Where the Patient Experience Is Heading – And 3 Ways Healthcare Providers Can Meet That Moment Leave a comment

If you’ve had a video check-in with your doctor recently, you’ve been a part of the most significant change to the patient experience in the last five years.

Rare to non-existent prior to the pandemic, telehealth visits have become standard for many physicians and their patients. For instance, by 2021, more than 86 percent of doctors were offering some form of telehealth services, up from just over 15 percent in 2019. And this trend shows few signs of abating.

Telehealth is a great example of an innovation that quickly developed from novelty to expectation for many patients. For example, a 2024 survey found that 94 percent of patients who had participated in a virtual visit expressed a willingness to have another one, up from 80 percent in 2020. It is now an integral part of the patient experience.

Now AI is charting a similar course. As it becomes a more pronounced force in healthcare in the years to come, the patient experience promises to be transformed even more dramatically.

The challenge for hospitals and other healthcare providers? Ensuring that they’re ready to meet those evolving patient expectations. Here are three areas to focus on.

1. Delivering new levels of personalization and convenience

Hospitals and healthcare providers have certainly made strides in building a more personalized and convenient system, allowing patients to more easily manage their care regimens.

For example, many providers now have systems that automatically add new appointments to patients’ calendars, saving them the trouble of doing so manually. In addition, integrated online charts make it easier for patients to view their updated health records.

By providing more visibility and greater ease of use in areas like these, however, providers have raised expectations and set the bar higher for themselves. The directive for the industry is clear: today’s historic levels of personalization and convenience are the new floor. Pushing for improvements on both will be essential to future success.

And the ceiling may be higher than you realize: not only do patients want more of the innovation they’ve already seen in healthcare itself, they’re now basing future expectations on what they’ve encountered in other aspects of their lives, such as their personalized banking app or their curated newsfeed.

2. Unlocking the power of AI

The personalized virtual experiences they’ve had in areas like retail and entertainment, for example, are now informing their desire for similar customization and convenience in healthcare. They want a smoother and more intuitive experience that just makes sense.

Just as in seemingly every other area of life, AI will be a big part of that experience. For example:

• Summarizing provider notes – AI can give a patient a more readable and understandable recap of their visit and any recommendations going forward. And from the doctor’s perspective, those AI-generated notes can be a significant way to free up time to focus on their patient rather than paperwork.
• Facilitating care coordination – AI systems can pull information from multiple EHRs to improve interoperability. This can give patients and providers alike a more holistic view of a given injury or illness – and really, of the patient as a whole person.
• Smooth care management for proxy caregivers – Unifying patient data also makes life easier for adult children managing care for elderly parents, or spouses supporting their partners through recovery or convalescence.

We’re at the start of the AI journey. As we prove out more use cases, expectations for AI-streamlined experiences will only grow.

3. Building data and AI readiness

With expectations increasingly built around this type of patient experience, AI is no longer a nice-to-have technology in healthcare – it’s an unavoidable reality.

That’s why hospitals and healthcare providers need to focus even more intently on both the quality of their data, from setting up data clean rooms to ensuring the interoperability of their EHRs and EMRs. They should also be viewing their data through an AI lens, considering how it can interconnect with new AI tools in strategic and regulatorily compliant ways.

All of that can add up to a tall task in the fast-moving world of AI. That’s why keeping up with the changes may also mean having good thought partners in the technology space who can think beyond implementation and look ahead to the trends that may be coming. Once they identify those trends, they can help a provider ask the important questions about any new tool:

• What is this going to mean for our patients?
• What is this going to mean for our doctors?
• What is this going to mean in terms of regulation?

Chances are, most hospitals and healthcare providers have been thinking about and experimenting with these types of things already. But as expectations continue to scale up, AI’s impact on the patient experience needs to be at the forefront of every conversation.   

Be prepared for an ever-changing patient experience 

Telehealth visits were once an oddity. The notion of a patient accessing their own digital health records once seemed far-fetched. But thanks to the influence of technology, nothing about the patient experience stays the same for very long.

Just as every patient is going to be different a year from now or five years from now, the healthcare ecosystem will likewise change and evolve. That’s why healthcare providers need to be thinking not only about the experience that patients need and want now, but the experience they’re going to need and want down the road.

Those providers that take that long-term perspective – and respond with tech solutions that effectively address those changing wants and needs – are those that will be poised to thrive.

Photo: malerapaso, Getty Images

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