Developing a digital strategy that encompasses the entire patient journey

Healthcare organizations of all kinds are approaching a future in which physical and digital patient experiences are harmoniously aligned. To differentiate themselves and offer greater choice, transparency, and ease of access, many organizations have implemented digital capabilities at a rapid pace.  

But technology is only part of the puzzle—albeit an important one. Bolting new tools and systems on to old, fragmented processes will severely diminish returns on investment and simply perpetuate existing problems. Avoiding this—and maximizing your investments across the board in people, processes, and technology—means identifying, building, and constantly adapting the kinds of end-to-end experiences that will help you not only remain competitive but truly stand out as an industry leader in patient experience and satisfaction. 

It’s a matter of alignment and balance. Leadership must be fully bought-in and committed to your digital strategy, teams must be prepared to integrate new capabilities while maintaining the  flexibility required to support evolving patient needs, and processes must be optimized to support a digital operating model that prioritizes innovation and adaptation. Doing so is well worth the investment: According to research by Forrester, customer experience leaders achieve 5.1x the revenue growth over laggards, and high-performing organizations waste 13x less money.  

Helping you achieve those kinds of returns is where we excel. West Monroe’s Connected Care Experience offering helps you increase patient engagement, grow revenue faster, improve patient outcomes, and lower operational costs by sharpening your organization’s digital focus and delivering to patients during the moments that matter.  

Being there in the moments that matter 

Digital health has a problem: It lacks focus. With so many technologies, patient populations, care journeys, and regulatory measures to consider, for example, it’s no wonder that healthcare has struggled to take fuller advantage of the digital revolution that has been sweeping other industries. At its most basic, what most healthcare organizations need is a digital strategy that combines human insights, design excellence, tech expertise, and business acumen. Only by addressing all of these elements as essential pieces of each and every patient interaction can you effectively home in on—and prioritize—the critical moments in the patient journey that have the greatest clinical and business impact.   

This kind of precision is how you establish processes and experiences to rally your teams around; distinguishing the signals from the noise like this is how you’ll prioritize use cases and create a solid foundation for further growth and development. Our approach is built for this, and it boils down to a focus on three core areas:  

• Defining winning strategic elements 
• Designing the future 
• Executing on the strategic roadmap 

1. Discover and define winning strategic elements

Your digital strategy must go deeper than technology. Understanding the patient journey is essential to helping you identify the moments and measures that can drive extraordinary experiences while creating positive clinical and business impacts. In defining your winning strategic elements, you’ll gain clarity on where you should focus and why. This phase is crucial to ensuring organization-wide alignment because it helps you:  

• Identify your unique starting point and establish where the bulk of your digital enablement efforts should go.  

• Clarify your vision to understand your strengths, which care experiences matter most, and where digital health fits into your overall strategy.  

• Define key moments in the patient journey to ensure your processes and technologies align.  

2. Design the future

This is the fun part—when all the hard work of discovery and definition is done, it’s time to design the care experience around those moments that matter most. Again, this experience needs to be seamless across physical and digital settings, ensuring that people, processes, and technology work in harmony. This is where we’ll work with you to gather key insights from customers and team members in order to start sketching out the future state of your business. Our process in this core area includes:  

• Analyzing existing data, performing competitive analysis, and reviewing strategy docs. 
• Designing the patient experience in conjunction with user personas and journey maps.  
• Recommending a business case and roadmap that is firmly based on proven insights to help you reach your goals.  

3. Execute on the strategic roadmap

At this point, we’ve uncovered a plethora of meaningful moments in the patient journey and drawn up detailed plans for how to optimize them. The goal is now to define and guide the investments that will differentiate the experiences you’ve defined and maintain maximum platform flexibility. Here we’ll work with you to create alignment between stakeholders, establish governance, and begin to implement the changes we’ve identified. During the execution stage, we’ll:  

• Set up protocols for rolling out new capabilities and process changes and define what success looks like so you always have a north star to guide you.  
• Oversee delivery, which includes managing teams, communicating changes, and measuring progress.  
• Establish conditions and operating norms to ensure scalable, sustainable growth as you transition to a steady-state team. 

That’s it: define, design, and execute. It sounds simple but that’s the idea—make the development of a focused, achievable digital strategy as painless and engaging as possible, so you and your teams are equipped to deliver connected care experiences.  

Rethinking how healthcare organizations operate

Our approach is designed specifically to help build winning healthcare organizations that are focused, nimble, and prepared for ongoing, scalable growth. We know that people and processes are just as important as technology. So we include change management as a vital component of our service offering to ensure that new processes and capabilities are desired, accepted, and adopted across the enterprise. 

Our team at West Monroe is dedicated to helping companies be digital no matter the industry. With offices across the US and over 2,200 employee-owners, we have a vast store of expertise to draw from, including helping other healthcare organizations create holistic care experiences. Let’s talk about how you can build a winning healthcare organization.