January 26, 2022
In 2022, Move Beyond Personalization to Precise
RevSpring surveyed 1,000 patients across the U.S. and found that 75 percent believed personalization in the billing and payment process was very important. For most healthcare financial departments, however, personalization has not evolved much beyond “mass customization,” such as using a patient’s name on their billing statement or other communications. Yet the opportunity to personalize patient communications has dramatically expanded.
Personalized communication today means being precise: precise messages, precise delivery methods and precise timing.
That’s the essence of OmniChannel communication. By using data and increasingly precise patient insight, your engagement strategies can move beyond merely personalized. Instead, they can empower you to execute and continuously automate an ever more precise engagement strategy for each individual patient.
Engaging with patients—from encouraging them to make and keep appointments, to paying past due balances before new appointments, to paying their statements on time—begins with communicating with them in precise ways that encourages the behavior you are hoping to inspire.
Revenue cycle management has tended to rely on just one personalization dimension—propensity to pay—to determine how and when to communicate with patients. While important, propensity to pay is only one aspect of patient behavior to be considered when deciding on a precise 21st century engagement strategy.
Move Beyond Personalized to Precise Engagement
Understanding many of the dimensions that make people who they are is not as daunting as it may sound. It begins with extensive demographic data. Analytics can use that data to reveal which patients share similar attributes. From there, we make some assumptions about how people with those shared attributes may tend to engage. An engagement strategy is conceived and implemented based on those assumptions.
Then things really start to get interesting!
As patients begin to engage, or not engage, we watch—and with help from machine learning—we begin to see more clearly what is and isn’t working, and to adjust engagement strategies accordingly. Each adjustment leads to more precision and better results.
Why should you bother?
Precise engagement means better engagement, faster response times, increased patient loyalty and better bottom-line results. It also fuels a more satisfying patient experience.
Within this context, now imagine that the patient communications you send today is 21st century precise: that the communication is dynamically constructed so the messaging relates to your patients and their life today, the tone relates to them, the timing of the message and the call to action all specifically relates to them, even the frequency of the message feels right to them. And then imagine that some of these highly precise messages were not printed at all but delivered electronically, based on how different patients best respond to different messages and calls to action.
Read more in our Bright Ideas series: Precise Patient Engagement.
