Southeast Asia’s vibrant health-tech landscape has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years, with countless providers developing and distributing innovative solutions to drive customer engagement. The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital healthcare, which supported the critical delivery of services and paved the way for today’s growing preference for virtual care for its convenience, easy access and improved efficiency.
As digital consultations become mainstream and more widely embraced and adopted, the digital customer experience (DCX) that healthcare providers offer has become critical to ensuring business success. Patients accessing digital health services expect them to be available, fast, and easy to use, which is why any issues with DCX can be incredibly damaging to revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation. Negative digital experiences, such as a healthcare provider’s website going down or their mobile app crashing in a time of need, can erode customer trust and loyalty.
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However, not every healthcare service has the right observability practices in place to measure and improve digital customer experience in a meaningful way.
Monitoring digital customer experience
Observability provides a connected, real-time view of all data from different sources in one place where teams can collaborate to troubleshoot and resolve problems faster, prevent issues from occurring, ensure operational efficiency, and produce high-quality software that promotes an optimal customer and user experience.
By offering app developers complete visibility, observability enables them to scale their systems based on how and where traffic is moving to, without compromising performance, cost, or the end-user experience. It creates a single source of truth based on real-time data, with enhanced system resilience and the ability to ensure peak demand performance. This naturally accelerates application modernisation and improves the user experience.
Meeting specific healthcare needs requires resilient technology to facilitate behavioural change through AI-enabled smart plans, consultations with medical experts, and connected devices. This is where the technology of observability plays a pivotal role. It enables organisations to measure how a system or app performs and identifies issues and errors based on external outputs (called telemetry data) and includes metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT).
The technology will also need to be able to scale quickly to meet the ever-growing needs in an uncertain environment. Indonesia-based healthcare company Halodoc faced an explosion of demand for its virtual health services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The secure health-tech platform, which connects millions of patients with licensed doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurance providers and labs in a single place through its mobile and web app, saw their transaction numbers double every day.
The Halodoc technology team needed to manage this increased system load while keeping their patient-focused approach and delivering the best possible customer experiences. They turned to New Relic to reinforce their uptime and platform reliability.
Creating greater visibility into end-user experiences
Halodoc was able to analyse data to see which parts of their systems were underutilised, allowing them to serve more customers with the same amount of infrastructure.
With end-to-end visibility via dashboards and distributed tracing, Halodoc tracked its performance against KPIs, while consolidating and optimising its infrastructure usage. Real-time and historical insights provided by New Relic allowed for the periodic analysis of past performance, load, and throughput to understand current and future capacity needs. The Halodoc team was able to reduce the mean time to acknowledge, the mean time to respond to production issues and the kept mean time to resolution to a minimum.
The positive impact on user experience and service availability helped Halodoc deliver life-saving health technology to support their 20 million plus monthly active users, as well as improve app performance by 40% over the course of the pandemic.
As health service providers like Halodoc continue to innovate and better serve the diverse and complex patient communities in the region, they will create vast data volumes that will need to be processed seamlessly. Consequently, it will be critical for the industry to invest in the right tech infrastructure to support these burgeoning needs and deliver reliable DCX that has come to be expected by tech-savvy consumers.
Engineering teams can no longer limit themselves to just building and managing their component of the tech stack, and now bear responsibility for how their work impacts customers and the broader business. Monitoring digital customer experience helps development and operations teams find and solve problems no matter where they are located and ensures that patient communities are served and have access to the best medical care possible.
This article titled “Forging seamless digital customer experiences in Asia’s healthcare industry with observability” was contributed by Genevieve Goh, Director, ASEAN, New Relic
About the author
Genevieve Goh is Director, Enterprise Sales at New Relic. She has more than 19 years experience working with clients in a variety of industries. Prior to New Relic, Genevieve led Asian teams in the Go-To-Market landscape for leading multi-national corporations including EMC, Pure Storage and NetApp.