Rethink Patient Trust: Why It’s Critical to Get Engagement Right

Trust is central to all healthy relationships. It’s created one interaction at a time with empathy, reliability, honesty and consistency. Trust is time-consuming to build and yet so easy to quickly undermine. This is especially true in healthcare when many different people and departments—sometimes in silos with no understanding of the overall patient situation—engage with the same patients for different reasons. Yet building and sustaining trust is critical for the best outcomes—for patients and providers. It is directly linked to such benefits as:

Increasing patient retention
Improving appointment adherence
Generating positive referrals
Strengthening healthcare outcomes
Yielding positive patient survey results

Healthcare chief financial officers understand the crucial importance of building and sustaining patient trust. A healthcare CFO survey (Deloitte) finds that 55% rank “consumer trust as the top driver of strategic change,” with 83% responding that “consumer engagement is an increased organizational priority.”

The relationship between building trust and patient engagement is clear. And as digital becomes a bigger part of patient engagement, understanding how to leverage digital communications tools to enhance patient trust and loyalty is highly relevant to healthcare providers.

Fortunately, there is growing understanding about how patient engagement can increase trust. Such principles as providing consistent and accurate messages from preservice through final payment, and creating an intuitive, interactive and streamlined digital experience are just the beginning. Modern content that is easily associated with a provider’s brand—and that makes it easy for patients to self-serve—also is a critical component of building trust through patient engagement.

Healthcare providers do not have to go it alone. Technology solutions now can deliver messages in ways that patients prefer, help respect patients’ time and provide fluid two-way engagement. These solutions empower providers to seamlessly link all aspects of the patient experience, which makes patients feel known and cared for by everyone in your organization with a patient-facing role.

This matters because patients don’t compartmentalize.

All interactions—in-person, over the phone, through the mail, or via digital channels—coalesce to form a single experience of your brand for patients. Making the investment to ensure every interaction between patients and providers is positive, consistent and connected is a sound investment in attracting, treating and retaining loyal patients. Learn more about why it’s critical to get patient communications right.