Top 10 ways for Patient Engagement

Delivering exceptional patient-experience along with care

Souce: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org

The ultimate goal of any healthcare model is satisfied patients. And a very important part to monitor patient grievances and satisfaction level is by engaging them with the hospital staff at different levels. Engaging patients with their medical procedures have direct impact in the degree of acceptance to whatever they are prescribed and charged. They need to be cared with extra efforts in order to gain their trust and willingness to return to us when they or their relatives encounter unfortunate disease. This can be assured by not just treating your patients but also reestablishing their social and mental well being. Here is a list of top ten ways to improve patient engagement:

1) Giving Patients what they need

All patients visit healthcare institution with specific needs. It is important to understand their needs and categorize them accordingly in order to avoid chaos and unnecessary delay in treatment. Prior to their visit to the physician, an attempt should be made to collect their personal details, medical history, their expectations from the treatment and similar factors. Based on the data obtained, they can be approached by care-givers more confidently and even patients will like the way they are cared.

2) Easy access to patient data

The benefit of giving patients open access to their data, physician notes and reports is that it will bring more transparency which helps gain faith of the patients in the care provided. This strategy has been successfully implemented by Cleveland clinic.

3) Involving patients in the process

Getting suggestions from patients for process improvement will let us know what exactly the patient needs and where provider needs to make changes. Getting accurate feedback from patients are extremely important. Any provider should understand the type of patient and provide them with different ways for completing feedback forms like electronics, telephonic or hard-copies.

4) Patient education

This includes giving patients proper handouts related to their disease and instructions to be followed during and after the treatment. This will help patients not falling prey to partially correct information on the internet or some other laymen. We don’t want patients to be doctors for self!

5) Incorporating latest technology and data management system

A considerate amount of patient engagement strategies should be invested in incorporating latest technology. This includes reaching out to patients on social media platforms, health-IT solutions like smart-watches and other form of online solutions like scheduling software where patients can book appointments online and avoid long waiting times. One more innovative way to engage your patients is by making them use bio-monitoring devices like mobile cardiac telemetry services.

6) Everyone is a performer

This concept has been successfully implemented at Disney. Though Disney and healthcare are way far apart, we can definitely use their customer service strategies. They say that each and every staff member from receptionist to physician who directly or indirectly encounters (patient) customer is a performer and they should be trained enough to provide excellent service. The staff should be trained to be friendly and treat all patients with respect while performing their job functions.

7) Adding accountability to the service

This one is also inspired from strategies utilized by Disney. It believes in shared accountability. If any patient is dissatisfied and shares his/her problem with any staff member, they should be able to resolve that issue or at least give them assurance that it will be resolved by implementing proper processes instead of blaming the mistake to different department.

8) Giving access to tele-health

This is an important tool to remain in touch with your patient constantly. Many patients today are tech-savvy and they use smart phones. Patients can have access to doctors 24/7 and they do not even have to travel to hospitals unless required.

9) Tailor information according to the patient

Making your patients realize that their care providers actually care for them is really important. This can be achieved by utilizing some resources to understand patient profile on a case to case basis and offering them services accordingly. Say for instance some patients want to be contacted via email and some via telephones or some may even prefer being contacted in face-to-face manner. Identifying what kind of patient is like passive-who wants doctors to make decisions, independent-who believes in their own opinions after learning all options, intellectual- eager patients who want to understand the science behind pathology, flexible- who try to get over the episodic health needs and open minded- who seek more connections with physicians and want to get involved in decision making process. Providing information according to the type of patient proves to be a nice patient engagement strategy.

10) Increasing coordination among staff of different departments

This has proved to be a strong engagement strategy. Being able to locate your patient at any step by all departments will help establishing a personal connection with the patient. Patient data should be shared among different departments on a similar platform, so that whenever patient tries contacting the facility they do not have to start explaining their situation all over again. They can start from where they have left with previous person. Increasing awareness among staff helps reduce fake claims or even misinterpretation of information which might be the case many times. For instance if a patient undergoing surgery calls billing desk and billing officer tell them (after pulling their data) that they underwent this surgery by specific doctor on this date makes the process much more easier for the patient to directly explain their query.

Successful patient engagement leads to multiple advantages for any healthcare institution like more satisfied patients, more unbiased data for process improvement, increased financial performance, reduction in bad-debts and many more.