When was the last time you talked to your friend? Your mother? Your old college roommate? Now think—did you actually talk to them? In person or on the phone?

If you’re like most Americans, you probably conversed with them via text, email or social media. In fact, a recent Gallup poll finds that texting and email are the most frequently used forms of non-personal communication for adult Americans. So is a cellphone, because even when we do use a phone, it’s typically not a landline, the survey reveals.

For all Americans under age 50, the survey finds that texting is the most dominant form of communication.

Given these changes in our own everyday interactions, why does the healthcare industry insist on sticking with old forms of communication?

Healthcare needs to embrace email and text as the preferred and most efficient patient-provider communication methods, just as we have accepted—and really, expected—email and text communication in our daily lives.

Will you succeed or die in digital America?

That is the question the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, “Digital America: A Tale of the Haves and Have-Mores”, poses to all sectors of the American economy.

Looking at it through the lens of American healthcare—to tease out a road map for the business of healthcare—the report provides a compelling argument for aggressive hospital digitalization with the following key points:

There are many solutions out there that engage patients at different times in the care journey. At UbiCare, we have always maintained that setting patient expectations earlier in the care episode is better to improve patient outcomes.

Research supports this, as well. In a Gallup study of pre-surgery patients who received education to set expectations, researchers found that going into surgery with a good idea of what’s coming afterwards had the biggest impact on patient satisfaction.

In 2011, the BirthPlace at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital–Plymouth (BID-Plymouth), in Massachusetts, was losing patients to other maternity units, and the hospital considered closing it. Instead, we decided to rebrand the BirthPlace and our outpatient OB/GYN and Midwifery practices with a focus on improving the patient experience.

We determined that we could impact patient experience best by working cross-functionally—aligning the marketing, clinical and IT teams—and implementing digital health tools that supported the new brand by improving patient-provider communication and increasing patient satisfaction.

We were right! Here’s how our hospital did it and what we learned.