Amplitude Simplifies The Digital Experience For Complex Healthcare Organizations

Many firms struggle to deliver a personalized, relevant, and easy-to-use digital experience. This is especially true for organizations in the healthcare industry where the stakes related to customer data privacy and security are relatively higher than for most other industries. Patient expectations about user experiences with their healthcare service providers have changed, which means it is paramount for a provider to put forward the best digital experience it can provide. At the same time, trying to provide a better digital experience is nearly impossible without having any insights or visibility into a patient’s digital behavior. Having the right tool to provide this visibility while maintaining compliance obligations can result in: 1) increased adoption of digital products, 2) improved patient experiences and increased patient loyalty, and 3) decreased operational cost.

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that provides organizations with full visibility into patient journeys, which they can use to understand how their patients utilize and engage with their healthcare providers. In addition to improving visibility, organizations can then use the insights to build digital experiences that are valuable to patients, which results in both top-line revenue impacts and bottom-line operational efficiencies and cost savings.

Amplitude commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview four representatives of organizations with experience using the platform and conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with Amplitude.¹ This abstract will focus on the healthcare industry’s use of Amplitude and the platform’s value for organizations in the industry.

The interviewee for this spotlight is the director of product management at a healthcare organization.

Return on investment (ROI)

217%

Net present value (NPV)

$5.34M

Challenges for healthcare

The interviewee said their healthcare company adopted Amplitude to improve its digital analytics capabilities, and they cited several challenges the organization previously faced in its legacy environment, including:

• Inability to meet compliance obligations. The interviewee noted the unique challenges around data security and privacy in the healthcare industry. While their organization desired to have more visibility into this data to help inform patient experiences with both healthcare providers and the digital portals utilized by the system, it needed to proceed with caution. The interviewee stated: “In healthcare, there’s a lot of concern about protected health information. Any location portal where you go to log in and message your doctor securely, to schedule appointments, [or] to view your medical record is protected health information everywhere. We had to be very careful with any web-tracking technologies in terms of data collected.”
• Lack of analytics and visibility into patient data. The healthcare interviewee said that prior to using Amplitude, their organization did not have a single source of truth for enterprise data on patient journeys. This meant it did not know how its products or applications were being used. The organization was also unable to do comprehensive digital analytics to generate key insights or trends to determine the best courses of action for improving the digital patient experience. The director of product management said: “We were going to start the process of building an amazing patient portal experience, which was going to be a massive investment. Prior to [using] Amplitude, we didn’t have the analytics, so were essentially flying blind.”
• Low adoption of digital portals and poor patient experiences. The interviewee expressed that their organization had limited visibility into how people were using digital portals and interacting with healthcare providers. Continuing along the development process without digital analytics to support decision-making generated a tremendous amount of business risk in the form of dissatisfied patients that could result in terminated relationships. The interviewee told Forrester: “We had an industry study showing the majority of consumers [were] dissatisfied with their digital [experiences]. Half of them said they would switch providers to get that better experience.”

Reasons For Choosing Amplitude

The interviewee said their organization chose to invest in Amplitude for the following reasons:

• Capabilities. The organization was looking for a solution that could produce a higher-level user behavior analysis in terms of quality and depth.
• Time savings. The interviewee also highlighted Amplitude’s ability to generate insights at a faster pace than other tools they compared it against.
• Ease of adoption. The interviewee shared that their organization was looking for a tool with a self-service element to allow different people across the company to access the tool and extract the information or insights they need without a lot of training. The interviewee stated that their own team benefited from the ease of adoption and said, “No one on my team came in here with a deep web analytics background.”

Key RESULTS For Healthcare

The results of the investment for the interviewees' organizations include:

Revenue-impact benefits. The investment in Amplitude enables the interviewee’s organization to leverage patient insights to improve its digital product offerings and approach to patient care. As a result, the organization improves revenue by:

• Increasing digital portal adoption and retention. Having better quality data and more mature experimentation functionality allows the organization’s product team to influence product features and improvements that increase digital product adoption. The interviewee explained how better testing improved product decision-making: “With Amplitude, we were able to look at specific user segments, [conduct] an A/B test, and find that with the new feature we introduced, our new version performed 39% better than our old version.” 
  
  In this way, the product team has a higher likelihood of rolling out features and functionality that resonate with patients and, in some cases, this can lead to incremental profit improvements. The interviewee cited the following example: “With Amplitude, we looked at the amount of people who weren’t paying their bills [and found] that we had made bill pay a separate login. After making it easier to pay bills on our app, we [saw] 90% of new users coming through the application.”
• Increasing patient loyalty. Overall, the organization’s goal was to improve patient experiences because 89% of its consumers were dissatisfied with its digital product offerings and half of those consumers would switch healthcare providers because of that. Therefore, improving the digital experience for patients is tied to the overall patient experience, and enhancing those experiences reduces patient churn and the associated negative impact to revenue.  

Operational efficiency benefits. The interviewee at the healthcare organization said their company previously used lean data and analytics teams to leverage patient insights but that Amplitude enables improving patient experiences while creating operational efficiencies by:

• Decreasing overhead personnel costs. The interviewee said Amplitude impacts both their organization’s data and analytics teams and that both benefit from the platform’s seamlessly integrated experimentation product. The interviewee stated: “I’d expect that if we were using a separate vendor for experimentation, our tech cost for the experimentation software would be 50% to 100% more. Additionally, there are people costs and time savings when considering the time it takes to launch each test. I’d roughly estimate that we can test roughly twice as fast and get more insights with [Amplitude’s] natively integrated tools versus using two standalone tools.” Furthermore, the interviewee said any complexity in the testing would kill the initiative due to the team’s lack of both competency and capacity. They stated: “We could manually do simple tests. [But if we did] one complicated test, we would be dead in the water.”
• Creating an insights-driven business. The interviewee’s organization balanced driving operational efficiencies with creating more effective digital products by establishing an insights-driven business. The interviewee stated: “[Using] Amplitude is not about reducing or avoiding tech-stack spend. It’s more about having access to quantitative data in decision-making to ensure our team is working on the right things and measuring progress.”
  
  Additionally, despite having lean data and analytics teams, the company was able to democratize data and analytics across organization wide to broaden the influence to product design organically. The interviewee said, “We have democratized the analytics where all my product managers, analysts, engineers, and designers are using Amplitude [to do their work].”
  
   

Return on investment (ROI):

217%

Net present value (NPV):

$5.34M

Appendix A: Endnotes