Key Health Industry Takeaways from 2020

The most successful businesses of 2020 are the ones that have embraced change, are agile in an ever changing environment and who have communicated clearly with their teams and customers. What can you add to your business?

Embrace digital: Take advantage of technology by getting digitally educated. To achieve business success, efficiency and productivity are vital. Digital technology can help improve communication, collaboration, content management, access to analytics data and social networking as well as staff and customer experience. COVID-19 has been the greatest digitisation test that humans have ever experienced, especially in healthcare. Telehealth is slowly removing the frictions of travel and waiting time. The good news is that the more healthcare is digitised the more data becomes available and the smarter the solutions will become.

Get Social: Social Media plays a crucial role in connecting people and developing relationships, not only with key opinion leaders and journalists covering the health sector, but also provides a great opportunity to establish customer service by gathering input, answering questions and listening to feedback.

Communicate clearly: With rules and regulations surrounding COVID-19 changing in an instant it is important to have clear communication with your clients. As simple as it sounds communicating to your clients/customer and staff member can sometimes be overlooked. Alieviate anxiety by sharing how you will keep people safe during these uncertain times.

267%

Royal Rehab’s increase in video and phone consults March-June (compared to the same period last year.) .¹

47%

of consumers say that healthcare and life sciences are more focused on industry needs than patient needs.²

2,909,600

The views on the Australian Department of Health’s youtube channel as of 02/02/21.³

$30 Million

Spent on advertising by the Australian Government 2019-20 & 2020-21 for the COVID-19 national communication plan.⁴

1 in 3

of the 7 million people who have downloaded the Covidsafe app have not updated to the most recent version.⁵

$14 Million

The total cost of the Covidsafe app.⁶

Customer experience

Healthcare is one of those industries that everyone needs, but no one really loves. Sickness always comes with pain and fear which is one of the main reasons we don’t like to talk about or think about it.

A study from PwC shows that only 49% of consumers say that the healthcare customer experience is satisfactory.

It’s safe to say that health-related organizations, ranging from insurers to pharmaceutical companies, are not really perceived as the most customer centric. Which is a true tragedy when we think about how much we will need this industry to help us solve the huge problems of a growing and ageing population and the COVID-like pandemic crises that await us in the future.

An important change would be to start viewing patients as empowered, critical and tech savvy consumers that need to be wooed with flawless experiences. An important ingredient of that will be to move out of the negative emotions sphere of pain, worry and fear that come with sickness and start to protect health instead of managing disease, moving from sickcare to proactive healthcare experiences.

Sources

1. Royal Rehab, 19-20 Annual Report, p10.

2. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/new-research-reveals-global-consumer-trends-for-healthcare-life-sciences/
3. https://www.youtube.com/user/healthgovau/about
4. https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/03/covid-19-national-health-plan-health-protection-covid-19-national-communication-campaign-covid-19-national-health-plan-national-communication-campaign_1.pdf
5. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/14/one-third-of-australian-users-have-not-updated-covidsafe-app
6. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/14/one-third-of-australian-users-have-not-updated-covidsafe-app