Statistics show that >80% of the UK population engage in online shopping, an impressive number given Amazon et al only launched in the 1990s. The Badger uses Amazon, amongst others, because the ‘customer journey’ from choosing goods, payment, through to and including delivery, is straightforward, reliable, and provided with informative tracking information about the journey of the goods. This ‘customer journey’ is founded on solid, integrated IT, designed to engage and communicate with the customer throughout the whole process. Good, proactive, interaction with customers is a norm in today’s online world, which means that any public facing service that doesn’t have it sticks out like a sore thumb!
Last week the Badger visited a neighbour, a statistician long retired from the UK Civil Service, who’d recently had a fall in the street. Their wife invited the Badger round for coffee and a chat to lift her husband’s spirits. The coffee was good, the conversation lively, and her husband’s spirits were indeed lifted! Given their Civil Service career, government and the NHS inevitably came up in our conversation. At one point the Badger laughed when the statistician asserted that ‘All governments are somewhere on the incompetency spectrum’. They were forthright about the NHS too, saying ‘Unlike Amazon with its customers, the NHS doesn’t engage and communicate with patients on waiting lists at all’.
What triggered this remark is the fact that a NHS hospital consultant told them a year ago not only that they needed an operation, but also that its clinical priority meant it would happen within 2 to 3 months. After 3 months had elapsed with no communication from the hospital, the statistician called to enquire what was happening only to be told they were on the waiting list and would hear something soon. After another 3 months of no contact, they enquired again and got the same response. A year has now passed and there’s been no proactive communication from the hospital at all. Understandably, their trust in the NHS has almost completely evaporated. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that we decided during our conversation that government should get Amazon to implement proper, ‘customer journey’-like, 21st century ‘patient journey’ engagement, IT, and waiting list communication practices for the NHS. Radical, wacky? May be, but the status quo isn’t working. Not proactively communicating with patients who’ve been on waiting lists for months sticks out like a sore thumb as being behind the times and is plain wrong!
The IT for the online shopping ‘customer journey’ is well established, so surely its principles and mechanisms can be adapted to proactively keep patients informed during their ‘patient journey’? The government’s consulting about NHS changes but can it cut through NHS vested interests? It has to, because there’s a mountain of waiting list patients who’ve already lost confidence that this complex 20th century supertanker will ever be truly fit for the 21st century…
