4 Things Healthcare Orgs Need To Know About The Retail Digital Transformation

For a recent Yext webinar, I had the opportunity to interview our new Head of Industry for Retail and eCommerce, Derick Jaros. Derick spent over eight years at Home Depot during the period of time when retail and eCommerce were not aligned — and Amazon had started to threaten the retail industry as a whole.

Sound familiar, healthcare readers? In the healthcare industry, Amazon recently announced that they are buying One Medical for a whopping $3.9 billion – and for the first time, they are threatening the primary care specialty. More broadly, the move is forcing healthcare organizations to think differently about consumer experience.

Consumerism is top of mind for executives in both the Payer and the Provider industries. In my role as Yext's Head of Industry for Healthcare, I frequently hear executives talking about how consumers are shopping for care and how dissatisfied they are — but many organizations are not sure where to start making improvements.

Too many of them are looking at their own industries for inspiration. For example, one Chief Marketing Officer recently told me that he doesn't want his team looking to a local healthcare competitor, but to Mayo Clinic. This is the wrong strategy: healthcare organizations need to stop looking at their local competition for inspiration or for benchmarking purposes. Instead, they need to look at what organizations like Amazon and CVS are doing to improve customer experience — and attempt to emulate that standard in the patient and consumer setting.

During my interview with Derick, I couldn't help but notice the similarities between what Home Depot went through in the early 2010s and what healthcare is going through today. To illustrate how much the healthcare industry can learn from the retail industry, here are four take-aways from our conversation.

The traditional model of healthcare, healthcare delivery, and consumer expectations have changed drastically through the pandemic — and yet healthcare organizations are operating in the same way they did ten years ago. Going through a website redesign and launching a new site isn't going to significantly improve consumer experience. But from a marketing perspective, that's what teams have always done — so organizations continue to pursue that strategy, hoping that maybe this time it will produce a different result.

For years, healthcare organizations have been lamenting how they would like to engage more providers on online appointment scheduling — but providers continue to push back.

To change this dynamic, how about attempting to change the incentives to encourage providers to get on board with online scheduling? Organizations could look to provide them with double RVUs for every appointment booked and completed via an online appointment scheduling platform. Or, could they pay them a bonus for every x number of appointments booked online?

In our interview, Derick talked about how difficult it was for the eCommerce and the in-store teams to work together until they had shared goals and incentives. Retail teams thought eCommerce teams would take business away from their stores, so they never wanted to cooperate with them. Similarly, providers today feel like they will lose control and autonomy over their schedules. Why not bring them along by incentivizing them to use online appointment scheduling to allay their fears?

For many years, Home Depot looked to Lowe's as their main competitor. Lowe's stores and Home Depot stores often were within short driving distances from one another, so it was natural to look at Lowe's as primary competition. But in the 2010s, Home Depot began to realize that looking at local competition was going to keep it from growing as a business in the digital age. Frank Buckley, Home Depot's CEO at the time, encouraged everyone at Home Depot to look beyond the local competitor to what Amazon was doing. Internally, it wasn't easy to bring Home Depot employees along and to change who they considered were really competitors. But Home Depot leadership persisted and continued to ask the question: "What is Amazon doing?" until it really sank in.

Leadership within a healthcare organization should do the same. How many leaders ask about the local market competitors? How many are looking at local competitors, trolling their websites, looking at advertising and branding campaigns, and more to see what the local competition is doing?

On the other hand: how many are asking about Amazon, Google, and CVS in addition to the local competitors? How many are going on those sites and drawing parallels, for example, between the checkout experience on Amazon versus the scheduling experience on their own website? Not enough.

Always be asking not only what your local competition is doing, but what other market entrants like Amazon, Google, CVS and others are doing. Ask questions like:

• What is Amazon / Silicon Valley doing?

• How are they training the consumer?

• How are they improving the consumer experience?

• What can we do to draw those parallels to healthcare and what can we do to improve that experience within our system?

One way to differentiate from local competition – and from CVS and Amazon more broadly – is to provide a better experience. The easier you can make it to book an appointment, the more seamless to find and receive care, the more likely you will be to acquire patients.

Now, with the above-mentioned note about looking toward Amazon… that doesn't mean healthcare organizations should try to be Amazon. In our conversation, Derick noted that Home Depot was constantly looking at what Amazon was doing and how it was changing consumer expectations, but that Home Depot was not trying to be Amazon. This is an important distinction for healthcare organizations, because as Derick notes in the interview, "If you try to beat Amazon at Amazon, you're not going to win."

Instead, dive deeply into your identity as a health system and set your strategy based on your identity.

• Will you be the health system that leads in certain specialties and can offer the best consumer experience in scheduling appointments in those specialties?

• Are you an organization that serves your local communities and can therefore offer the greatest amount of community access to providers?

• Are you a technologically savvy organization that has partnerships with the most forward-thinking technology companies?

• Are you an organization that offers exceptional research and specialized care? If so, how? Can anyone and everyone easily get an appointment in those specialized areas?

• Are you an organization that offers the best consumer and patient experience for miles and miles? If so, how? How can you feature this in your marketing? How can you continue to improve the experience?

You can't try to beat Amazon, nor can you try to peek into the crystal ball to understand what Amazon (and other organizations) are trying to do in the industry. But you can look to them to see what they've learned from customer experiences. Apply those experiences to your strategies to drive excellence on a healthcare scale.

Home Depot focused on four pillars to help them move from a separate Retail and eCommerce strategy to a unified omnichannel strategy that effectively competes against Amazon every day. These four steps include:

Set your strategy. Home Depot pulled a team together to look at the future of retail and eCommerce and where Home Depot needed to fit. This team helped the company run toward a strategic goal without getting lost in the day to day initiatives. In healthcare, maybe it's worth setting up a "Healthcare of the Future" tiger team to look at what healthcare could look like in 5-10 years, and then constantly push the envelope on what that means. Look to Amazon and CVS and Google and others to see what they are doing and push the boundaries – with no limits and with assumptions that anything is possible.

Structure your organization with the right people. Not everyone leading healthcare today is the right person to lead your organization into the future. Maybe your "Healthcare of the Future" tiger team makes recommendations on how teams should be structured. Maybe marketing teams need to break up in favor of Patient Success teams or Consumer Experience teams (separate from Patient Experience). There are a lot of ways to look at how to orient your organization differently and to incentivize people to come along with the changes. Home Depot created a team and set aside a budget to "break the business." Can you do the same in favor of experimenting with new ways of doing business?

Align the right technologies so that tech can work with and for you. Prior to 2010, Home Depot made technology investments based on "gut instincts." This meant technologies lived in silos and systems didn't talk to one another. Once Home Depot transitioned from "gut" decisions to data-based decision-making, they made significant strides in unifying systems.

In the healthcare industry, where are your technology investments not working for you? Most of these live in places where data lives in silos and where teams can't access the data, or where data doesn't connect via an API to flow from one software platform to another. Try to move away from silos and toward connections as quickly as you can. A patient just wants to book an appointment – she doesn't want to have to log in three times and then call a phone number because your appointment technology doesn't talk to your Find a Doctor.

Focus on aligning process so that the consumer is at the center of all discussions. Home Depot knew it wasn't delighting its customers because it started to see their NPS scores decline. They said they were all about consumers, but in reality, Home Depot processes were making it very difficult for the consumer to become a customer. Consumers just wanted to shop. How do you leverage patient journeys to consider difficulties in your own processes to, for example, book an appointment, follow up on a referral, park your car at the main hospital location, and more? With every decision you are making, are you asking, "does this make sense for the consumer from the consumer perspective?"

We hope you enjoyed the interview and would love your thoughts and feedback on anything you would add. The healthcare industry can learn so much from the retail industry, and we hope you found value in this chat.