BayCare Health’s Vision: Evidence-Based Design for Care Delivery
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
Consumerism is driving all industries to innovate, and health care is no exception. The ideal state is a digitally enabled, frictionless consumer experience. But in a highly complex industry like health care that has traditionally operated with a command-and-control vs. consumer-centric mindset, it’s a massive change.
Adding to the cultural challenges, the pain points on the consumer journey vary depending on the consumer. For an 80-year-old woman with poor hearing, it could be the difficulty of scheduling an appointment using a complicated IVR system. For a busy millennial mom, it might be the absence of mobile online scheduling.
Ed Rafalski, senior vice president and chief strategy and marketing officer at BayCare Health System
“What I’ve been focusing on is removing the friction in health care and making it easier for the consumer to interact with the organization and not to feel the barriers and the difficulties and the frustrations,” says Ed Rafalski, senior vice president and chief strategy and marketing officer at BayCare Health System in Clearwater, Florida.
Rafalski co-presented at the 2019 Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit in Chicago with Linda MacCracken, senior principal, patient and caregiver experience leader at Accenture Health. MacCracken, who works with health organizations to optimize customer engagement, notes that today’s most effective solutions meet consumers where they are. The experiences are personalized, and to a significant degree, they are digital.
Linda MacCracken, senior principal, customer engagement at Accenture Health
“Although the pendulum swing favors the more digitally intense population, the last few years have shown increasing digital adoption rate by mature seniors — those over 75 years,” she says. “[But] digital adoption in health care is still somewhat of a guided tour, and BayCare does this uniquely well.”
To move toward the vision of a frictionless experience, BayCare has invested in a digitally enabled ambulatory hub that offers consumers a full range of health and wellness services under one roof. We spoke with Rafalski to learn more about how a high-tech approach to care delivery can be combined with high-touch human interaction to meet the needs of consumers wherever they are on the digital usage continuum.