7% of Google’s daily searches are health-related, equivalent to 70,000 searches every minute. People are asking us questions about conditions, medication, symptoms, and insurance, confirms David Feinberg (VP, Google Health).
Today, health technology has enabled people to participate in their own well-being. They are able to track their health vitals, adopt habits to improve the quality of lives and reach out to physicians for on-time consultation. Healthcare organizations, therefore, are actively engaging patients in their health, well-being, and healthcare choices.
Patient engagement is the watchword for healthcare organizations (HCOs). It involves encouraging the patients to participate in their own care so that HCOs can drive better patient care, improve health outcomes, and offer the best care at lower costs. This is generally achieved by combining a patient’s knowledge, skills, willingness, and ability to manage their health.
While personalized interactions have been there to promote positive behaviour and keep the patients informed & motivated, technology is bringing advances in the modern patient engagement model. It is being used by HCOs to create awareness, offers better treatment, introduces behavioral/lifestyle changes, improves outcomes, offers help, and more.
There are different ways healthcare organizations can establish a patient engagement system. It depends upon the scale of HCO, the intensity of treatment/care, the type of service that an HCO deals in, etc. Here are a few ways patients can be motivated to participate in their own care system.
Telemedicine:
The idea of caring for patients remotely, when the provider and patient are not physically present with each other is gaining ground in the healthcare system. This approach of care delivery is called Telemedicine and is helping HCOs in achieving patient engagement in a number of ways. For example:
Online Appointment Scheduling: One of the prime reasons why patients don’t show up for scheduled appointments or follow-ups is an improper scheduling system. Appointment scheduling is one of the key requirements to keep physicians and patients in touch.
By automating the schedule cycle, clinics and hospitals can manage patient-physician availability for a meeting, leading to a better care system. Appointment booking solutions give the advantage of monitoring the booking stats, cancel/reschedule appointments, notifies through automated reminders, etc.
Virtual Visits: As the name suggests, virtual visits allow enabling a remote care connection, usually initiated by patients with a network of clinicians. Such services allow patients to connect with physicians for acute care through communication channels such as video chat, audio conference, or secure messaging. For virtual visits, the patient may or may not have a formal/pre-established relationship with the patient.
ALSO READ: The Rise of On-Demand Virtual Visits in Healthcare
Promotional/Informative Content: To encourage patients to maintain a balanced lifestyle, it is important to educate them. As a part of the patient engagement program, HCOs can share informative articles, videos, and personalized content with the patients to help improve their health, well-being, and awareness. Along with this, patients should be encouraged to keep track of their health through regular consultation, checkups for which patients can be sent promotional offers, discounts, etc.
Pathology:
Pathology reports are a crucial part of patients’ medical history. Therefore, maintaining a history of patients with detailed individual detailing and reports is important. To bring pathology at the fingertips of patients, it is essential to build a unified system that connects hospitals, clinics, pathology centres, and diagnostics centres. By building such a solution, HCOs can:
- Enable patients to manage their health records (medical history, payment history, past reports, etc.)
- Share offers and discounts, limited-time packages, ailment centred packages to the patients
- Enable patients to schedule appointments, share test prerequisites, collect reports online, and update physicians for immediate action
Patient Wellness:
Today, patients have health goals that centre on both physical and mental well-being. While some believe in tracking and analyzing their health vitals, some focus on better eating and fitness practices. Other prominent ways that patients adopt to improve their wellness include reducing stress, improving sleeping, maintaining work-life balance, setting a diet plan, and more. Thus, by enabling different ways to achieve wellness, HCOs can stay connected with the patients and help them make better health decisions.
For example, with a solution that gives diet care and weight loss plan, patients can choose a diet plan, set alarms & reminders, form weight loss groups & monitor progress, have group challenges & rewards, get informational content, etc. Such options enable patients to plan their wellness and keep a track of it.
Planning to Build a Patient Engagement Solution?
Different healthcare organizations can have different plans to engage patients with their physicians and services. Therefore, a custom patient engagement software works best according to the requirement of a healthcare organization.
But, what’s the best way to engage patients? What kind of patient do you have and what are their pain points? Before building the right patient engagement software, let our business analysts and healthcare experts evaluate the right way to keep a patient-care connection.
Planning to build a patient engagement solution? Set-up a free consultation with our healthcare experts.
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