Healthcare shifts from reactive to preventive care, placing patients at the centre of the system and empowering them to take more control over their own health. At the same time, the industry embraces digitalization, expanding the variety of communication points between doctors and patients. Thus, to provide quality support and care to their clients, healthcare providers need to find ways to engage with patients, educate them, and care for them via new channels.
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Luckily, there’s a vast array of patient engagement tools, as well as providers of medical software development services ready to implement them in line with your needs. Yet, healthcare organizations should clearly understand how the technology fits into their unique practice before starting the digitalization journey.
Why adopt patient engagement technology?
The key goal of patient engagement is involving patients in managing their health and providing them with diverse solutions to make informed decisions. Numerous studies show that today’s consumers are able to become more medically independent. On the downside, receiving information from unreliable sources, patients often misdiagnose themselves or take up dangerous treatment methods.
It is healthcare providers’ responsibility to support patients in their health management journey. This means engaging them in a dialog, offering a reliable source of health information reviewed by authorized professionals, providing data-based advice, and quickly taking over patients’ care when they are unable to handle the situation on their own.
However, many providers are reluctant to go for new software for fear of large investments and insufficient advantages. So where should you start in order to pay less and benefit more?
Make the most out of your existing digital environment
First and foremost, we recommend examining the solutions already available to you and see whether they can make a difference for your patient engagement strategies.
CRM data cleaning
Patients and their needs make the core of any healthcare facility, which makes an effective system for customer relationship management a necessity. Providers have already understood the significance of healthcare CRM for patient retention and acquisition. After all, according to MarketsandMarkets, the medical CRM market is to hit $17.4 billion by 2023.
Sadly, the quality of data in such systems tends to deteriorate with time. Erroneous and incomplete data in a hospital CRM can lead to faulty analytics and a subsequent drop in the service quality and patient churn. To prevent this, you should revise the CRM, detect bad data, and fix it by deleting irrelevant entries and filling the gaps. This is a time-consuming task, so you might need professional data quality assurance services.
Patient portal revamp
Apart from CRM, a patient portal is another promising health IT solution for improving patient engagement. In 2018, the overwhelming 90% of the US providers launched portals, yet, the patient portal use rate has been lingering at around 30% since then (MGMA), and most users are still occasional visitors who check lab results or schedule a consultation and hardly ever return.
So should you look for another digital solution to replace the conventional portal? We suggest revamping your existing solution to better match patients’ needs by integrating it with your other systems like EHR, CRM, laboratory management to give your patients easy access to their health history and a knowledge base to educate them on managing their condition.
Provide support of PGHD
In their 2019 Health and Healthcare survey, Gallup found out that about half of US adults (45%) have tried one or more wearable products, such as fitness trackers, which accumulate patient-generated health data (PGHD). The majority of users are content with how the tools impact their health.
Letting your patients upload PGHD to the portal can be an effective route to enhance their engagement. Besides, you can also extend your service offer with a professional analysis of the data for health improvement under supervision.
Introduce telehealth & RPM
In the times of the COVID-19 pandemic, access to qualified care without the risk of exposure was what patients needed the most, and telehealth technologies came to help with that. McKinsey & Company reports 76% of patients became interested in telehealth technology after the 2020. For providers, telemedicine is a way to extend the reach and deliver care to some remote or rural locations by creating a full-fledged virtual hospital.
It’s vital to remember that the solution's success and adoption extends beyond tasking your developers to create a secure video conference app. It requires some work on your part, too. Before deploying your telemedicine app, you should prepare a handbook for patients which clearly describes all the steps they should take to connect and make the most of an e-consultation.
While telemedicine solutions cater to all patients, there are some groups that are in need of 24/7 tracking of their health parameters. Remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools are designed exactly for this purpose.
In case of critical drops or spikes in the glucose levels, blood pressure, heart rate or other vital health parameters, smart RPM devices can alert assigned caregivers, the emergency line, and even family members. Providing full-scale RPM services requires a proper digital environment with integrated data-collecting devices and the EHR database, as well as some extra efforts to ensure healthcare data security.
Create a secure mobile app
While the majority of patients would simply like to take part in managing their condition, for those with chronic conditions it is a necessity. Mobile health apps are great solutions for patient condition monitoring. Start with secure, professionally supervised health app development and make sure to study your patients’ needs and preferences beforehand.
Additional measures should be taken to ensure the app’s security and user-friendliness to generate patient engagement and loyalty. For example, enable reminders about appointments, tests needed, and drug intake plans. You can also add post-discharge or post-visit follow-ups to help the patient keep track of their health and prevent potential relapses. These features will contribute to patient retention and loyalty building.
If your engagement toolset doesn’t involve all mentioned solutions, you can go for their consolidated version – a user-friendly patient engagement platform.
In conclusion
While patients want to have control over their health, they’d love to manage it without investing much effort, while providers want to connect to their patients on their own terms. This makes patient engagement digitalization a must in any healthcare organization.
Remember that adopting patient engagement technology is not a one-way effort. Clinicians should be there for patients to inform them about available solutions and assist them when needed. Otherwise, patient engagement tools are likely to fall short of reaching their ultimate goal.