Why Most Of The Providers Fail In Patient Engagement And How To Increase Patient Retention Effectively?
The healthcare industry is counted as one of the largest industries today if not the largest one and why not? An industry that is solely dedicated to the patients and others distressed physically and mentally is ought to be vast and a growing one indeed in order to improve the living standards of humanity.
Even in the US economy, the healthcare sector is regarded as one of the largest and most complex, which accounts for 18% of the US gross domestic product (GDP) when last reported in 2020. Along with being a gigantic industry, the medical sector is also known for its steady growth year on year.
However, one thing that is constant when it comes to the healthcare sector is the patients. It is for them that the whole industry is set up and is transforming each day. Yes, the medical industry revolves around the patients with a motto of extending the best possible care for them and when that is not done by a particular provider, well then the patients turn to a different medical care provider.
The growing competition has touched almost every industry of now, and the medical industry is not an exception. Competition has more than doubled in the past couple of decades in the healthcare industry, where startups, new chains of hospitals, and medical practices are being launched every second day. However, to beat this competition, all that the medical care providers need to understand is the growing need of improving the overall care that they extend to the patients and enhance revenues. To achieve this, the first thing that the medical service providers need to be concerned about is patient engagement and how they can improve it.
Caring for the patients by engaging them is not something new that the healthcare providers are opting for today, but it is one of the factors that are really proving to be effective for the healthcare providers to improve their revenue and grow, even today.
According to the latest data, the U.S. patient engagement solutions market size was last recorded to be valued at $4.41 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $5.0 billion in 2021. This clearly shows the growing concern to improve patient engagement rates among healthcare providers today.
While more and more medical service providers, not only from the US but from all around the world are hunting for the best and the easiest ways to improve patient engagement and retain them effectively, it is also to be noted that many of them are failing to do so in the first place. This failure to do so in the first place is what is initially spurring them to find out easy solutions to improve their service.
There are countless missteps that even modern healthcare providers make while extending care to their patients, which in turn adversely affect their performance, thereby reducing patient engagement and retention rates.
Errors in patient engagement that most medical care providers commonly make!
If you are a practice owner or manager of a hospital, healthcare unit, clinic, or practice, you must understand that patient engagement that you can win hearts with. Proper patient engagement in healthcare can boost patient retention, attract more new patients and improve practice revenues effortlessly. However, caring less while serving your patients, especially if you are less concerned about patient engagement, then can prove to be highly detrimental to your overall performance.
Now, most of the patient service providers have swelled with pride to declare that they are right and they do things in the right way only to lose out on their opportunity to improve. This is why we have decided to list down the common errors in practice when patient engagement is concerned. If you also believe that checking on your mistakes can effectively help add gear to your patient engagement and retention rates, then dont hesitate and check these simple mistakes that you can avoid from the next time onwards.
So, without further, lets continue with them:
Not extending them online ways of patient appointments
The patient appointment is the very first step in a patients healthcare journey with a particular healthcare provider. Here, the medical care unit should bear in mind to follow the latest online way of booking appointments in order to hook the patients right in the initial stage. Gone are the days when the patients' appointments were booked via phones or physically at the medical office.
With the emergence of the online patient appointment bookings powered by GrowPractice, the online booking, rescheduling, and cancellation of patient appointments is a breeze. The latest survey reveals that more than 50% of the patients prefer digital tools to book, amend and cancel their appointments online. The easy and effective tools that GrowPractice brings to the practices of today have already boosted the number of new patients and appointments by 8% while retaining the old patients by 48%.
Lack of proper check-ins
The very next step that comes just after the patient appointments is the patient check-ins. The patient check-in process is mandatory in healthcare practices because it is in this step that the patients are registered with the particular practice, which also learns about the patients medical history, current medications, and more. This process generally bears the ill reputation of being unnecessarily long and complex. Hence, to avoid the patient check-in process seem thus, GrowPractice has brought in easy online patient check-ins for healthcare units. The effective digital check-in process from GrowPractice has resulted in reducing 75% of the medical staff time and has already proved to save 500+ hours of the medical care providers time.
Long wait times
Wait time is one of the major banes of the patients lives. Ideally, the patients should wait less than 10 minutes but that has hardly become possible even today with the advancement of software ad techniques. The patients wait time is declared to be a major part of influencing the patient experience. Around 97% of the patients state that the wait time they see is the single most frustrating part of their journey. Though you cannot obliterate the wait times for the patients, you can certainly opt for the latest software, tools, and online portals from GrowPractice, which will result in cutting the wait time satisfactorily short!
Lack of transparency
Patient service providers or healthcare units are often found to lack transparency, especially in the case of wait times and the cost of healthcare. Over 65% of the patients have reflected that they want to see transparency about the cost of the healthcare services and over 43% of them have lamented on the lack of knowledge of their wait time. Being transparent in these two steps can hugely boost patient engagement rates and retain patients effectively!
Inexperienced doctors and staffs
Doctors and nurses are the medical personnel who directly influence the patient experience because they are the persons who extend the ultimate care to the patients. The next comes the medical staff, the receptionist, and others who interact with the patients directly. Therefore, all of them must be experienced, confident professionals, treat the patients with confidence, and steer them forward to alleviate their illness!
Dearth of hospitality
Hospitality is something that only a few hospitals and healthcare units can take pride in. It is important to understand that the patients knock on the doors of hospitals and clinics only if he/she requires medical aid. Therefore, it is true that they are already frustrated with their own ailments.
Now, if the practices and their staffs fail to extend proper behavior, then that is another insult to the injury and might pull down the game for the particular medical service provider. Overburdened staff might result in lowering the much-needed hospitality. Therefore, remember to take off the extra load from the shoulders of the practice workers, which is easily possible now with the emergence of GrowPractices convenient patient payment and check-in software.
Not being flexible in payments
Patient payments are the most important source of practice revenues. Here, if a particular practice is reluctant to extend the online ways of payments, then that might prove to be a roadblock in its path of growth.
Ignoring patient feedback and reviews
Patient feedback and surveys are priceless. Such surveys coming from the patients are now extensively used by hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare units to evaluate their performance and improve themselves. However, if these feedbacks are ignored, then the miseries might never end for the healthcare units, and many of them are still doing the same, thereby sacrificing their opportunities for growth.
Not following it up with them
As soon as a patient sees the doctor, most of the medical care units deem that to be the end of the journey of the particular patient. However, that is far from true because the doctor visit is just the starting of another journey ahead. Patient follow-ups start just right after a patient leaves the doctors chamber. Here, the patient needs to be crucially briefed about what the doctor said and help him/her schedule the next date of appointment, where he/she will either checkup, test, or review with the doctor. Not following up with them properly can lead to confused patients, no-shows, and bad reviews, all of which would eventually hamper patient engagement and patient retention rates.
Apart from the follow-ups that need to be bettered, the medical units and practices should also care to nurture proper patient engagement strategies. Forming proper patient engagement strategies not only helps the patients show that their healthcare service provider thinks about them and cares for them but also helps them remember their own appointments and grab the best offers and deals, thereby boosting patient satisfaction.
Lack of proper patient engagement strategies
Though most of the patient care providers claim to extend the first-rate doctors, world-class equipment, and the best and most experienced medical staff to attend to the patients, a majority of them fail to engage the patients in between the appointments, after the actual office visit. Here strategizing to keep them informed digitally with the help of the effective patient reminders from GrowPractice, sending them relevant email campaigns and more can prove to be really beneficial for your practice and in lifting the rates of patient engagement in healthcare.
The above-mentioned errors need to be avoided by the healthcare providers at any cost in order to boost patient engagement and patient retention. Now, if you are wondering to further gear up the patient engagement and retention strategies of the patients easily in order to steer clear of your competitors, then here are some effective tips that you can try!
Smart Tips to improve patient engagement and patient retention strategies in healthcare!
If you are currently following a patient engagement and retention strategy due to the recent decline in the overall number of patients, then its great but following the below-mentioned tips, it would strengthen your strategies and not let you miss even the smallest of things that demand attention in healthcare.
So, heres a collection of some effective tips that would embolden your patient engagement and retention strategies:
Communicate more with the patients
Active communication always results in keeping the engagement up. Open and ongoing communication between patients and medical practices digitally has proven to increase the engagement rate by 60% or more. Besides, according to the latest data, over 69% of patients declared that they are more likely to go for the healthcare providers who communicate with the patients through emails. GrowPractice makes it further easier with the help of the two-way, HIPAA-compliant procedure, which helps the patients and practices share information as per the HIPAA guidelines. Furthermore, the information also remains encrypted and safeguarded with multi-layered security.
Stay active on social media
Social media presence has grown over time. Now the patients who are concerned about their health, a majority of them are also on popular social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Youtube, and more. This is why the engagement strategy should have the social media ticked at any cost in order to revamp the patient engagement rates.
Actively help them remember their appointments
Keeping patients informed about their appointments and guiding them with the next step of their journey is the least that the medical care providers can do. Sending reminders is something that the practices should never take lightly. However, it has been seen that most often they forget to remind their patients, thereby increasing the count of no-shows. This can be readily avoided with the help of automated reminders, a facility that they can take pride in by reaching out to GrowPractice. This has already improved 97% of the patient ratings!
Guide with whats next
Along with making the patients alert and updated with their upcoming appointment, the practices can also plan to schedule automatic reminders of the next set of tests and reviews. This proactive approach would help the medical practices with a bundle of boons!
Get creative with your newsletters
Newsletters are another essential component that is now hugely used by brands and businesses to keep with audience engagement. However, making the newsletters of your medical practice creative, hooking, and personalized along with passing on the relevant information that you want is something you can opt for to revolutionize digital patient engagement!
Use online portals for the patients convenience
Online portals are both convenient for the patients and effective tools to increase patient engagement rates. It has been discovered that over 59.3% of the patients who have used patient portals, used them to view their personal health records. Patient portals are therefore a must-have for the patient practices of today and would be an essential part of the patient engagement solutions.
Empower the patients
If you want to keep the patients first then the first thing you need to opt for is being transparent and conversational with them. Keeping the patients informed about the wait time during the doctor visit is important for them to gauge the time and would certainly improve the patient surveys you get. Furthermore, you also need to brief them about the overall costs, thereby helping them cling to their budget while checking up with a physician. All of these will go a long way to empower the patients.
Prioritize the patients
Prioritizing the patients even inside the office can work wonders for your medical practice. Yes, wait times are an evident part of a patients medical journey but if you have medical staff in a backup who can stay abreast of the timings and inform the patients accordingly, then that would further aid in adding a boost to the patient engagement and patient retention. Besides, if the medical workers stay close to the patients in waiting and help them during their needs inside the office, then that would certainly spark up the patient experience and leave them satisfied!
Grab the best patient engagement solutions for your practice with GrowPractice!
GrowPractice is one of the most trustworthy medical office solutions providers that will help your practice get the best patient engagement solutions, retain patients along with attracting newer patients easily. Revamping your medical office with over 65 EHR/PM software, booking easy and online patient appointments, streamlining the patient workflow, completing patient check-ins with paperless online forms, receiving hassle-free online payments, obtain smooth adn satisfactory patient surveys and reviews are only a few benefits that GrowPractice will bring in to your practice. Reach out to learn more and grow your practice!
