According to Forrester Research’s customer experience index, even improving patient experience by one or two points can have an enormous impact on patient satisfaction and a health care organization’s bottom line. It’s the proverbial win-win.

Nick Vennaro, Capto co-founder, recently had a chance to attend and speak at the first Health IT Expo in New Orleans around negotiating the right supplier contracts and treating suppliers as partners for better outcomes.

Healthcare as a whole is finding new ways to use technology to improve population health and patient experience. Population health is looking for a spectrum of precision in patient and provider data as well as clinical cost metrics and matching that data to patient communication, metrics and clinical outcomes. Patient experience requires streamlining information that is both timely and personalized, which is hard to accomplish with monolithic systems.

Efforts to improve collaboration is a common driver of the recent healthcare mergers, say experts.

The industry will be changed less by mergers that try to combine different core competencies that are borne out of different cultures, than by partnerships that allow the different businesses to become even more focused on what they individually do best, says Sheila Talton, president and CEO of Gray Matter Analytics, a healthcare technology company.

In today’s world where consumers are continuously bombarded with marketing messages; delivering the right ones, in the right context, and at the right time is essential.

More than ever, marketing teams are expected to drive revenue growth and, in a maturing telecom industry, exceptional customer experience and timely, relevant messages that hit the mark. Frankly, this is where telecom, media, and entertainment (TME) firms will succeed or fail.

Meeting customers and patients “where they are” is already shaping up to be the healthcare consumer and patient experience mantra of 2018. Consumers are starting to demand it as their tolerance for slogging their way through the system of care decreases.

Consumerism has significant implications for understanding data analytics, including the need to better understand the healthcare customer before they ever become a patient.

A Forbes and Sitecore study found that organizations have an average of 35 data gathering points, but little to no integration. This kinds of breakage in marketing and IT systems breaks down the customer experience and costs companies revenue in lost opportunity.

My article in Chief Marketer offers five ways for marketing to get their internal martech house in order.

A customer-first, omnichannel experience is reigning supreme across industries. We’ve seen it hold traction for years in telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and oft discussed, but omnichannel has been more slowly applied to other areas, such as healthcare.

The most successful IT outsourcing decisions create truly innovative execution strategies that deliver meaningful business results. The outsourcing decision, however, frequently comes down to a cost-driven ROI calculation: how much will all this innovation cost us, and how long will it take to recover those costs? This is the wrong mindset and often the primary reason why IT outsourcing is generally underperforming.

Hospitals are not strangers to complexity. Here are clear steps to make sure your organization is ready for new regulations, new customers and new patient experiences that I recently published in Becker's Health IT and CIO Review.

Healthcare has seen a boom in sexy new “killer apps” that have drawn a lot of attention from payer organizations seeking to advance their health IT investment strategies. Many have opened innovation centers or spawned new sister organizations to evaluate, invest in, and market new innovations venture-capitalist style. This is all well and good but typically makes for better PR than ROI.

Disruption. Transformation. Talent shortage. These are all continuously moving factors impacting business strategies. If you are only asking “How are we doing against what we said we wanted to do?”, it’s likely your organization lacks the agility needed to address the fast-changing behaviors of your customer and the marketplace. If you’re only looking at the speedometer and not the horizon you risk driving significantly off course.

As healthcare providers prepare for the shift to value-based care, they may find the key to success lies within lessons learned from the past.

With the ACA repeal not clearing its first legislative hurdle, it appears that Obamacare will remain in effect for the foreseeable future. Payers and providers will need to continue to work together to implement new payment models that maximize performance for both parties under the ACA and MACRA frameworks.

Currently, ACO models promise to align payers and providers around the shared goals of keeping patients healthier and thus reducing the cost of care. In practice, however, creating the actual contracts that transform that theoretical alignment into mutually acceptable business commitments has been elusive. Two of the primary reasons for this have been organizations not understanding which types of alternative payment models will be the best fit for their organization, and not knowing how to structure payment contracts to maximize their immediate and strategic value to the organization.

Buy (don’t build) healthcare data insights to improve data investment ROI

Healthcare organizations have been investing heavily in big data analytics, software, hardware, staff, and services to get insights into quality and cost. These insights will be critical as healthcare facilities take on more and more risk in a value-based care model. About 40 percent of healthcare providers are expanding IT budgets, a recent IDC Health Insights report revealed. The report noted that analytics is the top reason for the increase.

Two of Capto’s centers of excellence – healthcare and TME (Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment) – at first would not seem to have much overlap, but our experience finds significant commonality in the business and technical issues faced by these industries. One area of similarity is the need for both healthcare and TME to develop an omnichannel approach to improve customer experience. In a December 2016 study by Chief Marketing Officer Council, 49% of marketers stated that alignment between physical and digital customer experiences is selective at best.

Capto CEO, Tracy Currie, was recently interviewed for Healthcare Finance Management Association's CFO Forum by Laura Ramos Hewer.

Given the many competing priorities in an organization, CFOs need to make sure they understand the "why" behind their IT investments. Read the HFMA CFO Forum article.

Consumerism in healthcare is not yet at tsunami-level force, but it clearly represents an imminent and undeniable disruption in healthcare’s traditional business models.

It is only natural that this trend is putting tremendous pressure on heads of marketing. It is also challenging CIOs to bring their expertise to bear, and to clearly articulate the role IT can play as healthcare organizations seek to transform the way they engage with their customers.