Five key considerations
- Make it meaningful: Understand who your patients are, how they want to communicate and what messages they need to hear in order to influence the behavior you require. Do everything with intent and purpose; do not waste opportunities to collect feedback and inspire interaction. Engage patients across the full continuum of care.
- Leverage technology: New tools and technologies offer health systems the ability to vastly improve the patient experience and communication. From patient-facing technologies such as patient portals and texting, to systems designed to map the patient pathway and identify opportunities for improvement, healthcare providers will need to consider how they can use new technologies to better engage patients.
- Master your data: To understand and engage your patients, you first need to understand your data. Providers should be focusing on building their analytics capabilities on two fronts to improve patient engagement: better identifying opportunities for proactive intervention in patient health, and better personalizing outreach and communication. Both will require a level of predictive analytics capability.
- Continuously recalibrate: Recognize that the journey towards a high-functioning patient engagement capability takes time and incremental growth. Learn from every interaction. Be purposeful about building in measurements and feedback tools to ensure that, with each iteration, your organization is improving their capabilities and their understanding of the patient and patient pathway.
- Stay one step ahead: While most health systems will continue to earn most of their revenues through fee-for-service models for the foreseeable future, remember that it takes time to build relationships and patient engagement. Balancing the timing of investments into patient engagement technologies with the shift in business models and revenue streams will be key.
