In this day and age, digital solutions are used in several industries including the health industry. Patients and medical practitioners leverage patient engagement solutions for easy communication and management of health conditions. These solutions can serve as a lifeline during emergency cases.
Healthcare providers who prioritize patient experience can be seen integrating these solutions into their practice. You can check out VMS BioMarketing to learn different ways to enhance patient experience in your medical establishment. In this article, we’ll reveal all that you need to know about patient engagement solutions.
What are Patient Engagement Solutions?
These are digital platforms that allow the healthcare provider to maintain communication with patients while providing an overview of their general condition. In other words, they enable the provider to understand their client’s health status since communication lines are always open, and also alter health outcomes by providing instant recommendations. The patient can also access data about their health condition quickly and easily.
Instead of waiting for a fixed doctor’s appointment time that might lead to a medicine recommendation, the doctor can easily take advantage of the digital platform to communicate with their client anytime. This communication can be done via laptop or smartphone. The result is continuous information between both parties that benefits the client’s health.
Why are Patient Engagement Solutions Necessary?
After the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare establishments began to pay more attention to patient engagement. This was taken as a priority after healthcare providers felt that their patients might leave them as a result of poor communication. Below are more reasons why healthcare providers need to integrate these solutions into their practice:
- Simplification of Healthcare Processes: With a digitized platform, you can easily mitigate risks, foresee different negative scenarios, and also discover opportunities to improve the health of the patient.
- Simplification of Schedule: As we mentioned earlier, appointments no longer have to be time-limited or physical.
- Enables Contactless Payment: This feature is important, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Builds Doctor-Patient Relationship: Since the platform ensures constant communication between both parties, this will lead to an increase between the doctor and the patient.
How to Select a Patient Engagement Solution
To select a perfect solution, there are features you need to look out for. Also, you need to consider the setup of your establishment and what its aims and objectives are.
In this section, we’ll discuss the features that the solution you select must have.
Interactive and Real-time Communication
It doesn’t make sense if the platform’s interface is not interactive, therefore, you must consider this as a priority in your selection. Moreover, the communication must be done in real-time. This will ensure that the information is passed across instantly to enable quick action. In addition, the messaging feature must be safe and secure as most patients favor text messaging to other modes of communication.
Chatbot Functionality
Although communication with the doctor is important, not all communication requires that level of interaction. If the issue is not an emergency, a chatbot can attend to the patient; with a chatbot feature, the computer system can address the concerns of the clients and provide them with the recommendations they require. You can visit https://www.ibm.com/ to learn more about chatbots. This will allow the doctors to focus on emergencies and serious cases.
Appointment Reminder Automation
Missing an appointment is not great for the patient or the healthcare provider as it might have disastrous consequences. Therefore, the engagement solution you select should have automated appointment reminders.
The system will continuously remind them of their next appointment. This way, they get the necessary treatment, and the staff doesn’t have to deal with a backlog of duties.
EHR or CRM Integration
Several engagement solutions fail in this regard as they don’t integrate with electronic health records (EHR) or customer relationship management (CRM). This is not good given the provider needs to store patient information using updated platforms. Yet, this information must be stored in such a way that it can be easily retrieved by the user. You should look for a solution that makes it easy to get patient data and information, and reduce the stress of manually retrieving broadcast lists.
Conclusion
Patient engagement solutions are digital tools used by healthcare providers to enable their patients to communicate with their caregivers. These tools reduce the communication gap between the doctor and patient, ensuring they are in sync. The engagement platforms provide several benefits including easy access to medical records, automated appointment reminders, easy communication, contactless payment, etc.
The article above also revealed features that a great solution must have. Some of these features include interactive and real-time communication, chatbot functionality, appointment reminder automation, and EHR or CRM integration. When making your selection, you must also consider your company’s aims and objectives.
My name is Andrea Thompson and I’m a home based freelance writer. I’m 23 years old, married to my best friend, and mother to a wonderfully independent and opinionated 3 year old girl and step-mother to a sweet seven year old boy. I live in a tiny, little town in Kentucky, where I spend my free time fishing with my kids.
Writing has always been my passion, which I followed through high school, and for a while in college. Life happened, and once I discovered we were pregnant, I switched directions; opting for the healthcare industry because of the stability.
Finally, years later, I was in a place where I could leave the day job that never truly made me happy, and pursue my dreams. I’ve built, and am still building, my writing career from scratch. But, I’m passionate and I’m good at what I do. And, in the end, I can prove to my daughter that she can do anything she wants with this life.
