Why One of Healthcare’s Biggest Investments Isn’t Paying Off

In a recent survey of 300 healthcare leaders conducted by S&P Global’s 451 Research, 48 percent cited improving the patient experience as a top strategic priority over the next 12 to 18 months. Among C-level executives, the number rises to 53 percent. Patient experience now outranks digital transformation and cost reduction on the strategic agenda. 

But spending tells a different story. Organizations have invested heavily in patient portals and CRM platforms. What’s so interesting is that 83 percent say data quality issues are undermining those very investments. Eighty-four percent report that data mismatches contribute directly to lost revenue. Separately, nearly 90% of consumers who switched providers said the organization was simply hard to do business with, according to a national survey reported by the American Hospital Association.

The industry agrees on where it wants to go. So why isn’t the money already in motion getting it there?

What Organizations Already Know

The logic behind these investments makes sense. If patients want better experiences, give them better tools.

But the tools depend on the data underneath them. And 81 percent of providers and payers agree they can’t deliver personalized care or communications without complete and accurate consumer data. Seventy-two percent say inconsistent identity data creates friction that patients feel in every micro-moment of engagement. These are the organizations’ own assessments of what’s going wrong inside systems they’ve already built and paid for.

In other words, organizations are ranking patient experience as their top priority while simultaneously acknowledging that the data feeding their experience investments can’t be trusted. Which means they’re investing on top of a problem they haven’t fixed.

What Patients Are Actually Reporting

The 451 Research study also surveyed 1,047 U.S. consumers. Their responses confirm what the organizational data suggests, but from another point of view. 

• Eighty-one percent of patients say they’ve had to provide the same personal or medical information across different providers and departments. 
• Sixty-eight percent say it frequently feels like starting from scratch when they interact with a different part of their health system. 
• Fifty-five percent say they’ve delayed or avoided care altogether because they couldn’t easily schedule an appointment or find a provider.

Look closer at what patients say. Repeating information means the system didn’t carry their identity from one interaction to the next, and starting from scratch means the system treated them as a new person when they should know them. Each of these broke down when the system couldn’t reliably answer who this person was.

For example, a patient updates their insurance information through a portal, then shows up for an appointment the following week and gets handed a clipboard asking for the same details. The portal worked fine, but the system behind it didn’t connect the update to the right person.

Forty-eight percent of consumers reported finding incorrect or inconsistent information about themselves. Patients are telling us the data itself is wrong.

A Signal of What’s Coming

Seventy-two percent of consumers aged 18 to 34 reported difficulties using digital tools during their most recent healthcare experience. Among those 55 and older, only 30 percent said the same. Younger patients already expect every system to recognize them and remember their preferences. As they make up more of the patient population, their expectations become the standard.

When given a list of ten elements of the consumer experience, organizations identified four on average that are disrupted by inconsistent data. Meanwhile, interoperability and data integration rank near the bottom of the list of priorities, cited by only 28 percent of organizations. 

That ordering reveals something important about how the industry is thinking about this problem. Organizations are funding the layers patients can see while underinvesting in the layer that determines whether any of it truly works. Every portal and CRM workflow depends on knowing who the person is on the other end. When that foundation is unreliable, the tools built on top of it will keep underperforming no matter how much money goes into them.

The Question Every System Should Answer

The industry has correctly identified the battleground, and the money is already moving. But the 451 Research data suggests much of it is aimed at the wrong layer. Patient experience doesn’t improve by adding better tools on top of unreliable data. It improves when every system in the organization can answer a deceptively simple question about the person on the other end: who is this?