Health Care Industry Struggles with Service Personalization

Businesses see big benefits to offering individualized customer and employee experiences but struggle to deliver them, according to an Oracle survey of 300 C-level executives across 10 industries.

In the health care industry, for example, 70 percent of organizations surveyed noted that budget and cost constraints are hindering them from delivering more individualized services, with regulatory restrictions (63 percent) and security concerns (63 percent) falling closely behind.

There are also clear missed opportunities. For instance, 77 percent of organizations do not offer self-service options from the patients’ device of choice.

“In the health industry, health care organizations are struggling to offer personalized experiences to their patients and employees,” Lesli Adams, director of population health strategy for Oracle’s health sciences global business unit, told eWEEK. “Right now, there are few online portals that can message out to and support each individual physician in a health system; nor are there portals that can provide individual patients or patient sub-populations with personalized services or messaging.”

She explained the health care industry is using IT investment to simplify IT and drive innovation.

“This helps to gain the scalability needed to turn on a dime to meet customer and employee expectations,” Adams said. “As personalized medicine moves into the mainstream of healthcare, the enabling IT systems need to evolve into enterprise-grade, mission critical, scalable infrastructures.”

Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of health care organizations surveyed said they felt there is an important link between cloud-based IT solutions and their organization’s ability to deliver individualized employee and patient experiences.

Across all industries, 84 percent of respondents said their organization has experienced a trend toward customers wanting a more individualized experience and 70 percent have experienced this trend from employees—but fewer than 20 percent give their organization top marks for its ability to offer those experiences.

To gain the flexibility needed to succeed, nearly all organizations (97 percent) believe IT investments—from business intelligence tools to customer experience solutions to industry-specific applications—will play a vital role in improving their ability to offer individualized customer and employee experiences.

Furthermore, 81 percent believe there is an important link between cloud-based IT solutions and their ability to offer an individualized experience.

In terms of benefits, managers believe personalization will lead to greater customer and employee retention—the survey indicated organizations believe they could increase employee satisfaction by 94 percent if they were to offer a highly individualized employee experience and more flexible, industry-specific applications that help them to thrive on the job.