• by Karin Bauer , Columnist, June 5, 2018

With the new healthcare information age upon us, consumers are becoming more empowered to take control of their own health, and healthcare companies are facing new challenges each day to engage and maintain meaningful relationships with their customers.

At the Health Technology Forum Common Good Innovation Conference at Stanford University on May 14-15, 2018, David Cerino, group vice president at Providence Health said, “Consumers will increasingly take ownership of their own health and health data as transparency increases.”

How can companies evolve to meet the needs of the new, increasingly informed healthcare consumer? While the amount of information driving healthcare treatment and prevention is changing, the core tenets of the healthcare industry have not. 

Healthcare is still an empathy-driven industry. Understanding how to initiate, encourage and maintain empathetic connections with and between audiences can make differences that ultimately lead to success or failure in treatment and prevention.

At the same conference, Scott Zeller, M.D., vice president of acute psychiatry at Vituity said, “You can reduce the number of acute psychiatric patients in the ER who need to be physically restrained from 50% to less than 1% just by being human and treating others with humanity.” 

The human-centric approach that is so critical to creating trust and better health outcomes can also help healthcare companies and providers drive down costs, increase quality of care and get products to market faster.  

From harmonizing and optimizing workflows to tapping into the emotional motivators that create lasting connections with brands, human-centric design thinking leads to insights that can help any solution set adapt and win in a changing healthcare marketplace.

Successful healthcare companies put emotional connection at the core of their brand strategy, creating a value chain that extends from product development and marketing to sales and services. Everything is done with the consumer’s participation in mind and with value-based outcomes as the goal.

“So who are we, patients or consumers?” asked Robert Pearl, M.D. in Forbes on Oct. 15, 2015. “The reality is that on occasion we are one or the other, but most of the time, we are both.”

To win and maintain consumer confidence in the new healthcare information age, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, healthcare enterprises and insurers must provide human-centered relevance, based on insight into customer behaviors, perceptions and preferences.

The role of healthcare consumers is fundamentally changing. They no longer want to be regarded as passive patients — looking to the expertise of specialists to treat discrete conditions within a defined time frame — but rather as engaged participants in the pursuit of integrated wellness, day by day.