Omnichannel Healthcare Consumerism: Are We Ready for the Future?

This paper summarizes the results of our interviews with healthcare leaders across the U.S. We asked questions about the omnichannel approach of consumerism within the context of healthcare services and how it has impacted the strategies implemented within their environments. We asked each contributor to answer five questions. The contributors’ roles are diverse: COO, construction leaders within the hospital, architects, engineers, equipment planning and technology experts, and professionals sharing knowledge on products or research regarding the viability of new solutions from furniture to AI to Robotics. All contributors work daily in the industry to develop strategies to deliver high-quality healthcare services more efficiently.

This paper aims to provide you, the reader, with information and, ideally, a clearer picture of the direction we may be headed in the future. To provide clarity, we will start by defining omnichannel consumerism.

Omnichannel is a strategy successfully deployed in a retail environment for many years as product was sold not only via brick-and-mortar stores but online. Think of Amazon. Just 15 years ago, the market share of retail online sales was just a small portion of all product sales. By 2019, online sales for retail exceeded the total in-store sales.

Today, it is clear that a large percentage of our population and the majority of millennials purchase more services online than they do in person. It makes sense that the expectation (by consumers) of securing healthcare services continues to be through multiple channels (choices of when, where, and how) when securing healthcare services. The minimum expectation is that each of us, as the consumer, is in control as to what service we want and need, when we want it, how we want our journey to go, how we want to interact with the physician or the nurse, or the pharmacist, etc. We want to leverage the power of technology – which could be telehealth, a smartwatch, our phone or other devices, or drive to our doctor’s office and be face to face.