Out-of-date and siloed patient engagement tools are holding back the transformation of many healthcare provider’s systems, limiting the potential for future growth. Many don’t realize that their patient engagement solutions are falling short, and they are yet to reap the benefits of providing a continuous digital care journey.
What’s the problem? Humans are still needed to take action upon routine information collected digitally from the patient. For example, when you provide a digital patient registration form before a visit and the patient returns their responses – what happens next?
- Does the information sit in a queue waiting for a registration specialist to key into the system, or does it get written directly back into the source system?
- Based on the responses, can the system determine what should happen next and start acting upon it?
- And what happens if the information is still missing or outdated? Does it keep reminding the patient to fill it out?
Typically, someone is manually tracking, actioning, and chasing the patient for details right up until the provider sees the patient. This view of patient engagement is limited, inefficient, and far from transformative.
What to look for in a digital patient engagement system
When assessing patient engagement solutions, think about the complete workflow. You want to provide the best patient experience directly to your patients and free up staff time dealing with paperwork, data entry, and tasks. This can help both administrative and clinical staff manage care virtually.
To get ahead of the game, look for systems that can:
- Improve the convenience of care access through digital appointments and rescheduling, follow-ups, and recalls. Send communications when it’s the right time and directly to mobile devices, without logging into an application, keeping the patient connected.
- Expand patient engagement beyond reminders and rescheduling to include secure information gathering of data identified as missing or outdated from the record before the visit (e.g., insurance collection, privacy, and consent forms), reducing the time and costs associated with retrospective data collection.
- Pre-empt patient needs and guide them through timely and relevant communications (directions, instructions, educational links, etc.) based on visit type or population, simplifying the interaction and reducing delays.
- Provide real-time status of where the patient is in the process and proactively close gaps that may exist in information or care. Requesting data from the relevant places and allocating tasks to be completed when needed, keeping the care journey on track.
- Integrate both at the data and user interface level with your EHR and other systems to create seamless provider workflows and patient experiences, improving usability and satisfaction for care teams and patients.
- Flex and adapt to the organization’s needs by leveraging and maximizing existing technology investments and best-practice workflows as the foundation of digital automation, reducing redundant solutions and effort.
- Scale to simultaneously and automatically provide a quality, personalized, adaptive experience to hundreds of thousands of patients across your population – without your care teams having to lift a finger, providing consistent, high-quality care while relieving staff burden.
Rethinking how you approach digital patient engagement is crucial for digital transformation. By starting holistically with your end-to-end operations, digital automation can transform your systems to provide consumer-friendly, efficient, and consistent experiences all at once. This should be a top priority for every healthcare system.