Healthtech Security
Article | August 31, 2023
Effective Healthcare branding changes how the public perceives a healthcare organization. Brands are all about perceptions. The way your customers perceive your organization determines your brand. That encompasses your doctors, your board members, your nurses, and your patients. The process of healthcare branding helps organizations ensure they are perceived the way they want to be; as trusted, knowledgeable, caring, and experienced.
More than a tagline, name, messaging, or logo, the recognizable feeling that these elements induce is your healthcare company's brand. Healthcare branding ensures that these elements meet in a cohesive system informed by positioning and personality and are constantly implemented across your brand's touchpoints.
Why is Healthcare Branding So Essential?
Healthcare branding was not always so important. Patients had the freedom to select any healthcare provider. Insurance was the principal determiner of their healthcare provider. It depended upon their workplace. Those without insurance got treatment at community clinics and emergency rooms.
As you know, times have changed a lot in a big way. Changing the entire healthcare landscape, the Affordable Care Act put patients in the driving seat. Most of the patients now have access to healthcare insurance and successfully manage their own health. Patients without insurance have the options of out-of-pocket online pharmacies and providers.
Healthcare providers have changed their performance metrics system to value-based assessments such as patient satisfaction. More than treatment, now the emphasis is on prevention. It has become a market that is direct-to-consumer healthcare.
As a result, the consumer has become the controller of the healthcare brand-consumer relationship. As patients have turned empowered consumers, the benefits of healthcare branding have grown to the point that healthcare companies cannot ignore them. If they do, it affects their business.
What are the Benefits of Healthcare Branding?
Effective healthcare branding, directed by research and a clear strategy, has many valuable benefits:
Identify Changing Patient Needs
The needs of patients today have changed from the start of COVID-19. Even when a global pandemic hasn’t fundamentally changed the healthcare landscape, patients’ needs are continually evolving. Healthcare branding gives you the tools to understand evolving patient needs better and rebrand your company to meet them.
Brand research includes qualitative research (including one-on-one patient interviews) and quantitative analysis. Insights gathered from brand research are critical in optimally positioning a healthcare brand. It is vital during dynamic and unpredictable markets, as in what happened during this COVID-19. Beyond brand research, effective healthcare branding ensures your healthcare brand is continually aligned with shifting market trends and their impact on patient needs.
Establish Trust
It isn’t easy to think of a quality more essential to a healthcare organization's success than trust. A healthcare brand is broken or made by the degree to which it is trusted by those it serves.
When it comes to healthcare branding, trust is conveyed through everything from messaging to visual identity. Photography, colors, and typography all contribute profoundly to perceiving a brand as trustworthy. In healthcare branding, verbal identity is more important than visual brand identity in establishing it as an expert in the healthcare space.
Everything from a reassuring, confident voice in its website copy to guides designed to update patients on necessary healthcare topics and regular publication of articles are proven and well-known ways in healthcare branding to build up trust.
Set Your Brand Apart from the Competition
However, trust is not the only thing needed in the modern age for effective healthcare branding. The days, judging a healthcare organization based on its medical practice's reputation alone have gone. Patients have become empowered consumers as time passed. The competition to treat these empowered consumers too has become increasingly fierce. Here comes the importance of effective healthcare branding, tracking all your online and offline activities, and evaluating them every day.
Your healthcare brand is just one among the many other brands for internet-savvy consumers to choose from. First and foremost, all consumer decisions, including patients' decisions, are based on emotions. So, you have to think of ways to persuade your consumers' feelings to help your healthcare branding in the crowded marketplace.
Competitive differentiation is more vital than ever. Effective healthcare branding makes you find out opportunities and ways for differentiation in the challenging and competitive landscape. And, you can capitalize on these opportunities and ways with powerful storytelling and unique positioning.
Improve the Patient Journey
Patient experience, as mentioned earlier, is a game-changer in the healthcare industry today. Healthcare branding gives you various ways to shape and improve patient experience powerfully. After all, a good percentage of patient experience happens outside the healthcare facility these days. The beginning stages of the patient journey are the awareness and consideration stages. Healthcare branding tools, such as content marketing, are critical in influencing patients in these stages.
A website of your healthcare brand can make or break your patient’s pre-treatment experience. It is the selection phase of the patient journey. A premium and well-designed website optimized for conversion will enrich the patients' online experience, looking to book an appointment or answer a question.
Healthcare branding is helpful in defining the patient treatment experience. When correctly leveraged, healthcare branding allows your healthcare brand to enhance the patient journey from when the patient hears about the brand to the moment of finishing the treatment.
At every patient journey stage, healthcare branding fosters patient trust, builds patient loyalty, and reinforces patient-provider relationships.
Takeaway
Modern healthcare companies are operating in a competitive landscape where healthcare branding is more important than ever. Patients have become informed and empowered consumers. Digital healthcare brands have redefined the marketplace. Healthcare branding is vital if your healthcare company hopes to stand out from the rest and develop lasting and meaningful relationships with your patients.
Fortunately, there are many ways to differentiate your healthcare brand and make it sounds unique meaningfully. Positioning, identity, storytelling, and patient experience represent a powerful area where healthcare brands can better align themselves with their patients' needs and stand out from the competition.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is healthcare branding important?
Healthcare branding helps you effectively project the personality of your healthcare organization and products. A good thought process to brand your healthcare product will make people remember you forever.
What is hospital branding?
Hospital branding is the process of making your healthcare organization be perceived better by potential clients. Effective branding makes your patients remember you through the best patient experience and the organization's external look.
What are the three branding strategies?
There are many effective branding strategies. Line extension, brand extension, and new brand strategy are essential types of branding strategies. You can have any strategy based on the nature of your product.
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Digital Healthcare
Article | November 29, 2023
Your patients have grown to trust your expertise and recommendations in matters regarding their healthcare. As the sector transitions into a more digital playing field, uninterrupted network connectivity is more than just a bonus; it’s a necessity.
While there are many different challenges to completely integrating your practice into the digital world, internet outages are the costliest. Downtime can be caused by various factors, which can compromise patient safety, the faith your team instills in you, and your practice’s reputation and revenue. However, investing in the means to maintain a resilient network lets you maximize your network uptime to optimize resources.
We'll look at four different strategies and their benefits for your infrastructure so you can focus on what you do best: providing healthcare excellence to your patients.
Strengthening Network Infrastructure
The traditional way of doing things may be great for your remedies and techniques. Still, with a growing number of patients and their contextually relevant demands, your network needs to be able to accommodate many different booking requests, increase user activity on your server, and store sensitive patient information.
High-speed internet connections enhance your network performance and let you, your team, and your patients make the most of your uninterrupted uptime. Fiber-optic networks, when combined with load balancing and proper segmentation, can diffuse and direct network traffic efficiency and prevent congestion, which prevents downtime due to overload.
Implementing Network Monitoring and Management Tools
Much like your patients visit your practice to ensure everything is all right with the current state of their health, your network must also receive the same treatment. Identifying and pre-emptively resolving potential issues and vulnerabilities will prevent much more destructive or expensive problems from occurring.
Use real-time tools to monitor your bandwidth usage and gain visibility of potential bottlenecks. Tools that offer risk monitoring deliver alerts about critical events that pose a threat to your business continuity. Your IT team will be better equipped to troubleshoot issues promptly and optimize performance.
Conducting Regular Network Assessments and Audits
Once you have the proper monitoring tools to manage your network topology better, proactive troubleshooting is a great way to spot-check whether your current solution is working as it should. A network audit is much like proactive troubleshooting; you are looking to see if anything could harm the overall system and catch it before it can develop.
When auditing a network, the primary focus should be security measures. If patient and confidential data is not secure, the smooth operations of your business are the least of your worries. When conducting an audit, consulting with a network service provider will help identify issues with your protocols, data encryption, and firewall configuration.
Establishing Redundancy and Disaster Recovery Plans
Backing up private and confidential data is crucial to ensuring that sensitive information is not lost or exposed. Minimizing network downtime can often be achieved by having backup systems that will keep running in the event of an attack or outage. For example, a dedicated Cloud Access Network, power supplies, and switches will go a long way.
When creating an internet contingency plan, outline steps and protocols with your team that you will take in the event of a complete failure, including things such as brand reputation management, customer service, and data loss prevention.
Looking Forward
As the lines between in-person and digital are blurred, navigating the complexities of implementing a robust network is paramount to your business.
Strengthening your infrastructure, integrating redundant systems, and conducting regular audits and assessments with the proper monitoring and management tools will help you maximize uptime usage and minimize network downtime.
Although overwhelming, working with a reputable network service provider can help you embrace your network topology to remain competitive.
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Health Technology, Digital Healthcare
Article | September 7, 2023
Prioritizing health and managing it, has become highly important because our lifestyle is continuously evolving in ways that take a toll on us mentally, physically, and emotionally. However, the major issue for the patients lies in the inaccuracy of treatment due to the lack of complete health records in any hospital. With the recent changes in privacy legislation and data management, patients are even unable to retrieve their own health records.
For example, someone had an accident and was taken to the emergency room. The first thing they will need to do in their condition is to fill the hospital’s form. Then, for the treatment, if the injured person is conscious enough, doctors ask questions like if they are allergic to some medicines or do they suffer from diabetes or any other disease. Besides, what if the individual denies having allergies or diabetes in their half-conscious state? And the previous hospitals where they have already had treatment before have denied sharing the medical details of the person either due to privacy issues or data corruption. Well, it can create a lot of fuzz.
Solely, to improve the health industry without compromising the security of the individuals, blockchain has remained in the discussion. It has the potential to address the operability challenges present in the healthcare industry. But, what is blockchain, what are its underlying fundamentals, why blockchain, and what are its advantages?
Today’s blog will help in understanding every aspect of blockchain and its impact on the healthcare industry. So let’s get started!
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain is a P2P or peer-to-peer distributed or decentralized ledger technology. It stores a chain of data called blocks of information. These blocks are chained together by cryptographic signatures. These signatures are called hash that is stored in the shared ledger and backed by a connected processes network - node. These nodes reserve a copy of the complete chain and get continually updated by synchronization. Though, to include blockchain in the process it’s necessary to hire a developer who has prior experience and knowledge about its architecture and can work with the components efficiently as blockchain is a designed pattern that consists of three major constituents - a distributed network, a shared ledger, and all the digital transactions.
a. Distributed Network
As discussed before, blockchain is built on peer-to-peer networks. While having no central point of storage, it makes the information on the network less vulnerable to being lost or exploited.
Unlike the traditional client-server model that has a centralized storage point or controlling party, all the information in the blockchain network is constantly recorded and transferred to the participants of the network that are also known as nodes or peers. These peers also own several identical copies of the information. That’s why blockchain is seen as a huge improvement to centralized models and is considered the future of data storage and ownership.
b. Shared Ledger
Each authorized participant in the network records the transactions into the shared ledger. If they want to add any transaction, it is important to run algorithms that evaluate and verify the transactions. If the majority of members agree to the transaction’s validity, a new transaction gets added to the shared ledger. The changes done in the shared ledger is reflected in minutes or even seconds in the copies of the blockchain. Once the transaction is added, there’s no way to modify or delete it. Also, as the copy is shared in the form of a ledger to each member, no single member can alter data.
c. Digital Transaction
Transactions are information i.e. data transmission to one block. During the process of data transmission, each node acts as a central point to generate and digitally sign the transaction. As the nodes connect each other in the network, each of them has to verify the transaction independently for its conflicts, validity, and compliance. Only after the transaction passes the verification, the information is added into the shared ledger. The major element that makes digital transactions successful is cryptographic hashing that encrypts the data for security.
Why Blockchain technology in healthcare?
It has happened so often that the patient remains unable to gather all of their previous medical records in one format from one place swiftly or sometimes cannot even collect the required information at all. Unfortunately, in most cases, the information of critical patients remains scattered across several different institutions of healthcare that too in different formats. Besides, the data management systems along with the security regulations also vary in different institutions making it difficult to trace and fix mistakes.
But, what can blockchain do?
A blockchain is a system used for storing and sharing information with security and transparency. Every block in the chain is an independent unit of its own and a dependent link among the collective chain that creates a network controlled by participants rather than a third party.
As blockchains are managed by network nodes instead of central authority, they are decentralized that prevents one entity from having complete control over the network. With the incorporation of blockchain, the need for a central administrator will be removed by cryptography. Healthcare providers will be able to promote data management processes beyond perception. It will help in collecting, analyzing, sharing, and securing medical records. It will provide the access to healthcare workers for retrieving health records with the cryptographic keys provided by patients from anywhere without creating any privacy or security problems.
Advantages of Healthcare Blockchain
Although applications of blockchain in the healthcare industry are inceptive, some early solutions have shown the possibility of reduced healthcare costs, improved access to information among different stakeholders, and streamlining the entire business process. So, keeping aside the buzz, let’s see the real advantages of blockchain in healthcare.
1. Master Patient Indexes
The master patient index helps in the identification of patients across separate administrative systems. It is often created within the EHR or electronic health record system. As these EHRs have different vendors, there are several irregularities of MPIs. In many cases, the data of a patient between these healthcare systems become mismatched. However, with the nature of decentralization in Blockchain, it possesses the ability to solve the issue. In the blockchain-based MPIs, the data will be hashed to the ledger and content will remain unique as only the authorized nodes of the data can make changes to the hashes while all parties with access can only check the related information.
2. Single, elongated patient records
Blockchain technology is potent to transform health care by placing patients at the center of the system while increasing the security and privacy of health records. It provides a new model for health information exchange by forming electronic elongated patient records secured and efficient. Additionally, the fact that the data is copied among all the nodes of the blockchain network creates an atmosphere of clarity and transparency that enables healthcare providers and patients to know how their data is handled by whom, how, and when. It can also help healthcare from potential frauds, data losses, or security attacks.
3. Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management in healthcare is a challenging aspect. With scattered settings for ordering drugs, medical supplies, and critical resources, there’s an inherent risk of compromising the supply chain that might impact patient safety. Indulgence of blockchain technology in the transactions can tap into the complete process of medicine or drug products movement. As all the transactions will be recorded onto the shared ledger with every block recording and maintaining every transaction, it will become easy to verify the vendor, distributor, and origin of the drug within a matter of seconds. It will also enable healthcare physicians and officials to check the authenticity of the supplier’s credentials.
4. Claims Justification
Currently, the insurance claim processes face difficulties like lack of transparency i.e. most customers don’t even know how insurance works; human errors and inefficiencies i.e. insurances are full of confusion along with human errors that create inefficiencies that lead to the increased cost to customers; higher frauds in claims. But, blockchain technology can simplify and enhance recordkeeping, payment processing, claims registration, contract management, and closure with its immutable ledger.
5. Interoperability
Interoperability is the capability of distinct healthcare information technology to interpret, exchange, and use data. Due to the privacy issues, the alphanumeric code to identify a patient has been revoked that caused problems in gathering the required record of the patient. Enforcing measurement standards for industry-wide interoperability is also a challenge in interoperability. With blockchain in healthcare interoperability, data can be shared in real-time on the trusted network and provides access to the patient’s record in a secured manner. Moreover, with the pri
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Future of Healthcare
Article | January 28, 2022
As consumers, we crave convenience and simplicity, and across an array of industries, technology has made it increasingly easy to search for and purchase products and services. From getting a pizza delivered to buying a car online, the process often involves entering a few pieces of information, hitting send, and waiting for a confirmation email.
A Changing Landscape
Unsurprisingly, people want this same level of convenience and simplicitywhen they're seeking care. This change in consumer demand for convenience is further compounded by fundamental shifts in the healthcare ecosystem. Among these shifts are cost-sharing models that have increased patient out-of-pocket expenses, healthcare systems that are increasingly shifting toward delivering value-based care, and innovations in digital health solutions.
While patients want to play an active role in managing their well-being, that is often easier said than done in a system that uses a combination of manual processes and non-integrated point solutions to try and meet consumer demand. Disparate and burdensome methods of managing patient engagement often lead to inefficiencies within provider organizations, resulting in missed appointments, increased registration and eligibility-based denials, incomplete payments, higher collections and write-offs, and low patient satisfaction.
Consumer Dissatisfaction
Healthcare consumers today feel like they're fighting an uphill battle. According to Change Healthcare's 2020 Harris Poll Consumer Experience Index, 67% of respondents agreed that it “feels like every step of the healthcare process is a chore.” A similar percentage, 62%, agreed that “the healthcare system feels like it is set up to be confusing.”
Furthermore, if consumers don’t receive the level of convenience and digitization they want from their current provider, they’re more than willing to seek it out elsewhere. In a recent Black Book survey, 80% of respondents indicated they would be willing to change providers for more convenience even if they were receiving good care from their current provider. An even higher percentage of patients,90%, do not think they have to continue seeing a provider if that provider does not “deliver an overall satisfactory digital experience.”
A Patient-Centric Approach
Improving the patient experiencestarts with humanizing revenue cycle management(RCM) —the administrative process that takes the patient from registration and appointment scheduling to the final payment of a balance. Simply making administrative touchpoints self-service and easy to understand throughout the patient’s financial journey can help humanize revenue cycle management for providers.
How is that possible? By thinking about the patients’ side of the administrative process and leveraging innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. The more that providers’ staffs are able to automate repetitive tasks, the more time they're able to spend helping provide a seamless patient engagement journey that is focused on a patient’s specific needs. In other words, reducing human intervention throughout our technologies allows providers to infuse more human interaction with each patient as they navigate their healthcare journey.
According to Change Healthcare’s 2020 Harris Poll Consumer Experience Index, what patients really want is a retail-like shopping experience with modern, streamlined communication, as thevast majority (81%) agreed that “shopping for healthcare should be as easy as shopping for other common services” via a streamlined access point online. A clear majority (71%) also said they want their health insurance and healthcare providers (68%) to communicate with them using more-modern platforms.
Simplified Scheduling and Payment
The entire clinical-care journey is focused on the specific needs of the patient rather than the provider, so why shouldn’t the patient’s financial journey be handled the exact same way? From a patient-satisfaction perspective, patients are not separating their clinical journey from their financial journey, so providers should start viewing it the same way.
It should be easy to schedule an appointment and modify that appointment if needed. Patients should have to (securely) provide their personal and insurance information only once (digitally and in advance), then be squared away when they show up for their appointment with their provider. In addition, because of COVID-19 and the heightened awareness surrounding personal interaction, it’s important to provide patients with no-contact check-in and waiting room options.
By humanizing RCM, providers can achieve a cohesive end-to-end journey that allows patients to quickly and easily get the care they need complete with clear communication, price transparency , and a provider who truly takes the time to understand their unique situations. By putting the patient back at the center of their care journey, providers can improve care outcomes while also driving maximized business outcomes for their organizations.
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