How has the pandemic transformed digital healthcare for patients and practitioners?

As the UK braces itself again due to the emer­gence of the omi­cron vari­ant, and with a record 5.83 mil­lion peo­ple await­ing non-emer­gency hos­pi­tal treat­ment – accord­ing to offi­cial fig­ures from the end of Sep­tem­ber – the con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of dig­i­tal health­care ser­vices is crit­i­cal.

The pan­dem­ic neces­si­tat­ed the accel­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion across the health­care sec­tor. For exam­ple, the Nation­al Health Ser­vice embraced dig­i­tal solu­tions to track and trace, roll­out vac­cine pro­grammes, and imple­ment var­i­ous smart­phone apps, all of which have been well received.

From a cus­tomer expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive, there is obvi­ous­ly an appetite for dig­i­tal health­care. Grant­ed, this has been fed by the pan­dem­ic-induced lock­downs. But it’s telling that the NHS is now seek­ing to build out its video con­sul­ta­tion pro­vi­sion and move to a hybrid offer­ing, using face-to-face con­sul­ta­tions when appro­pri­ate. This approach reduces costs and is more con­ve­nient for patients.

To keep pace with cus­tomer expec­ta­tions, pri­vate health­care providers have also under­gone seis­mic change in the last two years. “It’s been a crazy time,” says James Elliott, head of cus­tomer and com­mer­cial expe­ri­ence at Bupa Glob­al. “We’ve seen a mas­sive dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, and there is a big oppor­tu­ni­ty in pri­vate health­care as we move to proac­tive health man­age­ment.”

How­ev­er, lega­cy prob­lems are halt­ing progress in the dig­i­tal era, he con­cedes. “For a long time, we thought that the best thing to do was plas­ter our tele­phone num­ber on every piece of paper and mem­ber­ship card, but that has come back to bite us,” says Elliott. Fur­ther­more, 40% of cus­tomers con­tact the organ­i­sa­tion via email, an admit­ted­ly “hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence.”

He adds: “We are try­ing not to make the mis­take of cre­at­ing infi­nite loops for cus­tomers to fall into, and we want to edu­cate them to make the right choice. We have cre­at­ed a dig­i­tal-first por­tal to triage their con­tact, and that could involve an urgent phone call or an out­bound sched­uled call.”

Bupa Global’s LivePer­son plat­form, estab­lished before the pan­dem­ic, has enhanced its con­nec­tion with cus­tomers lead­ing to a ten­fold increase in sat­is­fac­tion lev­els. But, as live inter­ac­tions – even phone calls – are “hard to man­age,” Elliott says dig­i­tal chat “is the answer,” whether via What­sApp or WeChat in Chi­na. “It has to be asyn­chro­nous,” he argues.

To bet­ter organ­ise the urgency of cus­tomer needs, Bupa Glob­al has “put a lot of time and mon­ey” into auto­mat­ed sys­tems and con­ver­sa­tion­al arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. “We want to build a trust­ed rela­tion­ship with our cus­tomers, and so improv­ing nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing capa­bil­i­ties is key,” adds Elliot.

Alice Pan, chief med­ical offi­cer and glob­al head of health oper­a­tions at Bima, a Swedish com­pa­ny that deliv­ers health and insur­ance ser­vices in emerg­ing mar­kets, agrees that devel­op­ing dig­i­tal ser­vices is what patients and prac­ti­tion­ers want. Bima is cre­at­ing an asyn­chro­nous chat func­tion, hav­ing been encour­aged by the dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty of its cus­tomers.

The organ­i­sa­tion, which oper­ates in nine mar­kets in Asia and Africa, offered a telemed­i­cine ser­vice dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, and it quick­ly became cus­tomers’ pre­ferred chan­nel for first con­tact, with over half (58%) rank­ing it top.

While this was a sur­prise for Pan and her team, com­plete­ly “shat­ter­ing pre­con­cep­tions,” it val­i­dat­ed a shift to more dig­i­tal solu­tions. And in time, with the cus­tomer data gath­ered from dig­i­tal inter­ac­tions, Bima is aim­ing to pro­vide a more pre­ven­ta­tive, proac­tive and per­son­alised ser­vice.

“We are get­ting to know our cus­tomers bet­ter, and we are col­lect­ing data to serve them bet­ter,” says Pan. “For the first six months of the pan­dem­ic, we learnt a lot, and it was tough; it was all reac­tive.

“It wasn’t until the lat­ter half of 2020 that we start­ed to think more strate­gi­cal­ly about what the pan­dem­ic meant for mobile health and Bima. Now, though, we have a clear plan of how we can grow in the next five years. “And,” she adds, “it’s excit­ing, espe­cial­ly for our cus­tomers.”