“Everybody wants to be in your business,” speaker and author Nick Webb stated as he delivered the keynote session highlighting home care and hospice trends at the 2024 Axxess Growth, Innovation and Leadership Experience (AGILE).
In the session, Webb outlined that the future of healthcare lies in decentralization and organizations need to understand that patient experience, emerging technologies and staffing are key aspects to navigating the evolving healthcare landscape.
Hyper-consumerism and the Patient Experience
Webb addressed that patients and their families actively research and analyze where they or their loved ones will be receiving home or hospice care. He noted that the expectations of the quality of care received are rising.
“Unfortunately, they can’t determine clinical efficacy. How could they? They’re not trained medical or care experts,” said Webb. “But they do 100 percent know what the experience was like.”
“Revenue flows where the experience goes in home health care and hospice,” he added.
Webb noted that organizations cannot ignore items like customer satisfaction surveys, ratings and ultimately, the way care is delivered, to succeed in the industry.
He added that patients and their families are looking for speed and efficiency in their experiences and are ultimately looking for a pain-free interaction with the same clinical outcomes.
“Patients and their families want friction freedom, they want speed, they want transparency, they want genuine, authentic empathy, they want this to be painless,” said Webb.
Webb acknowledged that while larger companies want to enter the healthcare industry and don’t always have the expertise to deliver quality care, they do have the advantage in delivering quality consumer experiences. Organizations need to focus on the experience of patients and develop strategies to improve satisfaction to remain competitive in the industry.
“The experience always wins,” Webb said.
Emerging Technologies
Webb encouraged organizations to focus on technology to reduce costs and improve overall experiences, asserting that organizations need to embrace and become proficient in emerging technologies.
“Home care and hospice are technology organizations that deliver beautiful, humanistic experiences and care,” said Webb.
He stated that leaders should explore tools like artificial intelligence to remain successful in the changing industry.
“The value that you can provide leveraging AI and robotic process automation is amazing,” Webb said.
Webb also listed telemedicine as an example of a pathway into the future of technology and healthcare.
“We are obsessed with telemedicine and when you think about it, you can use the camera on an iPhone or a laptop to be able to look at the face and use facial AI so we can look at pupillary dilation,” Webb said. “We can take a look at all kinds of other known indicators on the face to determine everything from intoxication to neuropathology to lots of things.”
He encouraged organizations to lean into technology they don’t understand and use it to improve their business.
Staffing
Webb outlined that organizations need to focus on more than attracting, hiring and retaining top talent. He also encouraged organizations to focus on employee engagement and productivity.
He urged leaders to take an innovative approach to overall satisfaction, focusing on the experience of staff members to positively impact the experience of patients and their family members.
“There’s something we call human experience innovation, meaning that we have to get far better insights into understanding what people want in terms of family members and patients,” said Webb. “We also need to understand concurrently what our staff really want, because you can’t improve customer experience without improving staff and provider experience.”
Webb concluded the session by noting that leaders need to focus on cultivating a culture of happiness and satisfaction, taking into account the voices and needs of employees.
“Your organizations are obviously people powered, but we have to formalize the process of creating a voice and to make sure they understand and believe in your mission,” Webb said. “The other thing that’s really important, that’s missed by most people that try to create great cultures, is that everybody at every job has two things they want. One is they want their job to be evolutionary, right? They want to evolve. They want to get better as a result of their job. The other thing is they want to feel like it’s home. They want to feel like they’re loved and respected and it’s home for them.”
Learn more about the Axxess Growth, Innovation and Leadership Experience, also known as AGILE. AGILE brings together the brightest thought leaders, policymakers, technology innovators and care teams to envision a shared future of healthcare at home.