases significantly as the page load time goes up. A visitor is 90% more likely to click away from a website that takes five seconds to load than if it only took one second. The impact on conversions is just as dramatic.
Once the page loads, you only have so much time to convince your visitor that you have the answers they are looking for. Content related to their query should be “above the fold” or you risk them leaving to look for something more direct. Consider adding summaries or summarized navigation toward the top of your common landing pages.
Contextual Clues
In addition to general content available to everyone, it is worth considering what contextual clues can be used to provide a better initial customer experience. The request for your content inherently includes additional details that can be used to respond with dynamic content. For example, their IP Address can be used to approximate location. Including nearby offices or locations could help prove your relevance.
If visitors are coming from an email or advertising campaign, using tracking codes in the landing page URL will let you know how they arrived and allow you to predict more accurately what their intent is and customize the experience to meet their needs.
The referring URL may also allow you to glean details about the visitor. With this you can tell if they are coming from a social media channel or even a common authoritative source. Combining these details can allow you to connect the dots and improve the experience as they reveal their intent.
Also keep in mind that although some digital experience platforms enable this kind of personalization natively, there are plenty of tools that can supplement your DXP if they don’t. Since these tools tend to track visitor data that could be classified as personal health data, you need to be careful about the tools you leverage and may even need to ensure the provider of the tools is willing to sign a business association agreement (BAA) to ensure your site is compliant with HIPAA.
Searching Phase
Once they have “landed” on your site, the visitor enters the “Searching Phase.” You should think of this phase as a critical opportunity to place the right paths in front of your healthcare consumer as intuitively and engagingly as possible. As noted, so much of the feedback consumers give about their experiences in healthcare relate to how difficult it is to feel like you are in the right place, that you are viewing the right content for your situation, that you are being prepared by that content to have the right context when making a decision.
Whether that decision is a simple one — like a quick primary care appointment for a kid’s sore throat — to a complicated one — putting together your options for a nerve-wracking surgery — the clarity and speed with which you can get to relevant information is a differentiator.
The problem for healthcare in enabling effective searching behaviors has always been one of prioritizing and matching between "how regular people search" — i.e., what terms “THEY” use and how “THEY” interpret our complexity — and "how we label ourselves, our services, our people, our place" — i.e., the structured, accurate, industry-specific language we use to describe these things. The default certainly appears to most to be that the latter wins, that your content will be structured and named (and therefore most easily searched) using language that is generated on the "business" side. There are very good reasons for this of course — ultimately it IS an incredibly complex field and precision in language is important.
The Game Changer
The game-changer in this is the role AI-enabled Intelligent Search can play. Healthcare consumers have become used to increasingly sophisticated "type ahead" and options in the search experiences that they encounter — but these experiences are still typically tightly constrained by matching taxonomies. Incorporating Intelligent Search allows for a continuous learning experience to evolve that takes account of terms being used, where those journeys end, whether they appear to have ended in a desired resolution (for the consumer and the "business") — and begins to shape iteratively the interaction between unpredictable raw search terms and more static content and information architecture (IA).
In the longer term, this can allow you to map what you learn from searching realities to inform you future content strategies, ensuring you have the content that aligns to what visitors could be searching for in the context they will be searching for it.
Related Article: How to Make the Customer Journey More Data Driven
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Rethinking Find a Doctor to Being 'Find Care'
The obvious benefit from rethinking how patients find care, and leveraging Intelligent Search into the bargain, is in that classic traditional experience — the “Find a Doctor” experience. In order to effectively rethink this experience, we need to take a brief look back at the evolution of these tools. For the most part, the archetypal "Find a Doctor" experience came together in much the same way as all the other content we discussed earlier — i.e., as a way to showcase what providers want to say.
Specifically, many of these tools were originally born of and share fundamental genetics (from data structure to UI) with legacy, INTERNALLY focused directories. They served a purpose and, in a less consumer friendly, less AI-ready world, did precisely the job they were meant to do, with precisely the limitations that were expected.
Expanding the Journey
Now we can think about this experience a little bit more expansively. This can be a critical, emotive, insight-laden part of a patient’s journey. Yes, there may be situations when it is less so — routine, basic primary care where speed is paramount for example. But often, it is a place that has huge value in surfacing intent, discovering more about your patient or prospect and serving as the staging ground for other, deeper customer journeys.
The wide variety of choices this can entail — (new vs. returning patient, priority of closest provider vs soonest availability vs highest rated) — both speak to the potential for broken steps and to the value of developing context as fast as possible. Some of that context is what was done before getting to the site, some of it is what happened before a search ON your site — and now we have the potential to capture a lot more of that context from the terms users leverage in using site search itself.
Thus, the “Find a Doctor” experience, even when focused on just that step, is much wider than the Directory experience. It is search for and reading articles can help give the user comfort about their choices, it is integrating appointment availability and scheduling into the results, linking to relevant tools like Symptom Checkers, matching options presented to the nuances of the search — be they Patients vs. Caregivers vs. Healthcare professionals looking for referrals.
Intelligent Search
Potentially even more revolutionary is the potential that, with Intelligent Search playing the expansive role it can in the “Find” experience, the hard line between a “Find a Doctor” or “Find a Location” paradigm and all other ‘end-points’ can be intentionally blurred. This means building an Intelligent Search experience that has the power to both (a) deposit the user deep in a traditional feeling Find-A experience, but with key criteria appropriately selected and explained, based on unclear search terms the system has learned to interpret and (b) leverage the same learning to direct a user on ANY of the increasingly large array of digital customer journeys a modern health system wants to provide — second opinions, virtual care options, remote monitoring, devices, even more straight-forward task-based steps like payment options.
The ultimate goal is creating a combination of an all-powerful search bar, with next generation configurable and pre-configurable Find-A experience — Allowing search to become the ultimate digital front door. Find Care becomes not just Find-a-Doctor and Find-A-Location, but also Find-A-Second Opnion, Find-A-Nutrionist, Find-A-Remote Monitoring Program, Find Me the Right Place For Me to be in this Website, this Organization right now that gives me the choices and context I need.
Related Article: Customer Experience Trends: Innovations Shortening Journeys
Rethinking Site Search
As with the potentially game-changing redefinition of Find a Doctor in light of applying Intelligent Search, Site Search is essentially a similar story. Site Search becomes increasingly informed by, even empowered by the terms that our users use to travel around our content. Couple this with AI content generation or even, without promising too much, AI content re-curation, and the traditional challenge of matching unclear search terms with a rigid IA rapidly fades away.
Within reason, a healthcare consumer can expect to use their own language, have it diligently matched with professional terminology that the Intelligent Search tool has ‘learned’ and travel directly to either the precisely accurate existing content, or, even better, to content that has specifically been assembled based on what we know now to be their interest.
Added to that, if it proves to drive conversion in the way we expect, we may ultimately "harden" certain aspects of that "new" journey into the static IA itself or otherwise formalize the learning.
Related Article: Customer Journey Orchestration for Powering Connectivity
Virtual Assistants/Chatbots
In the context of reimagining Find Care with Intelligent Search as central, the role of Virtual Agents or Chatbots primarily serves as a failsafe. In theory, the more the novel AI-enabled search experience learns, the more it is able to intuitively put the right options in front of the searcher, without them needing to resort to a conversational chatbot or old-school programmed conversations.
However, with some creativity, the role of virtual agent can be partnered with intelligent search to effectively operate as a "guide" — still using the engine of intelligent search, but using guided pathways with steering questions for users that are not yet comfortable with the powerful search tool magically dropping them exactly where they should be without a little bit of filtering!
Essentially, then Virtual Assistants and Chatbots — in the scenario of this reimagined Find Care with intelligent Search experience — operate as an optional companion tool, filling in where users have less familiarity or comfort with trusting search so implicitly. The operation of Intelligent Search together with a companion Virtual Agent, together with elements of familiar "filter" directories, completes the new Find Care.
Action Phase
If we think of healthcare customer journeys as searches for answers, it is important to note that each answer is usually not the final answer. Most answers just lead to more questions. While we need to think about how to make the “answer” they are looking for discoverable, we should also be thinking about their next questions. These “next questions” you want to answer should lead them to the action phase.
In the action phase, users are ready to take concrete steps, such as scheduling appointments or accessing specific services. Answers to questions in this phase involve streamlining processes, offering clear calls-to-action, and providing user-friendly interfaces for tasks like appointment scheduling. A seamless transition from information-seeking to action is essential for a positive user experience.
As the Find Care experience evolves and becomes more precise and predictable with the use of the tools we are imagining, the expectation that is set for the next "step" grows also. Consumers will begin to assume that if you have so effectively channeled them to, say, a given service area and specific physicians they can select from, then their expectation is that the action options they now have are just as the forces or properties that stimulate growth, development, or change within a system or process: complete, capable, intuitive etc. Foremost among these is obviously open scheduling where appropriate, but it might be any number of other options, as long as they are demonstrating that the value of having been directed here is that the user doesn’t have to start all over again!
Confirming Phase
After leading a customer through landing, searching and taking action, too many healthcare organizations let customers fall out of "the funnel” due to a poor confirming experience. They often hand off filling in the final confirming form to another application, giving a disjointed experience and leaving the customer wondering if they are really in the right place after all.
Experiences for HOW healthcare providers in particular “confirm” next steps is a clear area for innovation and creative enhancement to match those from other industries. Look at the “Amazon” experience, for example. Amazon provides all the reassurances needed to give their customers the ability to make the purchase. From reviews to questions and answers, to a seamless checkout experience that takes your preferences into account, Amazon is doing everything we need to make sure we “confirm” our order.
We should be asking ourselves how to give similar experiences when confirming healthcare related actions through our website. The typical experience has a ton of opportunity to provide these types of reassurances by integrating tools into the process — from preparatory videos, to provider ratings and reviews, to linkages to pre-authorization steps. This is also an opportunity to leverage the capabilities of our now “all powerful search.” Everything we learn from searches generated on the way to confirmation gives us more intelligence in how to reassure our patient’s that they are indeed in the right place.
Completing Phase
While the transaction may have been confirmed, the journey is never truly complete. Whether our goal is to ensure the patient actually arrives at the appointment, attends the event, adheres to their medication or schedules a follow-up, the completing phase involves thinking beyond transactions and even channels and looks to nurture the patient and increase the lifetime value of that relationship for both the patient and the healthcare organization.
To improve the experience here, we need to think about what should happen between stages of the customer journeys: what happens between making the appointment and attending the appointment, what happens after the appointment, during treatment and beyond. What questions might they have along the way.
And while having that context can help us improve our website and search experiences, often we’ll need to think across other channels. Whether that is reminder emails and text messages, or making some of those contextual details available to receptionists and call center workers when a patient calls.
The Value of Analytics Across Customer Journeys
As we start to think how to support this omnichannel approach to helping patients find care, we begin to see how important data and analytics are in helping us create and improve this “Find Care” journey. In that journey, we see at least two enormous value pools that can help us improve our experiences.
First, there is the knowledge we begin to derive about how our consumers actually consider their options, how those consumers differ based on simple characteristics, and ultimately how we can take elements of what we learn from their search terms, stay firmly in compliance with legislation around PII and PHI, and deliver personalization directly through the application of intelligent search. Over time, the machine learning of the Intelligent Search tool magnifies that learning, both by applying it automatically where we see fit, and by informing our decisions about all aspects of our digital strategy, from branding and positioning to content generation and IA.
Second, there is the knowledge we derive from what DOESN’T work. Inevitably, one of the largest challenges in Find a Provider in its legacy forms has always been the constant battle of managing provider data. The value of "redefined Find Care” is that we will increasingly have real data as to which aspects of those problems quantifiably MATTER and which, frankly, don’t.
Final Thoughts
Strategically aligning content and features to address the distinct needs of each phase empowers healthcare organizations to answer patients' questions effectively. By recognizing and embracing the varied nature of these phases, digital strategies can be tailored to create cohesive and supportive healthcare customer journeys, ultimately enhancing the overall patient experience.
Likewise, integrating intelligent learning search capabilities into every aspect of the process consumers undergo in finding care opens up new possibilities. This offers powerful potential to make the entire end-to-end process more intuitive and effective.
Additionally, it allows for reimagining the intersections between traditionally distinct steps in the journey — such as search serving as a vast digital front door and a critical business tool that directly influences everything from information architecture to operational workflows.
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