As a healthcare provider, it is critical to stay up-to-date on the latest patient engagement trends.
Patient engagement can be defined as patients who are driven to take the action needed to make wellness a priority, utilize preventive health services, and make healthy lifestyle choices.
Keeping abreast of the trends that are increasing patient engagement is essential as we continue to move into a more digital world. The better you can do this, the better quality your communication will be, the more value will be added to your overall patient experience, and the easier it will be for them to access information.
If you're ignoring patient engagement trends, your patients will seek out another provider that does, causing you to lose business.
Here are 8 major patient engagement trends that you need to be aware of.
1. High quality communication
Patients these days are expecting deep connections with their physicians. This includes being more responsive and accessible.
It starts by optimizing your Google Business Profile so that it's easier for your potential patients to initiate a conversation with you. Then, you'll want to make sure that when they reach your website, your content is clear and consistent.
Regular email and social media campaigns are other great ways to communicate with potential patients. Make sure these campaigns are clearly segmented, with the right content going to the right audiences. Automating your systems will make this process easier.
2. Automation
Automation is key to providing a great patient experience. By automating appointment reminders and follow-ups, you can free up time for your staff to provide more personalized care.
Automation encourages deeper patient-physician engagement and boosts care satisfaction. It can help expedite appointment scheduling and record-keeping, prevent human error, allow for more accurate and timely medical interventions, increase physician response time, and allow patients on-demand access to their records.
3. Emphasizing patient-physician care
In order to engage patients, providers must emphasize physician-patient care. This means collaborating with patients along their care journey, educating them on their conditions and what they can do to manage them, and offering support.
To do this, you need to partner with patients to create treatment plans that work for them. This includes incorporating their preferences and values into decision-making.
4. Accessibility
Everyone should have the right to affordable and accessible healthcare. One of the best ways to ensure this for your patients is by offering virtual services like telehealth. This makes it easy for patients who may not physically be able to see you in person to connect with you from anywhere, at any time.
5. Retention strategies
In order to keep patients engaged, providers must have retention strategies in place. Along with providing virtual options, this includes following up with patients after their appointments, keeping them informed about their health, building trust, providing clear communication and outstanding care, responding to all feedback, personalizing their experiences, and more.
6. Value and convenience
Patients are looking for value and convenience. They want to be able to see their provider when it is convenient for them and feel like they're getting their money's worth.
This means increasing access to high-value communications, high-quality amenities, price transparency, and more. You can do this by offering digital bill pay options, making online scheduling easy and accessible, providing educational content on your blog and social media, and being responsive to your patients' correspondence.
7. Mobile healthcare
Mobile healthcare is a rapidly growing trend. Patients want to be able to access their health information on their mobile devices. This includes appointments, test results, and prescriptions.
Moving forward, you should plan to use a hybrid telehealth and in-person care model to support better accessibility for your patients. This will allow for greater healthy accessibility and equity.
8. Health equity
Healthcare organizations that integrate health equity into their strategy are taking the lead. Over the past couple years, COVID-19 has pointed out numerous holes in health outcome equalities across varying patient populations and geographic locations.
In order to truly engage your patients, you need to be prioritizing health equity and address the barriers that may be preventing patients from accessing you.
Engaging patients is essential to providing quality care. By being aware of these trends, you can make sure that you are providing the best possible care for your patients.
Without embracing these trends, you risk losing your patients to the competition that has already done so.
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