The Changing Healthcare User Experience

This week at an event, I had the chance to chat with the VP responsible for application development at a major US health insurance provider. A very interesting lady with a deep appreciation for the experience users see.

She explained the modifications they see, driven by the recent healthcare law changes are creating new challenges. Companies and pension providers are having to change the insurance packages that they are offering to their customers to be consistent with the regulatory changes and the changing politics.

There are people who have been retired for decades who are now having to administer their healthcare requirements online for the first time.

Imagine your 85 years old and have been retired for over 20 years, until now your healthcare was basically a card you showed to your doctor, but now you have to submit claims online and communicate with various healthcare professionals through websites and through email. Some changes are now requiring healthcare customers to initially pay for some forms of their healthcare and then submit a claim for reimbursement. While at the end of the process they are not paying more, they are now having to outlay the expense and wait for their payments.

Many of these older customers have had a minimal digital footprint but now are required to be digitally savvy. They may have had a Facebook account to watch your grandchildren's lives vicariously, but that was the extent of your digital footprint. They have never had an email account.

This is the new normal, and healthcare providers need to be able to understand how these people are faring, being able to see UX issues that they haven't even considered before.

There may be specific forms, on fields on forms that are causing users confusion. How can you identify these?

Being able to monitor the users' experience is also made more complicated by the need to preserve anonymity for privacy regulatory reasons.

A good method of being able to understand how these users (as well as ll other users) are finding the systems, is to track the way transactions perform through the whole application stack.

Using this technique, you can see how long each, and every step of the process is taking the users and create anonymous analytics that allow the users experience to be measured. Creating visibility to any specific group that is having consistent issues.

Transaction Tracking and IT Operational Analytics (ITOA) can be a very effective way of monitoring how users are using your business transactions.