Chief Experience Officers with Paul Balagot

First published on PharmaVOICE.
By: Paul Balagot, Chief Experience Officer

Utility as a Metric
In this position, you need one person dedicated and accountable to what I think of as the important metric of the user experience – utility. Utility is the metric that drives me daily; our clients live and die by it. I ask myself every day if we are helping our clients make the lives of patients and HCPs better and easier, and are patients and HCPs using and adopting our clients’ offerings because they realize they make their lives easier and better.

There is a lot of frustration when people interact with the healthcare system. I strive to remove that frustration. You do it by defining challenges clearly, using the right data to make informed decisions, and then using the right technology to maximize utility. Technology is pervasive when dealing with the healthcare system. Technology focus such as telehealth, mobile apps, wearables, and digital therapeutics, for example are coming about faster thanks to COVID-19.

You can’t ignore technology, but you can’t over-index on it either. You must consider human factors so great solutions get adopted. So once you understand what you need to do, then you ask how technology can be used to better the user experience. This role requires someone who understands healthcare technology and data analytics–and how rapidly all of this is evolving—and someone who has touched the target audiences daily.

The best CXOs are the ones who have “done their time” in other parts of the agency ecosystem—from the account management side, the digital strategy side—and understand how people interact with a brand. And you need someone who can speak the language of programmers and data scientists so that you can bring about the technology solutions, informed by insights, that result in real utility.

A Broad Set of Data Types
Many factors influence treatment decisions beyond patients and HCPs. CXOs need to understand and work with a much broader set of data types and variables that influence the brand. The narratives we build will be powered by more nuanced data science and machine learning which will better inform the next best action that should be taken.

The healthcare data engine is about to get larger, and we need to get our heads and hands around it now. The CXO will be the person most able to tease out insights coming from the growing “data swamp,” and make the data actionable so that it can be used to generate more value to HCPs and patients. It is classic “what is the problem we want to solve and the experience we want to create,” and “how can we use cutting-edge data and technology to solve it.” This is the essence of creating the best user experience.