Before probing the details surrounding patient engagement solutions, it is extremely important to understand and define what patient engagement is and why it holds so much importance to healthcare providers as well as the healthcare sector in general.
Patient engagement is a term often used to describe a patient’s participation in the healthcare services they use. It can also be considered a partnership between a patient and a healthcare services provider wherein it opens the door to discussion between the two parties. It also aims at providing a complete overview of a health condition, thus opening the door to further discussion. The term “patient engagement” is applicable to any patient and any healthcare setting, including inpatient care, emergency room visits, retail clinics, and outpatient care settings like doctors’ offices, outpatient imaging centers, and more.
There exist multiple entry points to the patient experience. Some of these entry points are as follows:
- Scheduling
- Registration
- Check-in
- Appointments
- Post-visit feedback
- Billing
- Patient recalls
- Patient education
Is patient engagement worth digitizing?
The answer is yes. The simple logic behind this is that digitization is able to help healthcare providers to automate their communication with patients and in turn, makes it easy for patients to access their healthcare providers at times of need. It is also worth mentioning that the healthcare industry is flooded with massive amounts of data, with more and more data being created every second. Digitization helps with the storage and management of valuable patient information which serves as the foundation to patient engagement. All this data is transmitted dynamically to the healthcare service providers, allowing them to detect the early signs of change in their patients’ physical condition and overall wellbeing. Personalized care is one of the most important aspects of patient engagement, and incorporation of patient data and marketing technology can allow healthcare providers to formulate personalized engagement plans. In total, digital patient engagement simplifies the healthcare process for the patients and brings substantial benefits to the practice from the business point of view. It is a win-win for all.
What are patient engagement solutions?
Patient engagement solutions can be considered a platform or a tool that enables patients to get access to their health condition data via digital medium. The patients are able to communicate with their care providers using electronic devices such as smartphones or laptops, thanks to which, a patient need not wait on call or visit the clinic to make an appointment or know about their health status.
Patient engagement solutions are rapidly gaining momentum as they have become a vital aspect of medical care and are a very important segment of the people-centric approach the insurance services have adopted. These patient engagement solutions are very responsive and transparent, and this approach is forecasted to aid the growth of the healthcare industry in the coming years.
Basic features of patient engagement solutions:
- Online registration of new patients and management of patient history
- Hassle-free scheduling and rescheduling of appointments
- Automated appointment reminders to patients via text or voice message
- Digitized bill generation and online payment facilitation
- Customized content for patient education
Types of patient engagement solutions:
- Off-the-shelf:
There exist a whole array of patient engagement solutions that are readily available to the healthcare service providers. Health centers now have the liberty to choose from a wide variety of features and pricing models. These solutions are offered to the practices on a predefined and monthly subscription basis. These patient engagement solutions are the fastest options and best suited to individual practitioners or the kinds of practices that small in size and have limited funds because requires significantly low initial investments. There is no ownership of the product and no requirement to procure any additional technology as it typically runs on cloud. - CMS-based:
CMS-based patient engagement solutions are custom developed using pre-existing content management platforms, like Wix and WordPress. Platforms such as these, allow for building most of the basic functionality that a patient experience solutions could require, which includes patient registration, patient-provider communications, appointment scheduling and rescheduling, patient education etc. These patient engagement solutions are best suited to those practices that are looking for quick solutions without having to overpay and have no immediate plans of expansion as scaling CMS-based solutions can be quite difficult. - Custom built:
These patient engagement solutions are uniquely built specifically for the purpose of fulfilling the needs of and catering to the internal processes of one particular practice. The practice has the full ownership of the final product and the support team helps the practice further customize and add in the relevant changes and features as and when necessary. Unlike the other two kinds of solutions, this one is built completely from scratch and are best suited to practices that provide a diverse set of services. Practices that can afford to pull of a significant initial investment and plan on eventual expansion also benefit from this type of patient engagement solutions.
Benefits of having a patient engagement solutions:
- Minimizes patient no-shows at appointments with assistance from appointment reminders and effortless rescheduling
- Allowing for patients to fill in post-appointment surveys provides the doctors with valuable feedback and also get the chance to go through the surveys and adapt to individual patients’ requirements.
- Patient involvement in the decision-making process helps improve patient compliance and loyalty.
- Helps enhance the channel of communication between patients and their healthcare providers.
- Patient engagement solutions also help attract new patients through marketing campaigns.
Patient engagement solutions give the patients the power to have a better knowledge and control over their own health as well as the care they receive. Giving this power to the patient while making them accountable for their own health helps them get actively involved in their health and decide the healthcare approach on their own. This significantly decreases the provider responsibility and makes it easier for them to curate better healthcare decisions for the patient and thereby improving the patient-provider relationship which eventually leads to better health outcomes.
