Patients Vs. Consumers: Why The Word Doesn’t Matter — But The Argument Does
There’s nothing that gets my blood pressure going like calling the cable company.
Chock-full of scripted apologies, sales pitches, and roundabout conversations, the customer service of cable companies is notoriously awful. I’m almost certain that if half the companies didn’t have a semi-monopoly in their respective areas, they wouldn’t stay in business.
Customer service pervades all areas of our lives from who we begrudgingly choose as our utility providers to where we shop for clothes or groceries. Now, the concept of consumerism has made its way into one of the largest industries in the country — healthcare.
Healthcare is no longer just about the well-being of patients. Patients don’t stop being opinionated consumers once they put on that hospital gown, and they certainly don’t stop being Twitterers, Yelpers, or Facebookers.
The debate on whether to call them patients or consumers is a hot one. And the answer is that it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the conversation is even being had — and that good customer service in healthcare depends largely on the patient/consumer experience.
Whether you choose to call them patients, consumers, or pat-sumers, improving their experience should be high on your list of priorities. Here’s how you can do that.
Show Your Patients You Care — And Help Them Understand Their Condition
When I was 15, I went to my annual eye doctor appointment, during which my optometrist noticed my pupils were two different sizes. A few eye tests and an MRI later, my doctors were able to say that this condition (which I now know is called anisocoria) isn’t caused by a brain tumor and is also nothing to worry about.
Now, over a decade later, my primary care provider starts every annual visit with a quick check of my eyes. Every. Single. Visit. Maybe she has an awesome memory or maybe she references my medical records (more likely), but it doesn’t matter. This 60-second action makes me feel noticed and cared for.
It doesn’t take much to show you care — a friendly greeting, an empathetic tone, even a few extra minutes answering questions. In fact, a study that was done in Germany, the UK, and the US showed that for about 3 out of 4 patients, the top contributing factor to perceived better care is time left for discussion.
Keep in mind — patients might come in already believing they know what’s wrong. In the era of the internet, self-diagnosis is rampant, and almost 44% of Americans actually self-diagnose rather than visiting a healthcare provider.
While a patient’s idea of their condition may be a little off base — if not all the way in the outfield — the goal of healthcare remains the same. They should leave their physician’s office with a solid understanding of their health and why some websites can sometimes be misleading.
When a patient walks into your office, they’re putting their trust in you. Maybe it’s a few extra minutes of discussion or maybe it’s remembering a patient’s obscure medical condition. Either way, seemingly tiny gestures can have a huge impact on their experience in this consumer-driven healthcare world.
The Power Of The Internet: How To (Effectively) Stay In Touch With Your Patients
Listen. People go online. A lot. Nearly 30% of Americans say they are online “almost constantly” (
) — and over 80% say they go online daily.
This means they’re frequently checking their email, going on social media, and generally surfing the web — all places you can develop an online presence. A robust online presence is great for helping you build your organization, as over 80% of patients look up a doctor online before making a decision about their care.
As for your current patients, the internet can help you connect and communicate with them to drive loyalty. There are plenty of options to stay in touch, including an email newsletter, a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram account, a wellness blog, or a podcast.
No matter the method of communication, the key is to make your content valuable for patients. Nobody wants to read boring healthcare content, which can make patients quickly leave the page or never even open it at all.
Some ways you can make your content more beneficial and relevant to patients include:
- Providing general — and timely — information about staying healthy and common conditions, such as how to avoid the flu during flu season
- Choosing an enticing title that encourages them to open the content in the first place (think “5 Reasons You’re Not Losing Weight” vs. plain old “Weight Loss”)
- Encouraging interaction by asking patients their thoughts and feedback via comments or reposts
- Connecting them with the right resources if they have more questions or want to set up an appointment
Don’t forget — you can start small. For instance, you might want to choose just one platform to build your online and social media presence (most hospitals use Facebook) and go from there. After that, you might feel more comfortable branching out to other modes of communication.
The patient/consumer experience exists both within the walls of your building and online, and it’s up to you to take advantage of opportunities in both worlds.
The healthcare experience has the potential to be enjoyable, and whether you’ve landed on the term patients, consumers, or something else entirely, it’s time they get the attention they deserve.
Does your organization cater to healthcare settings? Not sure where to start when it comes to improving patient satisfaction? We can help!
Healthcare Web Content: 4 Reasons To Take A More Casual Tone
How you communicate is just as important as what you communicate—especially in healthcare.
Voice and tone are so often overlooked during the content creation process for healthcare web content, but they are key in distinguishing your brand and truly impacting your target audiences.
Maybe that’s why poor health literacy is such a huge issue in this country. Only 12% of US adults have what is considered a proficient level of health literacy, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In some areas of the country, 1 out of 2 people have a basic or below basic ability to comprehend health information, reports a study from University of North Carolina. This means that half of the population in these areas can read an appointment reminder and figure out when their next trip to the doctor is.
But filling out consent forms and insurance paperwork—or even understanding a pamphlet about healthcare services once they’re at the appointment—is tough.
At CareContent, we are all about increasing health literacy. And as a team of content specialists for healthcare, we advocate for patient-focused content to take a more conversational tone. Here are 4 reasons why.
1. A Casual Tone Helps Patients Understand Complex Information Better
When web content is narrated in a way that sounds like someone is talking, it helps patients understand the information better. The same goes for avoiding wonky language and acronyms. Ditto for cutting out long strings of sentences. When you break the information up and make it digestible, it becomes easier to understand.
This is part of our health literacy mission. If we want people to understand their diagnosis, their treatment, and their medical team, we have to talk at a level that they are comfortable with.
We don’t want people to have to read our client’s content with a dictionary next to them. We don’t them to have to ask the doctor, “What does that word even mean?”
For me, this mission is personal.
My son was recently diagnosed with mild autism. Even getting to that diagnosis required a lot of appointments with pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, developmental and occupational therapists, social workers, and a lot of other specialists who work in early childhood development.
One of the common complaints I’ve heard from other moms in this same position is that these specialists talk to parents like they’re talking to each other. Some of them spew out acronyms and terminology like you graduated with their credentials.
This is an issue for two reasons:
- It’s a waste of everyone’s time. Why should I have to stop and ask you to explain what you just explained? If they break the information down well to begin with, this doubling back wouldn’t be needed.
- It creates more anxiety. A lot of these medical jargon-y words seem scarier and more alien than what they actually mean.
Explaining healthcare information to patients is not the time for the medical expert to display their intelligence. We already know you’re smart. When information is presented to patients in a formal, clinical, wonky voice, that creates questions instead of answering them. And that’s a problem.
2. Conversational Healthcare Web Content Is Better For Search
In addition to helping people understand the information, taking a more conversational tone can also help with search results. This is especially true with the rise of voice search using virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, etc.
Today, nearly 1 in 4 people with an Android device speak their search query versus typing it.
Voice searchers don’t say, “pediatric autism specialist Chicago.” Instead, they say, “Where is the nearest pediatric autism specialist?” or “I need an autism specialist for my toddler.”
To ensure that the search engine robots crawl your content and connect it with something a voice searcher might say, your content needs to match how people talk.
3. Healthcare Web Content Needs To Create Empathy
The third reason to take a more conversational tone for healthcare web content is that it creates a more personal connection with people when, as they’re reading the content, they feel as if they are talking to someone—as if they can hear the nurse or doctor’s voice as they’re reading.
This is a great tactic for organizations that are trying to personalize their providers’ voices online. Wording the information the same way they’d explain it to their patients humanizes them.
This humanization goes hand-in-hand with the fact that most people who are looking for healthcare information online are often in need of empathy. They want to know that they are not alone, that their concerns are being heard, and that they can get help.
Taking a more conversational tone goes a long way toward providing that comfort and empathy patients and caregivers need.
4. Voice And Tone Can Set Your Healthcare Web Content Apart
Refining a conversational voice and tone is one of the most underestimated ways to distinguish a brand. Lots of companies seek to distinguish their brands using fonts, colors, and logos. And while these are all elements to consider, voice is often left out.
This might seem like an inappropriate example for a healthcare setting, but, for instance, take the website Thug Kitchen [Warning: If you click this link, don’t be offended]. Thug Kitchen started as a recipe website that has grown into a vegan cooking empire with three bestselling cookbooks.
The recipes are good, but it’s their intrepid voice and tone that made them culinary stars: Their recipes are full of cuss words.
I remember looking up a recipe for homemade cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving one year, and their recipe popped up first in my search. The first line: “Put the f***ing can opener down.” I laughed the whole time as I went through this recipe.
Other companies like MailChimp and BuzzFeed have risen to become leaders in their market because of the way they say things.
These may not be healthcare brands, but those of us creating healthcare web content can borrow this principle. Using a conversational voice and tone makes your content memorable. And that, in turn, makes your organization memorable.
Are you ready for your healthcare web content to have a voice and tone makeover? Contact us to get started.
Healthcare Digital Marketing In 2018: Putting Patients First
The start of a new year is a great time to take a moment and think about what we want to see happen next—not just in our personal lives, but in our professional lives and the industries we work in and for as well.
So, what do I want to see in healthcare digital marketing in 2018?
I really want to see healthcare become hyperfocused on patient and user experience, both online and offline. I want hospitals and medical practices to stop asking, “What do our doctors want—and what’s going to make us look smart?”
The question to ask instead is, “What do the patients want?” That answer is what should guide the next steps that healthcare digital marketing takes. And I think a key part of that answer lies in expanding ways that patients and providers can communicate with one another.
Embracing Patient-Friendly Communication In Healthcare Digital Marketing
I would really love to see healthcare embrace other ways of patient-provider communication.
For instance, I want to be able to email my provider. And when I say email my provider, I don’t mean through a patient portal. Patient portals are another user ID and password I have to memorize or find to do something as basic as emailing a question to my doctor. It’s just cumbersome.
There are plenty of ways to make this possible while still following HIPAA regulations.
I would love to see healthcare figure out a way for patients to connect with providers via email or even online chat. I have toddlers whose favorite toy is my phone. This means I don’t always have access to my phone.
In order to call a provider to schedule an appointment, I first have to find my phone. That can take more time than busy working parents or young professionals have available.
And I want to be able to connect with my provider on any device. So, if I’m sitting at my computer and need to connect with them, I want to be able to easily do that through email or chat. The same goes for my phone or tablet.
Who Benefits From Expanded Patient-Provider Communication?
The benefits of expanding the ways patients and providers can communicate aren’t one-sided in the patients’ favor. If patients could email their providers, this would give providers another way to share information.
We very much live in a digital world, so keeping patients engaged online is key to keeping them engaged offline, too.”
For instance, if multiple people are asking questions via email and providers are starting to see a pattern to those questions, that could mean it’s time to create web content around this topic to send out in an e-newsletter to patients.
This probably happens a lot seasonally—for example, during flu season. This year was a particularly devastating flu season, and I’m sure a lot of people have been calling their providers asking very similar questions.
It would be great if they could send those questions via online chat and the provider could respond with, “Here’s a podcast I just did about this exact topic.”
This keeps the connection between patients and providers going—and it keeps patients engaged with the hospital or practice online.
My hope for healthcare digital marketing in 2018 is that the patient experience takes center stage.
What do you want to see happen in the world of healthcare digital marketing this year? Contact us to see how we can help turn your organization’s resolutions into realities.
When You Have An Abnormal Mammogram: Grand New Adventures In Fear
It wasn’t exactly a surprise when they said I had an abnormal mammogram. I am, as they say, no spring chicken, and generally, the older women get, the higher their risk for breast cancer.
But I admit there was still a part of me shouting, “I’m too YOUNG! I’m barely out of college! This is crazy!” …Even though college is far behind me, and, as my aunt (a nurse) always reminds me sweetly, my arteries always know how old I really am.
Aging is the buzzard that sits on your bedpost…with a mean grin. I’ll get you eventually. No hurry.
But ready or not, I got the call last month that women dread. There was something unusual about my annual screening mammogram, and the hospital needed me to come back for additional scans. Oh, wow. This can’t be good.
What Next?
I was scheduled for a diagnostic mammogram—the heavy-duty kind with mix-and-match compression plates, multiple scans from different angles, and a radiologist who reads the results immediately.
If there was a lump, I was headed for a nice, long needle in the biopsy room.
“Disgruntled” is one word to describe my feelings. So are “vexed,” “alarmed,” and “appalled.” Especially knowing they’d be compressing, and re-compressing, certain parts of my anatomy with all the dignity of a marshmallow in a s’more.
Still, I figured I could make the best of it. So, I’m sharing my thoughts for any health specialist who might want to peek into the mind of a VNP (Very Nervous Patient)—someone who’s caught a possible sighting of the Grim Reaper in her crystal ball.
Scariest Show Under The Big Top
What is it like? Your mind is a circus of thoughts, questions, and doubts. Funhouse mirrors show you a distorted future, and sinister clowns juggle plates that say, “Haha, now you’re in for it.” The acrobat on the highwire is you. There is no safety net below.
In good moments, you hold on to logic: The odds are in my favor. About 80% of all lumps are benign, BreastCancer.org says. In bad moments, you brood and think the worst. It’s Stage 4 for sure. I should set up that trust fund for my cats.
The waiting is the worst part, of course. When I finally walked in for my diagnostic mammogram at Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago, I was relieved. And ready for answers.
At least I thought I was—until I started the trek back to the great Boob-o-Matic and my mind flooded with new questions.
This Time, They Mean Business
The diagnostic mammograms are held on the seventh floor at Rush, unlike the annual screening ones, which are held on the ground floor. Both offices are beautifully decorated and full of friendly, professional staff.
But at this appointment, I didn’t have to wait for my test. A receptionist checked me in immediately, and before I even sat down, a staff member led me to the changing area. Oh, that’s nice. They’re not wasting any time. Wait, is that good or bad?
After donning a maroon gown, I was led down a hallway past a series of interview rooms—cozy, rose-colored offices full of cushy chairs, subdued lighting, and Kleenexes.
They were gorgeous, impeccable. Part of me was impressed. And part of me was cringing. How many women have received bad news in those rooms? Will I be one of them soon?
I decided I’d rather take the doctor down to the Au Bon Pain cafe. Flapping gown and all.
Blissed Out … Not
In the waiting room, I watched a large-screen TV that showed a series of landscapes—waterfalls, mountains, flowers swaying gently in the wind. Violins and flutes serenaded us. It was elegantly produced. And I was instantly suspicious.
They’re trying to relax us, I thought. Why? This is creepy. Like a hospice for dying boobs. Geez, I can’t think straight.
I was having nonsensical thoughts about breast insurance when they called me back for the mammogram. I don’t remember the technician’s name, but I do remember that she shook my hand and smiled. It did have a calming effect.
As she set up the scanning machine—a sophisticated, oblong device that never fails to remind me of the space monster in Alien—I stood awkwardly. I babbled about my cats and how their veterinarians, amazingly, get them to sit still for X-rays.
The technician agreed that was amazing, and I said vets were amazing people. Who did amazing things. Really amazing. And pretty soon, we were off and running with my scans.
And Squish, 2, 3, 4 …
At the sixth compression, I was visualizing the machine as a cute baby shark that had swum by and clamped onto me affectionately. I wuv you. It helped a little.
“How are you doing? Are you okay?” the technician asked as she tightened the plates once again.
“Yep. I’m good,” I said, not looking down. Nice sharkie. Don’t bite any harder, now.
“You’re a tough one,” she said, and I grinned. Or maybe grimaced.
After the final round of hold-your-breath-and-don’t-move, I covered myself and sat down. The technician said she’d return in a few minutes. I was quiet, wondering what they’d find. It really could have been anything. Small lump? Big lump? Lots of lumps? Frankentumor?
There was another large-screen TV on the wall, and this time, there were animals in the landscapes. A butterfly, an elk, a gnu chewing on something. The New Age-y music wafted out. Animals die in nature, I thought. Circle of life. Happens all the time, nothing to fear. God, what am I thinking?
Finally, the technician reappeared. “We don’t need to do any more compressions,” she said. I hoped that meant good news. She led me back to the quiet, dark den where the radiologist did her diagnostics.
The Final Frontier
The doctor introduced herself and kindly invited me to sit down next to her at her desk. Peering through her eyeglasses, she brought up different views of my left breast on three large computer screens. They looked like giant, glowing moonscapes.
“You see these tiny calcifications here?” she said. “There are three together, very faint.”
They looked like small, white ice chips, and they were maybe a just a smidge larger than, say, a dot that a ballpoint pen could make. Ridiculously tiny.
As we zoomed in to see them more closely, breast tissue flew past us like clouds and space dust, reminding me of the Astrometrics lab on Star Trek. I was boggled by the magnifying power of this software.
“When a patient has ductal carcinoma in situ, it often starts out this way, as a cluster of calcifications,” the radiologist said. She explained that ductal carcinoma in situ is a form of cancer that’s usually very treatable.
“However, these calcifications are very small,” she continued. “If we were to try to get a tissue sample, we might not even be able to find them. And we cannot say for certain that they will evolve into ductal carcinoma in situ.
“So, we’re going to bring you back every 6 months, for 2 years, and keep scanning you, and watch them carefully.”
I had a million questions, and this crackerjack radiologist answered them all. In summary, she said if the calcifications started to multiply, it would be time to take a tissue sample. But for now, there was no reason to be alarmed. And she smiled.
I didn’t have cancer. Yet. Maybe I never would.
I wanted to hug her.
That’s All, For Now—Really
I walked back to the waiting room with a definite lighter-than-air feeling. I sat and waited for them to print my report.
Next to me, a woman named Tamika was watching the TV screen, with its floaty landscapes.
“This music creeps me out,” she said.
“I know what you mean,” I said, with a wry smile.
We talked, and she told me her mother was there for a biopsy. I told her I’d say a prayer for her mom, and she thanked me. I wished I could do more.
I suddenly felt a pang of sympathy for the health professionals who work with patients with dicey test results and uncertain futures. They did their best to make us comfortable. It couldn’t be an easy job.
Mischief Managed
I definitely have a new respect for mammograms. Meanwhile, I’ve named my calcifications Crabbe, Goyle, and Malfoy—after the bratty kids in the Harry Potter novels.
In 6 months, we’ll see if they’ve magically multiplied. Hopefully not.
The only thing I might change about my experience is switching those waiting-room TV videos to something maybe a little, er, lighter.
At my vet’s office, they show HGTV with continuous “flip-this-house/flip-this-condo” type content. It’s weirdly interesting. Something like this might work, on low volume—just a quiet distraction, if you want it.
The message would be less “We’re trying to comfort you,” and more “We assume you’re going to live. You should, too. So, you might as well think about ways to upgrade your bathroom.”
Life goes on, after all. Might as well embrace it, at any age.
We don’t just tell our own medical tales. We write about patients’ stories, too. Get in touch with CareContent to talk about some testimonials for your website. Nobody says it better than a patient who’s had a good experience.
