Despite health systems’ investments in marketing and patient acquisition, many still struggle to turn patient interest into scheduled appointments.
The disconnect between digital discovery tools and scheduling systems often causes patients to drop off before receiving care and for providers, that means lost revenue.
To better understand what it takes to bridge this gap and why technology is key to creating a seamless patient journey, Becker’s Healthcare spoke with Howard Bright, CTO of Patient Engagement at RevSpring.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are the biggest challenges health systems face in capturing and converting patient interest?
Howard Bright: The biggest challenge is the disconnect between the tools patients use to find care and the tools and systems to schedule that care. A patient may look online to find a provider; then they have to use a different, disconnected tool to schedule an appointment.
When they’re trying to schedule, the scheduling system doesn’t know anything about their insurance or the cost of the appointment. Patients want to seamlessly find care, schedule it, know the costs and get financially cleared.
For providers, the result of this disconnect is that lots of leads get dropped. For patients, the disconnect means they don’t proceed to get care.
In many geographies, providers are all competing for the same patient population. In this environment, patient acquisition is really important, because acquiring and retaining patients is where revenue comes from. There is a direct line from turning patient interest into converted patients and ultimately into revenue. That’s why this is so important.
Question: Why does patient leakage or drop-off occur? What strategies can keep patients engaged from referral or lead generation through scheduling?
HB: Leakage or drop-off occurs because the process is hard for patients. Consider referrals, which should be a slam dunk for providers. It is an easy way to acquire patients, yet there’s still drop-off.
Patients want to be contacted immediately after being referred, like hours later, not in days or weeks. But often an inbound provider sees it as time consuming to follow up to schedule appointments for the referrals they receive, which can be dozens per week.
An effective strategy for providers is to use technology to automate post-referral outreach to patients, via a text or email. Through automation, providers can confirm, “We got your referral,” and can give patients easy-to-use self-service scheduling options.
Question: How can technology support a more seamless journey from initial contact to intake and financial clearance?
HB: Technology can work behind the scenes by linking things together. It starts with linking the provider search to scheduling, and linking scheduling to intake and financial clearance. Technology can verify the patient’s insurance and get the ball rolling on prior authorization. By automating those pieces of the journey, technology improves the experience for patients and takes the burden off of staff.
Question: How are health systems balancing the efficiency of automation with the need for a personalized, human-centered experience?
HB: People worry about automation because they think about bots and robocalls. But a lot of automation can occur on the back end by automating mundane, repetitive, manual tasks, like calling an insurance company about pre-authorization.
Technology can also create a single pane of glass or dashboard, which automatically brings together all of a patient’s information about scheduling, insurance, prior authorization and cost, so staff don’t have to manually pull this information together.
Automating these tasks helps staff feel less burned out and frees up staff to engage with patients on a human level. Happier staff results in happier patients.
Question: Which metrics indicate whether the access process is successfully driving patient acquisition and retention?
HB: There are several good metrics. The referral-to-schedule rate shows the percent of referrals that get scheduled. Metrics can also measure how long it takes from when a referral comes in until it is scheduled.
Also important is the rate of conversion for patients who searched for the provider online, along with patient satisfaction and the rate of repeat patients. A good metric to assess scheduling is the scheduling abandonment rate.
