While the difficulties we’ve collectively faced as individuals, businesses, and a society in 2020 are impossible to ignore, this year and more specifically, the COVID-19 pandemic, has also ushered in some silver linings in how we approach communication technology and helping (as opposed to merely selling to) customers.

In particular, this pandemic has highlighted the universal need for easy, digital-based access to health care and education, and the importance of safety and security across both. Because of this, more companies are creating technology that hands the reins over to their customers to access information on their own terms.

In seeing this shift, we’ve identified seven major ways that businesses have used COVID-19 as a time to build a better customer experience model focused on autonomy. Scroll to find examples of how innovative organizations are using tech to make people healthier, safer, and more educated about the world today.

Self-service—addressing common …

In the wake of COVID-19, decade-long digital transformation roadmaps got compressed to just weeks, and for some, even days.

The impact on healthcare, for both obvious and less apparent reasons, was massive.

To better understand the effects of COVID-19 on businesses, Twilio surveyed 100 healthcare enterprise decision makers in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, Singapore, about how COVID-19 is impacting their digital engagement strategies.

The survey uncovered some powerful insights, including:

• The healthcare industry in general was the most affected by COVID-19—among the overwhelming majority of respondents who said coronavirus accelerated their digital strategy, it did so by six years on average;
• Purse strings loosened as organizations looked to quickly implement better digital communication strategies;
• Healthcare providers implemented a variety of new technologies to meet this unprecedented demand and change, including expanding telehealth opportunities, self-service, chat, and more.

Let’s explore further.

An accelerant unlike any other …

In the last 20 years, companies have transformed as they adapt to new customer engagement demands born out of the internet and growth of mobile.

The onset of COVID-19 and its impact on the entire world, though, led companies to shrink decade-long digital transformation roadmaps to just months—even weeks.

To better understand the effects of COVID-19 on businesses, Twilio surveyed more than 2,500 enterprise decision makers in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, and Singapore about how COVID-19 is impacting their digital engagement strategies.

The responses show that as companies reacted rapidly to ensure business continuity in the face of a global pandemic, three long-held myths about digital transformation were shattered:

1. Digital transformation requires lengthy advance planning;
2. Digital transformation takes a long time;
3. Massive barriers to evolution prevent change from happening.

Social distancing has given rise to a sudden expansion in digital customer engagement: 92 …

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, health services teams around the world are trying to serve patients and their families without putting their health at-risk with in-person visits. Telehealth is making care accessible for those recovering from and managing a symptomatic case of coronavirus, as well as those requiring healthcare services for other health issues.

In New York City, one of the areas hardest hit by the virus early on, major healthcare providers have adapted rapidly to meet patient demand while keeping patients and providers alike safe. These patient-centric trends, though, were underway long before COVID-19, and have effectively been accelerated by the “lightbulb moment” created by the novel coronavirus.

Twilio’s Global Head of Healthcare Services Susan Collins spoke with David Kerwar, Chief Product Officer and head of consumer digital innovation at the Mount Sinai health system—one of the largest health systems in New York—to discuss how …

COVID-19 has spurred rapid evolution within healthcare. Providers of all sizes have had to reimagine patient journeys and scale services unlike ever before, and the latest data shows the vast majority of patients—72 percent— have changed their healthcare habits due to the coronavirus.

For many providers, this unprecedented change has led them to treat patients a lot more like consumers.

Telehealth in particular is promoting ease, convenience, and speed that many patients will want to see continue even after the coronavirus is contained: McKinsey research found that 50 percent of US consumers 18-84 surveyed plan to continue using telehealth for physical and mental health post-COVID-19.

Learn how changing consumer and patient expectations are shaping the future of healthcare in this report.

Here are five critical ways healthcare providers are adapting to the new normal of patient engagement, triaging, and treatment.

Health screenings

To minimize the spread of the …

If you are a physician or manage a medical practice, sending SMS messages to patients carries a lot of upside. These forms of communication can minimize no-show appointments, improve interactions between provider and patients, and even provide more effective care/dosage instructions—all while saving your practice resources.

But healthcare SMS and text messaging is far from a turnkey process. Because the information contained in these messages could be considered protected health information (PHI), sending SMS messages needs to comply with the strict requirements outlined in HIPAA. In the event of a breach, PHI could be exposed, and your practice could face penalties and fines. Breaches can also damage patient trust in the practice or physician.

Let’s examine the potential benefits of adding SMS to your medical practice communications, how to do so in a manner that supports HIPAA compliance, and key considerations when choosing a HIPAA-eligible SMS provider.

How …

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the transformation of healthcare services to treat patients more like consumers.

For many providers, the sudden need for telehealth has been a lightbulb moment. Adapting to COVID-19 has seen the creation of solutions that meet pre-existing consumer expectations and preferences, and thus will outlast containment of the virus.

Get the ebook all about a consumer-centric model for healthcare delivery.

Here are three ways healthcare service providers are reimagining the patient journey during COVID-19 and beyond.

Scaling and automating appointment reminders

Traditionally, scheduling, confirming, and changing appointments has created operational overhead for providers—not to mention a poor experience for patients. In the US alone, missed appointments cost the healthcare system $150 billion a year.

There are two common ways to scale automated appointment reminders, either by phone or SMS:

• Conventional SMS appointment reminders are sent as one-way mass text messages that patients cannot act …

Twilio has teamed up with Oracle to equip healthcare providers and agencies with the real-time communication needed to understand and combat COVID-19.

Oracle collaborated with Twilio to power the SMS and email communications layer of its Therapeutic Learning System (TLS), which allows physicians and patients to record the effectiveness of promising COVID-19 drug therapies. TLS provides a way to study COVID-19 patient outcomes in aggregate, with the goal of helping researchers understand which drugs are most effective against COVID-19.

The collaboration between Oracle and Twilio connects physicians and patients receiving COVID-19 treatments from the safety of their own homes through the Therapeutic Learning System application running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Using Twilio’s communication APIs and Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle’s developer teams were able to prototype a solution in three days and launched this solution in twelve.

The embedded solution uses Twilio programmable messaging and email API to communicate …

There’s a famous saying about innovation:

“It’s not about improving the candle, but rather, building a light bulb.”

For decades, healthcare has talked about becoming consumer driven. Initiatives to that end, for the most part, have been incremental in nature: aka, building a better candle.

We’ve installed kiosks in our reception areas, put up billboards with live wait times, and provided apps and portals for limited self-service.

Improvements? Sure. But they don’t represent a shift to a truly consumer driven model—no lightbulb quite yet.

Meanwhile, time flies by, and in the US, the traditional approach has become unsustainable. At almost 20 percent of GDP, our costs are among the highest in the world. Despite that spend, outcomes are nowhere near the top of the class.

So, we hear a lot of talk about the pursuit of the triple aim of reducing costs, improving outcomes, and raising patient satisfaction (now, properly …