In almost all consumer segments, customers are increasingly looking to conduct business with companies online. So for instance, almost all travelers plan and book travel online. Readers buy books online, and increasingly download and read their books on digital devices like the iPad or Kindle. People shop for clothes and goods online. And so on. In short, more and more customer experience is going online.

There is one segment, though, that is conspicuously absent online… Healthcare. Think about it. When was the last time you interacted with your doctor’s office online, or a hospital, or your dentist, or your medical insurance company? If you’re like most people, your answer is probably, “Never, come to think of it.” Overwhelmingly, the business of healthcare has stayed offline, even as patients have been doing a growing share of the rest of their lives online.

Why? There are probably a couple of contributing factors. One factor may be that healthcare is often intensely personal, and as a result, less likely to go online. But then again, so is friendship and dating, and that’s pretty much gone online. Another factor is Healthcare Providers aren’t known for being rapid adopters of innovations beyond the core technology of their practice. In other words, Healthcare Providers tend to rigorously learn about innovations in their discipline of health practice, but are traditionalists in almost everything else. That includes how they interact with patients. But that was also true of travel agents, and we see where that got them.

Probably the main reason why Patient Experience has stayed offline was the unintended side consequence of HIPAA (the Health Insurance and Accountability Act Privacy and Security Rules). Simply put, this legislation defined both a patient’s legal right to have their information held strictly private, but also established significant penalties for any medical Provider or Payer that violated this right and allowed a Patient’s privacy to be breached. The level of potential penalties was so severe that Providers and Payers became almost paranoid about not letting any Patient information get out.

One of the easiest ways to do this was to stay completely offline. So that’s what happened. Providers and Payers didn’t offer any options for interacting with Patients online. As a result, Patients have been conditioned to not even think about interacting online with their healthcare Providers and Payers.

But none of this sets aside the HIPAA requirement to keep patient information confidential. So to make it possible to do “meaningful” things with Patients Online, Providers must get Patients to set up secure accounts, verifying their identity. And they have to get Patients to use robust authentication mechanisms.