Overview

In 2020, RevSpring, a leading provider of healthcare and health plan engagement and payment solutions, sought to update their understanding of patient experiences and preferences. RevSpring enlisted The Harbinger Group (THG) to assist them in gaining these valuable insights. Our team at THG collaborated with research partner Keypoint Intelligence to conduct a comprehensive survey aimed at understanding the gaps, progress, and opportunities in patient engagement.

The Harbinger Group worked to help RevSpring deepen its understanding of patient expectations and preferences when it comes to healthcare engagement and payment experiences. By working with Keypoint Intelligence to gather data on factors such as convenience, transparency, and communication channels, our team provided RevSpring with actionable insights to guide its product innovation and strategy. Additionally, The Harbinger Group’s earned media experts recognized the value this original research could bring to healthcare journalists eager to write about industry best practices. Our team strategically leveraged this to secure media coverage that elevated RevSpring as an industry leader.

Our Strategy

Our strategy focused on examining patients’ expectations and preferences across various aspects of their healthcare journey, from appointment scheduling and pre-service estimates to receiving care and submitting payments. This enabled us to ensure we collected the most useful and relevant data for RevSpring.

In partnership with Keystone Intelligence, we created thoughtful survey questions for outreach to a diverse cross-section of 1,000 healthcare consumers in the United States, taking into account factors such as age and income. This approach allowed us to generate unbiased, third-party data that could be leveraged to identify newsworthy findings and share them with the market. Our targeted questions aimed to explore patients’ perspectives on their healthcare and payment experiences.

Specifically, the survey aimed to:

• Explore patients’ expectations for interactions like scheduling appointments, obtaining estimates, preparing for/receiving care, and submitting payments.
• Gain insight on the ways in which healthcare providers are communicating with their patients, and whether these practices align with patient preferences.
• Analyze patients’ channel preferences for communications.
• Evaluate consumers’ feelings about their healthcare and payment experiences.
• Evaluate consumers’ feelings about their healthcare and payment experiences.

Our Results

Instead of focusing solely on the obvious shift toward digital engagement, we looked at how many patients still prefer to receive paper billing statements in the mail. We found that patients still trust paper bills and statements. As such, we determined it should remain a key part of any provider’s engagement strategy. This insight emphasized the need for providers to maintain a balanced engagement strategy.

The survey also revealed that 87% of patients strongly desire providers to follow their communication preferences, and failing to do so can erode trust. Another key finding was that 56% of patients would consider switching providers due to poor billing experiences. Furthermore, we discovered the role of empathy in patient payments was highly valued. Over 70% of patients agreed they would pay sooner when presented with options that best fit their ability to pay.

Our media strategy for leveraging the results included developing a press release, media pitch, and white paper in partnership with Keypoint. The research findings garnered 15 pieces of coverage from media outlets, including Health Leaders, Becker’s Hospital Review, and Healthcare IT Today.

The team also drafted and placed contributed content from RevSpring thought leaders in media outlets such as Medical Economics and Healthcare Business Today. Through this media coverage, we successfully reached RevSpring’s target audience of providers and revenue cycle management decision-makers. In total, the PR efforts generated more than 40,000 views and reached an audience of 1.59 million.

RevSpring demonstrated thought leadership and its commitment to staying informed about patient trends and insights through this survey. The Harbinger Group’s team maintained a laser focus on our goal, avoided getting caught “in the weeds” of the survey data and forced ourselves to think like reporters who had seen dozens of media pitches with survey results. This project’s success underscores the importance of distilling survey findings into compelling, media-friendly materials that resonate with reporters and their readers.