Publicis Sapient converts better experience into improved health outcomes

US healthcare leaders need help addressing the triple aim of care (the cost of care, health outcomes, and experience of care) since, by many measures, progress has stalled or is in decline. HFS Research perspectives identify that the cost of care has been increasing up to 3x inflation for the last decade (not accounting for the current high inflation), life expectancy has regressed to the rate last seen in 1996—in 2019 it was 79, and now it is 76.1—and most consumers are dissatisfied with healthcare.

Publicis Sapient’s SPEED (strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data and AI) philosophy, combined with its focus on an ecosystem approach to serving health consumers’ (patients, customers, beneficiaries, and employees) needs, is already delivering improvements in experience and improving health outcomes. Since Publicis Sapient addresses the entire ecosystem from government services (research and public health), pharma, health insurance, and clinical delivery, the potential to impact health consumers is high.

Crafting pathways from experience to engagement delivers improved health outcomes

Publicis Sapient’s view of experience in healthcare is grounded in being predictive, integrated, personalized, and ubiquitous. Its journey map in Exhibit 1 encapsulates three stages of progression.

Exhibit 1: The experience of health is about delivering quality and value, and trust is the new currency

Source: Publicis Sapient, HFS Research, 2023

The opportunity to progress paradigms and translate them into improved outcomes will need to shift from the notion of experience (point-in-time transactions) to engagement (longitudinal relationships). The case for engagement is driven by the health consumers’ desire to be known, not just for a symptom, prescription, or diagnosis, but rather as a person holistically. The need to know the health consumer is key for all the health and care stakeholders to ensure the right support and service is rendered promptly and cost-effectively, both proactively and reactively.

Therefore, digital resources (communications, devices, data, AI, and more) will become particularly critical to driving effective engagement. The smart application of digital technologies to address critical challenges can positively affect the different parts of the healthcare ecosystem.

Purpose-driven digital business transformation can translate into better health outcomes

Publicis Sapient has partnered with a very large US health system with a global footprint to expand clinical care through digital means. Publicis Sapient developed platforms that connect clinicians, caregivers, administrators, and patients to improve engagement and health outcomes. This connectivity is across the value chain, leveraging content curation and delivery to connect clinicians with patients through scheduling tools and care delivery.

Through another specific set of solutions intersecting human interaction and digital tools, Publicis Sapient helped improve medication adherence by 43 percentage points and increased rehab attendance by more than 60 percentage points for patients recovering from cardiac arrests. Its approach to delivering digital empathy directly impacts health outcomes, a critical value proposition for the health system and its consumers.

Another story of improving outcomes is reflected in Publicis Sapient’s partnership with a global medtech and technology player to change colonoscopy. Instead of a traditional colonoscopy procedure that requires anesthesia in an outpatient setting, the alternative Publicis Sapient facilitated delivers an ingestible with a camera.

The consumer swallows the ingestible under clinical supervision and goes about their day. The ingested camera sends pictures to an app via a disposable patch the consumer wears. The gastroenterologist can review the images using proprietary AI-driven image analysis, which now takes four minutes versus the 45 minutes required for a traditional colonoscopy. The diagnostics are equal to or better than with the traditional method, and the experience is certainly better.

The Bottom Line: Leveraging digital capabilities to address health outcomes through experience and engagement delivers real value to health consumers.

Health plans and provider systems continue to struggle to engage health consumers, and their inconsistency with point-of-care experiences typically affects health outcomes. Health plans and providers must explore working with service providers that have proven their ability to address experiential and health outcomes attributes. Service providers participating across industries can bring their experiences from other industries to help design effective ways to improve engagement and drive better health outcomes. Reimagining healthcare and leveraging digital as a force for good in driving business outcomes and improving people’s lives must be the way forward.