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Healthcare Consumer

Accelerating organizational performance and health outcomes through better patient engagement and experience
Health insurers have long recognized the importance of engaging members to improve the value of care. Yet efforts to date have rarely achieved the desired impact. The promise of member engagement throughout the care journey remains, however, and the underlying capabilities required to drive impact—especially data liquidity, advanced analytics, and digital solutions—are rapidly advancing. We help clients accelerate their organization performance and improve health outcomes.

What we do

Consumer attraction and retention

We help healthcare organizations spot unmet consumer needs and enable them to deliver better experiences at the right time and place with the right product, message, and value proposition that lead to improved attraction and retention.

Unrivaled stakeholder insights

We generate insights for stakeholders across the healthcare value chain—brokers, consumers, employers, and providers—to support improved business decision making and to develop a deeper understanding of healthcare stakeholders and how best to interact and engage with them.

Improved patient engagement

We help improve patient health outcomes and total cost-of-care delivery by empowering consumers across channels to make better decisions and manage their health through personalized, omnichannel engagement.

Seamless consumer experience

We support healthcare organizations in defining customer-experience vision, journey prioritization and redesign, and end-to-end delivery, resulting in enhanced consumer experience and outcomes , lower administrative costs, and improved medical costs, and we help identify digital and advanced analytics opportunities to improve consumer experience.

Our research

Consumer Health Index

Our forward-thinking, annual, proprietary research helps industry leaders understand and address the ongoing changes in how consumers engage in the healthcare ecosystem, with targeted deep dives each year for over a decade. The research provides information on the opinions, preferences, and behaviors 5,000+ consumers annually, as well as the environmental factors that influence their healthcare choices.

Featured capabilities

We invest heavily in developing ready-to-deploy proprietary tools, databases, and methods, including:

Comprehensive transformation diagnostic: Our holistic, integrated review of all key levers across an organization identifies the scale and focus of a customer-experience-transformation opportunity.

Consumer-journey predictive modeling: Our advanced analytics engine helps healthcare organizations understand and predict events and determine how best to engage consumers—for example, by identifying who is likely to retire and then building personalized recommendations based on needs.

Human-centered design: We use design thinking and develop personas (for example, through primary consumer research) to understand consumer needs, preferences, and experiences. We translate those insights into consumer journeys, test concepts with users, and rapidly bring them to market.

Examples of our work

Overhaul of the integrated-care-management strategy for a national payer

We helped a national payer increase its enrollment of customers requiring care management into the right programs to improve overall experience, outcomes, and return on investment. The payer more than doubled its ratios of certified-nurse-midwife staffing, resulting in between 2 and 5 percent savings in avoidable medical costs (up to 30 percent reduction of costs for specific events) and between 30 and 40 percent savings in care-management administrative costs through operational discipline and digitization (representing approximately 10 to 12 percent of total administrative spend).

Performance growth at a regional healthcare payer

We helped a regional payer achieve performance growth by transforming the customer experience across critical user journeys, resulting in an increase of between 15 and 25 percent in operating profit for the segment and 1.5- to 2.0-fold the return on investment in three years. This was a savings of approximately 5 percent in administrative costs for the individual segment during enrollment and an increase of between 4 and 8 percent in membership of the individual segment through churn reduction.

Featured experts

Jenny Cordina
Partner, Detroit
Improves healthcare clients’ performance across levers with a deep focus on delivering impact through consumerism in areas such...
Rohit Kumar
Partner, Chicago
Brings consumer and digital expertise to the healthcare industry across payers, providers, and health-services organizations to...
Julie Lowrie
Partner, Atlanta
Leads consumer growth topics with CMOs and heads of sales at consumer and healthcare companies

Featured insights

Article

Helping US healthcare stakeholders understand the human side of the COVID-19 crisis: McKinsey Consumer Healthcare Insights

– Healthcare stakeholders on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic must understand not only the disease itself, but also consumers’ questions, concerns, and behaviors. Our recent rapid-research effort in the US provides some early insights.
Article

Consumer decision making in healthcare: The role of information transparency
– When armed with transparent information, consumers are likely to make different decisions. These decisions include choosing a... different provider, often considering reputation, quality, and costs.
Article

COVID-19 vaccine: Are US consumers ready?
– While details of COVID-19 vaccine administration are still pending, healthcare stakeholders may want to consider their long-term... plans for consumer engagement in immunization. Here, we discuss the latest insights on US consumers’ reported acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination and considerations for healthcare leaders.
Article

Understanding the impact of unmet social needs on consumer health and healthcare
– Income, employment, education, food security, housing, transportation, safety, and social support are all factors that affect... health and well-being.
Survey

Physicians examine options in a post-COVID-19 era
– In McKinsey’s US COVID-19 Physician Survey, physicians indicated they are optimistic about a return to pre-COVID-19 volumes... but may shift their preferred sites of care and seek additional partnerships for financial support.
See more insights

How we help clients

Connect with our Healthcare Systems & Services Practice

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