Make Engagement Effortless to Truly Delight Patients

As healthcare leaders put increasing emphasis on improving the patient experience, truly understanding what patients value most is key. A major customer satisfaction study by Gartner involving nearly 100,000 consumers came to an interesting conclusion: people don’t require “exceptional” customer service to be satisfied. Instead, they want their engagement with organizations to be “effortless.”

From where we sit, “effortless” is the natural result of one unified end-to-end patient experience. Patients feel known. Every aspect of their experience is connected. Friction is eliminated.

How do healthcare organizations provide an effortless patient experience? Four crucial components must be working together within healthcare organizations:

Understanding of patients powered by data
Precise (intelligent) patient engagement enabled by analytics
Connected information systems that share data and work together
Consistent feedback loop that drives continuous improvement in every aspect of the patient experience

That might sound complicated, but when smart connected technology solutions are in play, it should be natural and invisible to patients. That’s the very point of effortless engagement after all. But there are some guideposts that should be obvious along your patients’ engagement journey.

The first guidepost is communication that resonates with patients. Messages should be clear, consistent and accurate, regardless of where they originate from within your organization. Communication should provide easy ways to respond and use communication delivery methods preferred by patients. That means leveraging a variety of channels, and understanding which channel—or combination of channels—work best with which patients.

A second guidepost to gauge the effortlessness of your patient experience is self-service. The ability to conveniently self-serve matters to modern consumers. They want easy options for scheduling appointments, checking-in, understanding service costs and making payments by using their own digital devices and on their own schedules. As technology solutions continue to evolve, providing such self-service options in healthcare is increasingly possible and popular—and can reduce the burden on overwhelmed staff.

Perhaps the easiest way to assess if your healthcare organization is making engagement effortless is to compare the patient experience to retail experiences. Ask how easy (or difficult) it is for patients to find you online. Once there, do patients (and potential new patients) find your website or portal easy and intuitive? What’s your process for two-way communication? Are you leveraging automation to increase ease and efficiency for busy patients?

RevSpring can help providers engage patients with smart, intuitive and connected interactions that make patient engagement effortless. Ask us how.