For people to get the health services they need, customer journeys must be simple and easy to navigate. If even one step along the way is frustrating, confusing, or too expensive, patients will end their journey. Unfortunately, this outcome is all too common.
According to McKinsey, customers are only 41 to 60% satisfied when filling their own prescriptions. The reasons for this can be complex and may span multiple channels or even organizations. Issues can include high perceived costs, fear of side effects, pharmacies that don’t accept insurance, or simply taking too long to check whether a medication is covered.
Figuring out what’s wrong with an incomplete healthcare customer journey requires a thorough experience checkup. This may require examining data from both digital and in-person channels, accurately mapping customer journeys, and correlating experiences with outcomes. For many healthcare organizations, this is a tall order. Data may be scattered across multiple platforms, and existing reports may not be designed to analyze journeys across channels.
To help legacy healthcare organizations better understand customer journeys and bottlenecks that hinder or delay the delivery of effective customer experiences, we are introducing Customer Journey Analytics to Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare. With Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, healthcare organizations can quickly identify how and where journeys break down — and make changes that benefit all customers, including patients, plan members, administrators, and providers themselves.
The healthcare patient journey today.
The healthcare patient journey is being reshaped by the pervasive influence of technology on how individuals seek and receive care. Understanding these shifts is paramount for healthcare organizations aiming to deliver relevant and effective services.
Individuals are transitioning from passive recipients of medical attention to active "healthcare consumers". This transformation is primarily fueled by their experiences in other sectors, such as retail and finance, where seamless, personalized, and convenient interactions are the norm. Consequently, these consumers now bring similar expectations to their healthcare interactions, demanding greater convenience, personalization, transparency in costs and processes, and more control over their healthcare patient journey. The 2023 and 2024 McKinsey Consumer Health Insights Surveys confirm that US consumers are increasingly proactive in their healthcare decisions and actively seek engagement from healthcare organizations.
Why a seamless digital journey matters.
The digital customer journey in healthcare encompasses all patient interactions with a healthcare organization through digital channels. This includes initial online research for symptoms or providers, digital appointment scheduling, telehealth consultations, engagement with patient portals for accessing records or communicating with clinicians, and ongoing digital communications such as email or SMS reminders.
The digital customer journey is not merely a parallel track to traditional care — it is increasingly intertwined with, and in many cases, replacing in-person interactions. A failure in the digital realm can derail the entire patient journey. The example of a medical practice losing patients after launching a poorly designed online patient portal vividly illustrates how a negative digital experience can directly lead to patient attrition, even when the intention was to improve service. This underscores that digital engagement is not an optional add-on but an integral component of modern healthcare delivery. Furthermore, the success of digital transformation initiatives hinges on user adoption, which is directly correlated with the quality of the digital healthcare experience.
Healthcare customer journey challenges.
Healthcare companies know when customer and care journeys are falling short. Customers may fail to return phone calls, renew their health insurance, miss key follow-up appointments, fail to fill prescriptions, or neglect to submit insurance claims correctly. But the fault isn’t only with the customer.
Too often, healthcare and life sciences companies don’t have a clear understanding of how customers interact with their communications and experiences in the real world. For example, consider a medical practice that loses patients after launching an online patient portal. Without a deep analysis, they may simply conclude that patients in their region don’t like to interact online, and they’ll scrap their new digital offerings.
But taking a closer look might uncover the following issues:
- Patients must supply copious documentation to get a user ID.
- The login process includes a cumbersome multifactor authentication, which requires installation of a new third-party app.
- Online appointment schedules aren’t up to date, so patients who book appointments commonly receive cancellation notices later.
- Patients with questions that the portal can’t address can’t reach the practice by phone because they reduced front desk coverage after launching the portal.
Using data to map the customer journey may show that patients drop out after installing the app but before receiving a user ID. Organizations may notice a pattern of customers who call their local office while logged on to the portal, or they may discover something else altogether.
Still, without analyzing the customer journey, the medical practice will see only the “what” — patients leaving for competing medical groups — without the “why.”
Reveal patient care journeys with Customer Journey Analytics.
Customer Journey Analytics connects data from every customer touchpoint. This empowers healthcare payers and providers, as well as pharmaceutical and medical device companies, to explore customer journeys in real time. Gaining the insights they need to give their customers empathetic, relevant, and meaningful care experiences at scale is a critical component of personalization. For example, an insurance provider might take a deeper dive into why customers don’t make fully covered preventive care appointments or don’t utilize their drug benefits.
Deliver compassionate, personalized, and connected care.
Customer Journey Analytics helps healthcare organizations replace confusing, impersonal processes with smooth, intelligent, and personalized patient experiences. By tracking interactions across all channels, from the website to the clinic, Customer Journey Analytics identifies and removes obstacles to care.
Key applications include:
- Mapping cross-channel behavior: See how patients interact both online and in-person, such as when they decline a pharmacist consultation but later research drug information on your website.
- Finding and fixing bottlenecks: Uncover why patients get stuck, like discovering appointment reminders are being sent in the wrong language.
- Understanding progress triggers: Identify what moves patients forward, such as an insurer seeing that open enrollment reminders directly boost policy sales.
- Identifying hidden needs: Connect disparate data to find surprising insights, like linking rainy days to appointment cancellations, which suggests a need for transportation support.
Data siloes hinder access to care and patient information.
Access to care remains a significant hurdle, with patients encountering difficulties in scheduling appointments, enduring long wait times for care, and facing geographical barriers, particularly in rural or underserved communities. Underlying many of these issues are pervasive data silos and a lack of interoperability between different health IT systems. This means patient information is often scattered, leading to operational inefficiencies and an incomplete view of the patient's health status.
Optimize digital healthcare experiences with Customer Journey Analytics.
Customer Journey Analytics offers a significant leap beyond conventional analytics tools. While traditional methods may provide isolated data points, such as website traffic, call center volume, or appointment no-show rates, Customer Journey Analytics is engineered to connect data from every customer touchpoint, both online and offline. This creates a holistic, dynamic, and actionable view of everyone’s healthcare customer journey. The core value of Customer Journey Analytics in healthcare is its unique ability to weave these disparate data points into a coherent narrative of the patient's experience.
Instead of viewing a frustrating website interaction, a subsequent call to the contact center, and a missed appointment as separate events, Customer Journey Analytics reveals the causal links between them, providing profound insights into patient behavior and system performance. This connected view facilitates a shift from departmental optimization, where marketing focuses on campaigns and operations on call scripts in isolation, to a holistic optimization of the entire healthcare patient journey. This approach is far more impactful in driving meaningful improvements.
By bringing together this diverse information, Customer Journey Analytics facilitates the creation of a unified, dynamic patient profile, often in conjunction with solutions like Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform. This comprehensive mapping is critical because the healthcare patient journey is inherently omnichannel — many pivotal moments, such as consultations or diagnostic procedures, still occur in physical settings, even if the journey begins or continues online.
A few value adds of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics include:
1. Generative AI-powered conversational intelligence
Customer Journey Analytics integrates with Adobe GenStudio, which has fundamentally changed how users interact with data. This moves beyond dashboards and complex queries to a natural, conversational model.
- Value proposition: Democratization of data. Business users, marketers, and executives can now self-serve complex insights.
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How it works:
- Text-to-query: Users can ask plain-language questions directly in the Customer Journey Analytics interface, such as "Show me the top paths for customers who abandoned a cart after visiting our support page," and Adobe GenStudio translates this into a formal query and visualizes the result instantly.
- Intelligent captions and summaries: AI automatically generates narrative summaries and captions for charts and tables, explaining what the data shows, highlighting key takeaways, and identifying significant anomalies. This drastically reduces the time required to interpret results.
- Automated anomaly detection: The system proactively identifies unexpected spikes or dips in behavior, explains the contributing factors, and allows for immediate deep-dive analysis.
2. Proactive, predictive journey orchestration
While predictive capabilities existed before, they are now more sophisticated and tightly woven into Adobe Journey Optimizer for immediate action.
Value proposition: Anticipate and shape future customer behavior. The system moves from historical reporting to forward-looking guidance, prescribing the next best actions.
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How it works:
- Enhanced propensity scoring: Using GenStudio, Customer Journey Analytics can generate more nuanced scores for a broader range of outcomes (e.g., "propensity to convert on a mobile device" or "likelihood to respond to an SMS offer").
- AI-accelerated "what-if" scenarios: Analysts can more easily model the potential impact of different marketing actions, helping to prioritize campaigns and strategies with the highest likelihood of success.
- Real-time triggering: These predictive insights, such as a sudden drop in a customer's engagement score, can be used as real-time triggers to place that individual into a nurturing or retention-focused journey in Adobe Journey Optimizer.
3. Deeper integration and streamlined workflows
The connection between analysis and action is now more seamless, resulting in a fluid workflow that seamlessly transitions from insight to experience delivery.
- Value proposition: Increased organizational agility. The time from discovering an insight to launching a campaign or personalizing an experience is drastically reduced.
- How it works: Insights, audiences, and segments discovered in Customer Journey Analytics are instantly available across the Adobe Experience Cloud suite, including Adobe Target for A/B testing and personalization, and Adobe Journey Optimizer for cross-channel engagement. This unified workflow ensures that data-driven decisions can be implemented immediately.
Utilize integrations in Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem.
Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare is a comprehensive offering that enables healthcare providers to enhance patient care experiences while maintaining patient privacy at all times. In addition to Customer Journey Analytics, our comprehensive HIPAA-ready healthcare offering includes:
- Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform: Real-Time CDP connects customer data from all your channels into unified profiles that support the discovery of insights and the delivery of personalized experiences.
- Adobe Journey Optimizer: Journey Optimizer allows organizations to orchestrate and automate care journeys that span multiple channels.
Experience Cloud for Healthcare is designed to work for providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies, medical technology companies, and more.
Healthcare organizations have more on their plates than ever before, from staying ahead of the latest variants to addressing everyday health issues like insurance coverage and preventive care. And the faster they can complete their digital transformations, the more effective they will be. If your healthcare organization has high standards for patient and customer experiences but struggles with manual processes and disconnected customer journeys, Experience Cloud for Healthcare can help.
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