The term “crowdsourcing” is leeching in to our lexicon of management terms. One application of crowdsourcing that is most overlooked is one which hardly fits the definition. This type is not premeditated. It is the type where the “machine” is a means to an end, and it does not originate at the organization. In fact, the organization is the target of this type of crowdsourcing—Social-CRM.
Crowdsourcing, although rarely used in the context of healthcare, impacts healthcare significantly. Just because nobody talks about it does not make it go away.
Most definitions of crowdsourcing include the notion of a call going out to a group of individuals who are then gathered via the call to solve a complex problem, acting like a shared problem solving methodology, much like the theory of Law of Large Numbers.
The crowd is likely to have an upper limit in terms of the number of members. By default, traditional crowdsourcing is fashioned to work from the top down; it is outbound, a push model.
In healthcare, Social-CRM (S-CRM), which is how we most often see crowdsourcing at work, tends to work from the bottom up, it is patient-driven. There are no boundaries to the number of members; in fact, there can be thousands of members. Also atypical is the fact with S-CRM no single event or call to action drives the formation of the crowd. The crowd can have as many events as it has members (patients).
The unifying force around S-CRM is each patient’s perspective of a given healthcare provider. Patients can be knitted together by having felt wronged or put-off by an action, or service provided, or by one not provided by said organization. Many healthcare providers do not have their ears to the ground. They are perceived as not listening and as not having a means by which they can communicate with their S-CRM crowdsource. Not listening causes the membership of their crowdsource to grow, and to become even more steadfast in the individual missions of their members.
In traditional crowdsourcing, once the problem solving ends, the crowd no longer has a reason to exist, and it disbands. With S-CRM crowdsourcing, if nobody in the organization is listening, the problem which caused the crowd to source itself never seems to go away, and as a result neither does the crowd.
Every hospital has one or more S-CRM groups biting at its ankles, hurting its image, hurting the brand, causing patients to flee, and disrupting its business model. Even so, most organizations ignore the S-CRM crowd just like someone ignores their crazy Uncle Pete who disrupts every family gathering.
If your organization does not know where to look to find its crowdsource, try Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Linkedin. You can also find out what your crowd is doing by Googling the name of your organization and the word “complaints.” Your organization’s crowd naturally finds its center of gravity using these same social media tools.
At best most hospitals do little more than read what the crowd is saying about them. A scarce few react, but those reactions are all designed to try to put the toothpaste back into the tube.
The way to win at this game is to develop an outbound S-CRM campaign to try to get the crowd to follow you. This, coupled with an effective patient experience management program, has the ability to be more effective than all of your combined marketing efforts.