There are other factors at play that mandate certain actions by healthcare organizations and businesses — and those requirements are evolving in complexity and geographic scope. HIPAA compliance, expanding privacy regulations, the deprecation of third-party tracking, tech company practices, and increasing consumer awareness should all inform your complete data strategy.
So the question is: how can you manage compliance with applicable laws while prioritizing trust and building strong patient relationships? Seeking a sustainable balance that aligns each side of this equation is of the utmost importance to remain competitive in a crowded healthcare market.
Let’s take a closer look at healthcare consent and preference management, why this strategy is the choice of leading healthcare teams, and how you can apply best practices to deliver outstanding experiences that build trust.
What are the main consent and user experience challenges in the healthcare industry?
The main challenges faced by the healthcare industry can be summarized in the following three areas.
1. Increased importance of data security and compliance
When thinking of regulatory compliance in the healthcare world, HIPAA is the first thing that comes to mind, and rightly so. With the penalties for HIPAA violations reaching nearly $2 million annual maximum, healthcare providers and insurance companies have a significant reason to ensure compliance.
Keeping up with HIPAA and US state privacy compliance in tandem is reason enough to ensure that compliance and security is a priority when collecting data. Apart from HIPAA violations, the US state privacy laws also have varying exemptions regarding personal information. For example, while CDPA, CPA, and UCPA exempt HIPAA-covered entities from complying with the state statutes entirely, others such as the CPRA and CTDPA exempt only health information currently covered by HIPAA.
2. Low rates of portal adoption by patients
Although the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rise in telemedicine and patients seeing the value in accessing health records digitally, more than half of US residents reported they have trouble accessing their information through patient portals. Lower rates of patient trust also factor in here, as patients are less likely to enter their data into an HCPs portal when they don’t fully trust how their information will be used or trust their doctor to utilize it effectively. 55% of people said that they’ve lost trust with their provider, with 80% reporting they are unlikely to return after such an experience.
Healthcare providers are incentivized to improve their portal experience and in turn patient trust as well. When patients get the information they need over digital systems, they spend less time in the hospital. This can save hospitals more than $10,000 per patient, per day, on average.
3. Huge volumes of data hampering its value and efficiency
The amount of data held by healthcare providers and medtech, pharma, and insurance companies keeps trending upwards. As the volume and complexity of patient data increases, it becomes tougher to define streamlined data workflows and subsequently automate processes efficiently.
With the cost of data storage also rising, healthcare organizations need to make sure they’re getting optimum value from the data they collect, which in turn will benefit their patients with efficient processes and quicker turnaround times; their administration with seamless automation reducing clunky manual inputs; and healthcare professionals with access to relevant data in an intuitive view, with defined pathways for next steps.
What consent and preference management looks like
In practice, consent and preference management always begins with consent. Your goal must be validly obtaining consent, consistently and compliantly activating it, providing patients and customers with a clear value exchange for their data and honoring consent removal if it is requested.
1. Obtain valid consent from data subjects (patients or customers)
- While the GDPR and US privacy laws don’t define consent in the exact same way, their definitions have some general similarities – consent is broadly defined as freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous
- This applies to healthcare providers getting consent from patients, and pharma or insurance companies getting consent from customers
- Some types of identifiers, particularly those defined as sensitive information, such as geolocation, and IP addresses and other demographic information, may require consent before collection is legally permitted
2. Maintain meticulous records of consent
- This includes timestamps and points of collection, as well as which privacy policy is in effect when the patient or consumer gave consent
- If a user removes their consent, it is your responsibility to apply that decision across your organization
- Maintaining these records will also be helpful to refer to when interacting with patients or in case of an audit, as all consent data is clearly defined
After fulfilling your baseline consent obligations, you can take steps to implement more advanced data strategies.
3. Employ a preference management program
For example, patients can use a preference management center to opt-in or out of communications, identify how they prefer to get in touch, signal what types of content they like to receive, and more
These data points can help a healthcare provider, pharmacy, or insurance provider strengthen its relationships with patients or customers by decreasing unwanted or unnecessary communications, demonstrating care, and enhancing the value exchange between them
A preference management program can also help pharma and insurance customers gain the most value from their interactions with their pharmacy or insurance provider, or medical device providers build trust with consumers regarding their use of data. Improving their user experience based on their inputs is the most direct avenue to build and strengthen trust with your customer base. And from their perspective, there will be fewer redundant forms to fill out, which will remove the feeling that their HCP/pharmacy/insurer doesn’t value their time.
Modern, data-enabled healthcare organizations must consider the value of consent and preference management and determine how best you can implement this strategy for your stakeholders. The following best practices will help you do just that.
Best practices for consent and preference management
The patchwork of privacy legislation is becoming increasingly complex. On top of that, consumers are demanding increased personalization from their HCPs, pharmacies, and insurance providers. Medical devices and wearables in healthcare are also more commonplace, leading to a huge influx of data. When seeking to address the dynamics at play within today’s healthcare industry, there are several ways to implement a consent and preference management program for your organization.
Below, you’ll find tested strategies within healthcare organizations that support strong compliance outcomes and delight patients and stakeholders with personalized attention.
Automated Compliance
A universal consent and preferences management solution allows organizations to improve consent compliance outcomes by removing the guesswork and potential for human error from the effort. It leverages automation to help your organization phase out manual processes — some of which may be entrenched in your current operation but ultimately present compliance risks.
Also, working with a configurable consent and preference center allows you to capture data using forms and procedures that adhere to global regulations. This will also help you stay on top of changing laws and requirements related to consent and privacy.
Enforcing consent downstream
Effectively enforcing consent is a turning point where you can start to derive significant value—and trust—from your relationships with data subjects. When there is a diverse range of departments leveraging user data, it is virtually impossible to enforce consent without operating from a single source of truth consent database.
Consent and preference centers for authenticated patients or reps operate from a unified database that streamlines consent activation, modification, and revocation across a healthcare organization. This way, you can sync consent across departments and systems that activate patient data while abiding by data privacy protocols.
This will allow healthcare professionals, pharmacies, and patients to have quick and intuitive access to relevant data when required, turning previously labored interactions into seamless, patient-friendly ones. On the medical device side, it can ensure that data collected by the devices is transferred to databases and systems that follow the proper consent rules in place, allowing for a more trusted, stress-free experience for the user.
Mature first-party data profiles
With third-party cookies going away in the near future, first-party data (provided directly by data subjects to an organization) is increasingly valuable.
Since healthcare organizations often control significant volumes of first-party data, the question isn’t how to obtain it but rather how to use it to maximum effect.
A healthcare organization implementing this approach must already be fluent in consent and preference management fundamentals. Developing user profiles based on first-party data is an advanced strategy that helps organizations take customer care and value to the next level.
This effort relies on standardized data centralization, synchronization, and activation.
For example, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and pharma providers can use patient profiles enabled by first-party data to provide useful information, such as:
- Patient support programs
- Motivational texts or emails
- Access to a mobile wallet containing insurance and payment information
- Prescription refill reminders
- Pre- and post-operative instructions
- Reminders about prescribed care plans
Medical device companies can use first-party data to share data insights and provide updates on newer tech to users and HCPs.
Benefits of OneTrust Consent and Preference Management
Implementing a comprehensive consent and preference management program in your organization carries many benefits. The primary advantages include cultivating productive, trusted stakeholder relationships and enhancing compliance outcomes. Additional secondary benefits support stronger marketing and communications results, higher-quality datasets, and detailed metrics.
Whether you're an HCP working with patients, a pharmaceutical or medical vendor advocating for your products, or insurance businesses providing consumer coverage, the benefits hold true.
Consider how your organization can build stakeholder trust and derive value via the four main benefits of consent and preference management.
Enhanced patient experiences
OneTrust Consent and Preferences enables you to deliver timely and relevant content to your patients, be it educational material, new products or services, or any upcoming offers. Using first-party data, you can build comprehensive patient profiles and link these to your centralized database, integrating this data across your ecosystem.
This ensures that consent and preference data is synchronous with new inputs and these rules are applied when building out relevant patient profiles.
Increased data transparency and control, quicker visit times, timely and relevant content, as well as intuitive data access are all patient benefits that are realized through consent and preference management.
HIPAA compliance
Patients’ personal health data is sensitive, and the safeguards around it need to be proportional to its sensitivity. HIPAA compliance entails appropriate security measures and access controls are in place around collected patient data. What is appropriate for a particular covered entity will depend on the nature of the covered entity's business, as well as the covered entity's size and resources. The Security Rule requires covered entities to maintain reasonable and appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards for protecting e-PHI (this is PHI in electronic form, which would likely necessarily be the case here).
With OneTrust, you can enable HIPAA-compliant data operations, with hosting rules relevant to the regulation, role-based access, and business associate agreements. Having data intake streams where compliance is baked into the process makes stakeholders’ lives much easier around HIPAA compliance, especially with penalties for non-compliance on the rise.
US State Privacy Law compliance
For organizations in the US healthcare sector, HIPAA compliance is just one part of the compliance puzzle. US state privacy compliance completes it. OneTrust can enable “Do Not Sell or Share” opt out requirements with pre-configured CMP templates, while also ensuring GPC compliance across web and mobile channels.
In the case of patient or customer data access requests, use a customized preference center embedded Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) form, integrated with dedicated workflows throughout marketing and business systems.
Medical trials & innovation
For clinical trials, finding the right patients is vital for success. Using OneTrust consent and preferences, target relevant patients based on trial criteria and develop long-term engagement plans based on user preferences to generate comprehensive insights.
This helps accelerate the R&D cycle, retain patients for future trials, and unlocks opportunities for new areas of research. With medical R&D costs at an all-time high, avoiding the bottleneck of finding and retaining relevant patients for trials takes a huge load off the process.
Building trust throughout the healthcare industry
The healthcare industry counts on a complex network of users, organizations, and businesses. Each plays a role in contributing to overall patient experiences. As a result, each is uniquely responsible for developing and maintaining productive, trusted relationships with its stakeholders.
Healthcare Providers (HCPs)
Studies indicate increasing patient demand for more accessible communication with providers and higher quality healthcare outcomes.
To make this happen, HCPs need to build trust by delivering experiences that strengthen patient relationships. Healthcare providers can transform patient services by using self-service portals for quicker problem resolution and getting patients to the right department faster with OneTrust. Using connected consent data, changes can be made quickly, improving patients’ access to care.
With portal usage data, healthcare providers can use this to surface critical usage insights to drive better efficiency and patient outcomes.
Pharmaceutical representatives
Competition between pharmaceutical businesses is steep. The global pharmaceutical market is worth approximately $1.42 trillion as of 2021 and counts on hundreds of players.
Pharmacies' relationships with their customers and patients are primarily based on the effectiveness of their pharma-patient programs. Use privacy-centric processes to deliver personalized experiences based on the customer’s preferred mode of communication to deliver information such as upcoming prescription pick-ups, new offerings or pharmacy features, or testing reminders around flu season through an automation platform. Delivering these at the desired frequency of the customer enhances their experience and strengthens the relationship between pharmacies and patients.
Generating a relevant stream of qualified patients for clinical trials is another common issue in the pharmaceutical industry. OneTrust enables you to collect first-party data in a centralized CMP and create effective profiles to target the best patients for clinical trials.
Medical device providers
Advanced medical device providers deal with lengthy sales cycles for their costly products —anywhere between eight to 12 months in typical cases.
It's up to medical device providers to build and nurture trust with HCPs over nearly a year's time, if not longer. Delivering consistent, personalized communications based on HCP-provided data can help build trust in a medical device's capacity to deliver enhanced patient outcomes.
Using OneTrust can:
- Simplify patient care programs
- Manage enrollment forms with e-signatures and a preference center
- Track patient consent and preference data across care programs
- Deliver timely communicaitons based on the patient’s use case
Health insurance companies
Due to the industry’s complexity, users need help from their health insurance providers to understand their plan benefits, receive speedy authorizations, and more.
Consumers are also calling for more control over their healthcare, and they need insurance providers to help them exercise this control by providing increased transparency. For example, 46% of consumers with health insurance coverage gained a better understanding of their coverage after the COVID-19 pandemic began.
An automated system can provide your consumers with a member portal with easy visibility into their data, coverage plans, and privacy policy information, while providing them with an intuitive avenue to change their coverage or other information when required.
OneTrust partners with healthcare organizations
OneTrust is leading the way for healthcare enterprises seeking to build and sustain trusted relationships with their stakeholders.
Want to learn more about how an effective consent and preference strategy can help your organization, patients, and end-users thrive?
Find out why OneTrust is the number one choice among healthcare organizations for consent and preference management. Request a demo for OneTrust Consent & Preference Management today.
