Optimizing an A+ customer experience
Every year, Eurocross offers assistance to over 40.000 Dutch patients with medical issues abroad. Setting up a digital patient portal to support Eurocross’ services, provides patients a way to stay up-to-date about the status of their case file. By digitising the process, we optimised the customer experience by reducing 25% of the time spent and stress caused by it. How? The application allows more transparent and faster operations, by creating a single source of truth and mitigating the communication overload.
Empathizing with ex-patients
So how do you improve a service that is already highly valued by its users? Well, first of all, you have to listen to them to figure out what you can do. So we started off with in-depth interviews with people who dealt with a medical emergency while abroad in the last six months. The insights were transformed into a customer journey map, including the most important pains, gains and activities.
The main problem voiced by patients was that they were experiencing communication overload due to the sheer amount of phone calls with different parties. Furthermore, a lack of transparency and overview caused patients to feel insecure. The vast majority of patients never needed medical help abroad before and therefore didn’t know what to expect. Eurocross does a good job in offering them reassurance in the first place. However, since communication takes place over the phone it’s easy for patients to lose track of the process. Understandably, this leads to insecurity, confusion and ultimately even more phone calls.
These key insights were the starting point of the design of a digital patient portal aimed at supporting the service provided by Eurocross.
The design of a digital patient portal
We created a digital application that helps patients to stay up to date about the progress of their casefile at Eurocross. The application aims to make the process more transparent and less confusing by creating a single source of truth. Furthermore, it serves to decrease the number of unnecessary phone calls and mitigate the communication overload experienced by patients.
A single source of truth
Assistance coördinators from Eurocross can send messages to the digital casefile of patients. This way, the communication between Eurocross and the patient is logged, creating a single source of truth. Moreover, patients can be asked to send certain information using specific message templates. Patients can for example communicate the date they were discharged from the hospital, saving them a pointless phone call.
A digital yet personal experience
Throughout the design of the platform, the need for personal contact with Eurocross has been taken into account. One of the key requirements was that phone calls should never be discouraged by the application. Therefore, contact information for Eurocross is always within reach of the user. Furthermore, the message templates are editable, allowing assistance coördinators to add a personal touch to the messages they send.
Complete transparency
We increased the transparency of the medical casefile by displaying the actions Eurocross is currently undertaking and the ones they have already fulfilled. The information is triggered automatically by certain actions conducted by assistance coördinators in the back-end system of Eurocross. By doing so, patients always know what is going on in the background while assistance coördinators don’t have to spend extra time updating them.
An optimal experience for every device
Throughout the design process, all types of devices have been taken into account to ensure an optimal experience for every user. Therefore, the patient portal is developed as a progressive web app by our development partner 7Lab.
Measuring impact
After several months of development, the digital patient portal was released at the beginning of 2021. The launch was postponed several times because people were not allowed to travel due to Covid-restrictions. The impact of the tool is measured using various methods, like Google Analytics and customer satisfaction surveys. The goal is to continuously keep improving the tool with use of this feedback loop. Therefore, further development of the patient portal is planned to take place later this year.
