It's impossible to read any medical practice blog or journal without hearing that "patient engagement" is on everyone's minds.
The more patient engagement you foster, the happier your patients and staff will be, and the more smoothly and profitably your business will run... or so the theory goes. But what does that really mean? Didn't things run just fine before all of this patient engagement stuff came into vogue?
Perhaps, but times have changed. We are now used to a world where virtually any business is accessible 24/7. Expectations are that "doing business" means communicating and transacting from any device, anytime and anywhere. When every other business operates this way, short of the actual encounter with the physician (and even that will change with virtual visit technology), patients will soon expect — if they don't already — that all the other "work" a patient does with their healthcare providers can, and should, happen electronically. Convenience is expected, and consumers (your patients) reward businesses that offer it with loyalty and referred business.
When the medical industry talks about patient engagement, this is the service model that must be its cornerstone. Nothing replaces personal one-to-one time with a physician or other medical provider, but every patient touchpoint — from making the appointment, to asking a question of a nurse, to completing required forms, to seeing personal health information mapped over time, to paying a bill —should be convenient and support the clinical encounter. All of these interactions require technology, but not new or untested technology. Patient portals, self-scheduling systems, online payment systems, and self-check-in systems are all available today. And the organizations that have embraced them are reaping the benefits.
To become a patient engagement-focused organization, a perspective shift has to start from the top, and become a centerline mission of each staff member. It means going from physician-centric to patient-centric, and requires looking at every touch point in the patient's journey and thinking about how convenience and efficiency can be inserted. A great place to start is with a task force – representatives from various departments – looking at what they can do to make every part of the "work" a patient has to do with the organization as easy as it can be. At the same time, they should look for technologies and best practices that enable the medical staff to spend more time taking care of patients, rather than taking care of repetitive administrative tasks.
Here's a few ways to meet patients' expectations and increase patient engagement across any organization:
• Encourage online self-scheduling of appointments. In a world where hotels, haircuts, car servicing, and nearly anything else can be scheduled online, why should patients have to call to schedule an appointment? Enabling patients to schedule simple appointments at any time is not only convenient, but invests the patient in that appointment.
• Strongly promote (or even require) patients' use of patient portals. One successful organization, Raleigh Neurology Associates in North Carolina, changed its phone message to advise patients to use the patient portal to request prescription renewals, and subsequently reduced its call volume dramatically. Imagine if requests for health records, appointment requests (or scheduling), clinical questions, or requests for lab results were eliminated by enabling patients to do all this through the patient portal.
• Offer multiple ways for patients to electronically pay bills. Any organization that is still only sending paper statements is doing a poor job of running their business, period. 77% of patients want to be able to pay their bills online according to a recent Accenture study, just like how they pay their other bills. Not only should they be able to pay using the patient portal, but they should be able to "guest pay" from the practice's website, or pay from an e-statement, or be able to easily work out an automatic draft payment plan so they can pay over time.
• Be mobile accessible. Patients access your patient portal from their mobile phones nearly 40% of the time, and that number is climbing. If your website and patient portal are not mobile-optimized, you are frustrating your patients and eroding the quality of customer care you offer. This does not mean you have to have a "native" mobile application that is downloaded to the phone, it just means the website or portal should automatically re-configure itself to look and work just as well on a phone as on a tablet, laptop or desktop computer.
• Send Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs). Sending your patients CCDs does not just help accrue that MU numerator! In order for patients to have the data to understand the trends in their healthcare, you must send encounter CCDs. This is a necessary part of those patients becoming partners in their health care. Additionally, there are mobile apps you can encourage patients to use that gather this data from all their providers, giving them a 360-degree view of their healthcare – all medications, lab results, immunizations, appointments and more.
These are just a few ways that you can provide the level of customer service your patients have come to expect. In return, your organization will be rewarded with more informed, more loyal, and yes, more engaged patients. And engaged patients show up for their appointments, pay bills sooner, and become partners in their healthcare, all key to running a profitable business with better patient outcomes.
Kim Labow is the Chief Executive Officer of Medfusion, a provider of solutions that simplify the patient experience.
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