Is Empathy the Next Normal in Healthcare?
Is Empathy the Next Normal in Healthcare?
By Michael Oleksiw, CEO, Pleio
Healthcare is meant to be understood as human care. But in the ongoing flurry of digital transformation in every aspect of this industry, the aspect of the human — our thoughts, emotions, and needs — are often left out in the digital often for acceptable reasons for a highly regulated, science-based industry; While COVID-19 has motivated us to rally around our human purpose in many ways, it has also accelerated the digitization of who we are as patients as well as raise our expectations on what we expect from those who serve our health needs.
The benefits of technology to reach us, teach us, and connect us are transformative for our quality of life. At the same time, our humanity has a tendency to become filtered behind “data”. Too often, a casualty of modern patient care is empathy, a key ingredient that can make a difference to outcomes and which definitely makes a difference to the patient journey. In the midst of dealing with often frightening and bewildering health conditions and low health literacy, speaking to their hearts and minds can be an answer to soothe patients. It seems simple enough. According to
Empathy in Medicine: What It Is, and How Much We Really Need It.,empathy among health care users and professionals significantly contributes to how both groups behave as well as to their therapy and overall well-being.”
Where there is empathy, there is also a greater opportunity for adherence leading to better patient outcomes, which the WHO (World Health Organization) recognized way back at the turn of the 21st century. Or look at Cleveland Clinic, a nearly $10 billion hospital network that has a Chief Empathy Officer. Combining human and digital elements, the time is past due for healthcare institutions and life science organizations to adopt an attitude of empathy that becomes integral to the patient journey.
Must Adherence as we know it evolve?
Patient acquisition and adherence cover the spectrum of the patient’s experience with pharmaceutical brands and they have more in common than one would naturally think. At both ends of the world of patient support, there is a major failure that needs to be addressed – and patients’ own behavior and societal trends provide us with the most obvious answer.
Looking at Both Ends of the Patient Experience
Let’s look at both ends of the patient experience. Why do nearly 50% of all people leave their doctor’s office and check their smartphones for information? In a recent Accenture study on patient views, the highest need a patient has (53% of those surveyed) supports the notion for more education to better understand their medications. Lack of education frames a new start fraught with uncertainty and patients are left having to take a leap of faith regarding doctor’s orders that fades over time. So many of us start with the notion that health education is a rational process, whereas nothing could be more heartfelt than one’s health.
At the other end of the patient experience, we find that massive $300 billion cliff that is the impact on the entire healthcare industry due to non-adherence can barely be budged in a direction that truly makes a dent with solutions that make a difference. After all, profits aside, long-term patient compliance and persistence are key for the patient to realize better health through their prescribed medications. Despite a myriad of new patient support platforms being invested in and launching, the answer is clearly not technology alone. While pharma brands understand that retaining a patient and delivering a positive ROI is important, the approaches to date fall short of having the impact needed.
Something is missing.
Both of these challenges share one loud, common patient insight: many people (yes, people, not patients) do not feel listened to or heard. Anyone (including those reading this article) on the journey of a new start or switch knows it is fraught with more questions and doubts than confidence in their new medication. It is well-known that lack of education creates a lack of confidence. Lack of confidence allows all the usual emotional suspects to creep in: fear, anxiety, sick of feeling sick, believing you do not need the medication. So many reasons, but again, with the proper bundling of the humanity of content and the backbone of smart technology, a new opportunity arrives.
“Listening” has become the fulcrum definer of Social intelligence. But this is too limiting. While these insights are valuable, as an industry we need advanced technology platforms to incorporate those and other insights because patient support is now in the multi-channel, nuanced relationship between pharma brands and customers. Now is the time to broaden “listening” to what it really is. At its core, the most effective impact is the act of providing empathy. Human-to-human.
Pharma brands can achieve a positive impact and ROI through the right adherence programs. Marketing investments include needing to find viable and valuable patients. The increasing and growing “noise” has moved to put technology at the center of the solution. But technology alone is not enough. We are in an age where customers have higher expectations from their brand relationships and brand experience is critical to longer-term loyalty. Being clear about who you are and what you believe in, driving personalized attention, making a consumer feel cared for, listened to, and heard is paramount to success. Pharma brands must break through that final frontier of emotion with patients. The time has come to marry that great technology platform with the human connection through empathy. Content tone and manner is a brand’s best chance to project some true human listening and empathy, because the meaningful result is as important as the actual product information itself.
The opportunity now — and looking to the future, is care collaboration as an industry to understand the human need combined in perfect harmony with tech-driven support to provide multi-dimensional information for patients.
The Cost to Patient Outcomes of Neglecting Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share other people’s feelings. According to the analytical literature review on the concept of empathy previously referenced, it is a core concept of behavioral and person-centered approaches and facilitates the development of a therapeutic relationship. What this tells us is that establishing human rapport builds relationships that can trigger lasting change. While many studies have been done on using empathy to strengthen doctor/patient relationship, pharma has shied away from using it as a communications strategy.
A foundation of empathy is a business-building strategy. Grounded in a foundation of empathy, building long-term relationships with patients will support them in feeling more confident in their medication management. Educational tools are one way to support them as they navigate their health issues. Unfortunately, patients don’t always know where to find those tools. According to a recent survey, pharma companies spend more than $5 billion on patient support programs every year but realize only 3% of patients using them. Are these programs relevant to the patient’s needs and emotional space at critical points of their healthcare journey?
Inserting Humanity into Pharma Marketing
Personalized human support for patients who are feeling overwhelmed or confused about how to manage their medication journey will rely on creating meaningful connections. Driven by the needs of each individual patient, a multi-channel program that integrates both human connections and digital support tools can optimize the patient experience and ultimately drive better activation, adherence and health outcomes.
Digital health is a large and growing field that is based on a simple concept: using technology to help people improve their health and well-being. By uniting human advocates with digital tools and employing a network that reaches across the nation’s community pharmacies, providers and patients can work together to reduce the amount of drop-off and improve first-fill prescriptions.
Establishing a foundation of empathy is a business-building strategy for pharma marketers.
They can do this by integrating a unique blend of human counseling paired with digital communication. As an industry, we can move from putting the burden on the patient to self-manage often overwhelming therapeutic instruction to being that facilitator that holds the hand and guides the patient.
As humans, we all thrive when shown empathy for what we are going through. Let’s make a return to reaching out and showing care in our uniquely human way. As someone who understands the importance of demonstrating human emotion, Meryl Streep once said, “The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” Let’s apply it in a way that benefits all patients. After all, we are all patients.
About the Author
Michael Oleksiw is the CEO of Pleio and developer of the GoodStart patient support program, which focuses on solving the $300 billion adherence problem impacting today’s healthcare system. Michael has been a leader in technology development and product data on a global scale for over 20 years. As an innovator, he has identified unique needs and developed products to solve specific business and societal problems. Pleio is at the intersection of people, data and technology, and works in partnership with pharmacies reaching across 20% of stores across the U.S.
About Pleio, Inc.
Pleio, Inc. is a personalized patient support platform that strives to solve the $300 billion adherence problem impacting healthcare today. Founded in 2011, the company offers a unique hybrid human-digital engagement solution to support medication management for patients. Pleio’s network of pharmacy partners extends the care of the pharmacy team by connecting patients with the support they need to navigate through the complexities of chronic condition medications. Through a proprietary LIFT®, technology approach, Pleio brings science into the art of human engagement utilizing behavioral data science to deliver a personalized patient journey. Pleio is fully HIPAA and TCPA compliant.
