Patients today want to have good experiences in healthcare. One of the most important ways to ensure that is by making patients have a say in their own healthcare choices. But in order to do that they need to be well informed about their own medical conditions. That’s why patient engagement is a positive cycle that improves the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Introduction

It is hard being a business at this time. With increasing competition and significantly lower barriers to entry than in the past, navigating the business environment can be hard. As a result of so many options to choose from, customers today also want more and better from each interaction.

For the healthcare industry, this has been the defining truth in the 21st century. For better or worse, today’s patients have plenty of options to choose from (at least theoretically). As a result, patients today want better experiences in their healthcare journey when they do choose a healthcare provider.

Improved patient experiences are not just important for acquiring and retaining patients as a medical business, but they have an impact on other key metrics like staff morale and even reimbursement rates. All in all, patient experience is not something that healthcare professionals should take lightly in any way.

But improving patient experiences can often be challenging for medical businesses. While it can be relatively easier to fix major issues that are causing a negative impact on experiences, it is much harder for most healthcare businesses to implement changes that have a positive impact on experiences.

That’s where patient engagement comes in.

Patient Engagement

Let’s first make it clear that patient engagement doesn’t refer to medical businesses simply communicating with patients to ensure that there are information gaps in the healthcare journey. That’s simply good communication. No, patient engagement refers to actively promoting patients to gather information about their own health and make informed decisions about their healthcare journeys. Patient engagement leads to better treatment outcomes as a result and is a patient-centric way of going about healthcare processes.

You can learn more about patient engagement in some of our other blogs.

Patient Engagement methods

With that out of the way, let’s get down to business. Saying that patient engagement is important is good but without giving any clear ways to improve patient engagement, it is not much help to medical businesses. It is for that reason that we have highlighted some of the patient engagement best practices that you can use in your medical business. These methods require minimal costs and can be easy to set up at your practice. If your business cannot justify the costs to implement all these practices in-house, then you can also outsource these tasks to agencies.

Engage continuously

Patient engagement doesn’t start when patients make their first appointment. Neither is it consigned to just a couple of interactions throughout the year. Patient engagement should be a continuous process that your medical practice should be undertaking. From appointment reminders, pre-visit instructions, and intake forms to emails, newsletters, and medicine reminders later in the healthcare journey. Patient engagement is not a single checkmark that needs to be ticked, but a whole continuous process.

Share information

Nearly half of all patients suffering from chronic diseases are unable to receive the proper benefits of medical intervention due to poor compliance. By sharing information with patients, and ensuring that they are well educated about their own conditions, medical businesses can massively improve patient compliance. This in turn results in much higher treatment outcomes and better patient experiences. Information should be shared across multiple intersections; in-person from the attending physician, in form of emails, newsletters and infographics, and even brochures and booklets.

Removing barriers

There is no single barrier that healthcare businesses must overcome but a couple. Firstly, healthcare practitioners must ensure that they are eliminating barriers to care in the first place. With nearly 15 percent of chronically ill patients unable to find access to healthcare, it’s not surprising that these patients have poor outcomes. Remote outreach programs, telehealth consultations, and other processes can help alleviate these barriers. Another barrier that medical practices need to overcome is the communication barrier. With healthcare practitioners often running ragged, medical businesses need to ensure that there are other avenues for patients to receive the information they are seeking in a timely manner.

Conclusion

Patient engagement is one of the most effective ways for healthcare professionals to improve patient experiences. Patients today want to have meaningful empathetic bonds with their healthcare providers but also want to be in charge of decisions regarding their own health. Increased patient engagement can help create a base of loyal patients for a medical business and has cascading benefits.

But with limited time, it can be hard to make sure that your medical business is properly engaging patients. And for small medical practices, it isn’t often that there are enough resources to hire a dedicated employee to engage patients either.

That’s why practices of all sizes need to start using digital marketing methods to start improving their patient engagement metrics. For medical businesses of larger sizes, these methods allow them to employ patient engagement methods that can complement their larger processes at a high ROI.

BraveLabs is helping medical businesses of all sizes to score big with higher patient engagement. With our custom digital marketing tools, it is easy for your business to connect with your patients. Want to learn how patient engagement can drive success at your business? Contact us today.