Our Prescription for the Future of Digital Healthcare Platforms

Due to the complexity of the healthcare industry, it can be easy for patients to feel confused or intimidated when engaging with medical organizations or touchpoints along the patient journey. In fact, a Forrester report focused on customer experience in the healthcare industry maps out ten different parties with which patients commonly interact across the healthcare ecosystem, including their primary physician, insurance company, labs, pharmacies and several more in-between.

According to the report, healthcare brands are often shortsighted in identifying where they fit along the patient ecosystem, highlighting a need to better understand their needs and behaviors—then deliver upon those expectations with better control of the end-to-end customer experience. A good starting point to approach this, writes Forrester Senior Analyst Faith Adams, is to refresh journey maps continuously. From there, “iterate and expand on your mapping activities to build empathy and trust with your customers.”

Healthcare brands can achieve these aims through superior storytelling methods and smart platform design, both of which should provide people with better access to the information as they need it throughout the patient journey. From setting patient expectations before a visit or empowering them to take control of their treatment options, good digital storytelling and production are key for a better medical experience—here’s our prescription for how brands can improve.

Let Empathy Lead the Experience

One medical practitioner integrating digital storytelling into top-of-funnel touchpoints is Montefiore Medical Center, whose website won a DrupalCon 2019 Splash Award that recognizes the best Drupal projects on the web. The primary function of the Montefiore website is to connect patients with the physician that best suits their medical needs. When users reach a subdomain dedicated to the department most relevant to them—orthopedics or arrhythmia, to name a couple—they’re treated to multimedia stories that showcase the medical center’s empathetic approach to treatment.

Quite a bit goes into these stories, one of which was produced by MediaMonks. Because the physicians know their patients’ stories best, they recommend individuals with unique stories to tell. These often begin with one of the most common frustrations patients feel: that they aren’t being heard. By establishing a narrative that’s centered on the patient’s experiences and is told in their own words, the narrative demonstrates Montefiore’s focus on validating its patients and finding the precise treatment they need. Stories are produced through a series of interviews, a film shoot resulting in several visual assets and illustrations, bot static and animated.

See what happens when integrated content drives a narrative.

Such effective, actionable storytelling isn’t just about creativity and production chops; it requires a backend that supports the rich media you wish to include. MediaMonks worked with Montefiore to optimize its web platform to allow for more dynamic, modular forms of content creation that can empower each department to tell their unique stories while remaining consistent with the overall Montefiore brand.

“Every department has different treatments and different stories to tell,” says Brook Downton, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “There needs to be some consistency in the way stories are told, but enough dynamism for how different departments can stand out.” An empathetic storytelling approach is a great way to enhance a top-of-funnel medical platform that puts patients at ease while connecting them to the physician they need.

Keep Ease of Access at Top-of-Mind

Two major challenges to proper treatment include lack of accessibility to health services and lack of medical knowledge. For healthcare brands to truly own the end-to-end patient experience, they must take both challenges to mind in designing platforms through which their audiences engage. Take myTomorrows for example, a platform that shortens the timeframe from lab discovery to patient-available medicine by connecting patients with early-access programs or clinical trials that could help treat what ails them.

We worked with myTomorrows to design a digital platform that facilitates this connection in a fast, simple way for patients. It not only provides audiences with access to research and clinical data, but lets them seamlessly get in touch with a live, professional medical team that can provide more context around a given program or trial. This ensures people receive the options that they truly need, and equips them with the right questions to ask their physician.

Much of the friendliness of the myTomorrows platform stems from its visual design. In addition to designing the search platform itself, we included a handful of cheerful illustrations into the platform’s design to help convey a sense of optimism—as users may be driven to the platform in response to hardships that bar access to other types of care. By placing their attention on both form and function, medical practitioners and health brands alike can help users quickly self-serve solutions within an environment that engages them in a friendly way.

All in all, the examples explored above show how insightful digital platform design provides great opportunities for brands to make themselves more approachable and user-friendly. By marrying creative storytelling with technical development, healthcare brands can respond to needs across the patient journey for a greater end-to-end experience.