The Power of Conversations: Reshaping Patient Stories in Healthcare

Stories are powerful. They provide context and humanize quantitative data, making it more relatable and meaningful. By weaving a narrative around conversation data, we can better comprehend the impact it can have on the patient experience — and begin to learn how we have power in that change by reshaping patient stories in healthcare.

Stories carry the power to drive unison and empathy, transform conversation data into action, spark critical discussions about strategy, and inspire positive change based on a deeper understanding of healthcare data.

Stories Inform Strategy

Knowing what “the normal” should be in your customer experience makes it easier to see outliers, which is essential for effective strategy. Understanding typical patterns and behaviors within a given context can help in identifying anomalies or unexpected deviations; e.g., why members aren’t using their benefits vs. not being able to navigate the online portal. This is particularly important for risk management and proactive decision-making, as it enables organizations to recognize and address potential issues before they escalate or worsen. 

Stories drive emotion, and emotion drives behavior, making storytelling a powerful tool for reshaping strategic initiatives. When organizations use compelling narratives to convey their messages, they can evoke strong emotional responses that can influence how leaders, stakeholders, and patients perceive their brand, products, or services. By tapping into emotions, storytelling can drive patient engagement, loyalty, and empowerment. 

Stories Are Needed

Stories humanize the quantitative data in your organization. By sharing patient experiences and illustrating the impact that healthcare has on their journeys, stories can inspire leaders in your industry to implement new practices, improve patient care, and drive positive change within the industry. 

Conversation data is often complex and diverse with perspectives — and that is a good thing. By providing context to the data, stories help create improved collaboration, communication, and better decision-making across the enterprise. 

There is immense potential to evoke emotions and reactions to drive meaningful actions. Teams can be motivated to provide improvements to care based directly on patient conversations, advocate for policy changes to bring more customer-centricity, or even develop new ways to access treatments or medication to improve patient outcomes. 

Stories Are Relatable

Stories help set the scene and contextualize the journey patients are on — from access barriers and medication shortages to plan changes and words of gratitude for helping them. By providing background and data insights in a more digestible way, leaders, organizations, and patients alike can better understand the significance and relevance of the data, leading to a more human-centered approach to their care. 

Beyond setting the scene, stories are representative. They help humanize your data, making it more relatable and memorable. As Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown explains, “You can’t unhear what you’ve already heard.” The same truth is applied to stories. By incorporating the actual voices of your customers to patient experience data, the narrative structure can help all stakeholders connect with the insights on a deeper, more emotional level. 

A well-structured data-backed story can guide the audience through the data, highlighting friction points, adherence or retention indicators, and even improvements already made. 

Stories Cast a Vision

Unexpected events can significantly alter the direction of how organizations lean into policies, initiatives, and best practices. A new disease outbreak, medical breakthrough, or supply chain issues can produce a lasting effect on the outcomes for patients. Adaptability and evolution are key elements to telling these stories with an anticipated vision. And a dynamic and responsive approach to addressing emerging or new challenges and opportunities is crucial for effectively communicating your organization’s vision for healthcare. 

Whether it’s a shift in patient care models, technological innovation, or changes in healthcare regulations, storytelling can convey the impact of these changes on your patients and communities. This can foster the understanding, empathy, and support behind the vision of your organization. 

While stories inherently have a limitation because they end, it is important to keep in mind that patient journeys do not end. By using stories to illustrate that healthcare is an ongoing journey rather than a finite destination, the need for sustained effort, continuous improvement, and perseverance is emphasized in your organization’s vision of ongoing innovation and adaptation. 

Four Steps for Effective Data Storytelling

Telling your patients’ stories can be difficult. Parsing through conversation data and listening to it at scale for themes of impact that effectively tell a part of your organization’s vision can make it hard to know where to start. That’s why we’ve identified four (4) essential steps for reshaping your customer insights with stories. 

1. Find the story: Explore the data to identify themes and bring light to the connection between the themes and your organization’s vision.   
2. Craft the story: Create the narrative with highlighted stories as examples that show relatability, credibility, and connection to patient experience. 
3. Deliver the story: Share insights and present feedback to ignite discussion around strategic actions for improvements for the care journey. 
4. Be accountable: Follow up with your leaders and check on the status of actions they have agreed to take or implement to bring positive outcomes for the patients. 

By bringing the voice of the customer to the forefront of healthcare, reshaping patient stories with data-backed storytelling produces the comprehension and direction necessary for action. And our annual Customer Voices in Healthcare report shares these themes alongside strategic AI initiatives for your organization to leverage and lead. So, stop waiting for the right moment to tell your patients’ stories – the time is now. 

About Authenticx

Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes. In 2023, Authenticx was ranked No. 349 on the Inc. 5000 recognized as one of America and Indiana’s fastest-growing private companies.

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