As
patients continue to shop around for their healthcare, healthcare organizations
may consider patient engagement strategies that will improve patient retention
and customer loyalty.
By Sara Heath
November 03,
2016 - Cultivating the ability to maintain high rates of patient
retention and loyalty has become a top priority for providers, especially
as patients face rising out-of-pocket costs and
make more careful decisions about how to use their buying power. With patients
shopping around for high-quality and cost-effective healthcare, organizations
need to show consumers that they are worth the money.
Employing patient
engagement strategies may improve patient retention rates. From getting
patients in the door to ensuring a quality and cost-effective payment
experience, healthcare organizations should be mindful of patient satisfaction
and engagement in order to maintain patient loyalty.
Hospital marketing
and patient outreach
Getting patients in
the door of the hospital is the first step to engaging them and maintaining
their loyalty. In an industry steadily shifting toward consumerism, healthcare
organizations need to rethink how they engage potential patients through their
hospital marketing strategy.
Wake Forest Baptist
Health took on this challenge by digitizing their marketing and outreach tools.
“We have had to move
out of the mass media as the strongest way to reach folks just because their
communication habits and behaviors have completely changed over the past couple
of years,” said Jeff House, Assistant Vice President of Marketing at Wake
Forest Baptist Health.
The institution
transitioned from traditional media outreach – including billboards and radio
ads – to digital techniques such as pay-per-click and targeted Facebook and
social media posts. These strategies yielded new knowledge of consumer
preferences, helping Wake Forest continually engage with their patients.
“We’ve tested eleven
different programs so far and we now can understand which products are better
suited to a digital platform, and which products are a better blend between
some traditional and some digital,” House explained.
Obtaining a better
understanding of their consumer base has helped the hospital target their
marketing and educational messages to the right
patient populations. For example, when House and his team sees a population of
patients interacting with messages about diabetes education, they know to
continue targeting that outreach to that patient population.
“Customer
relationships management is not about what we want to tell them. It’s about
what they want to hear,” House asserted. “I think you get respect and you get
trust when you value that approach with consumers now digitally.”
Patient satisfaction
efforts to improve retention
While ensuring
patient satisfaction has a moral imperative, there is also some pragmatism to
the concept. When patients are more satisfied with their healthcare, they are
more likely to return if they fall ill again and more likely to recommend the
practice to friends and family.
According to Joe
Greskoviak, President and Chief Operating Officer at Press Ganey, patient
satisfaction is fundamentally tied to patient loyalty.
When practice leaders keep track of their patient satisfaction levels and
online reviews, they can get a better idea of how to grow their community
influence.
“Healthcare has
become a market share game,” Greskoviak said. “To really be able to survive and
thrive in healthcare you have to continue to grow your market share, and the
best way to grow your market share is not to lose the market share that you
have today.”
According to
Greskoviak, patient loyalty boils down to three things: patient-provider
communication, provider empathy, and care coordination.
“Patients want to
understand that we actually care for them,” he explained. “So our ability to be
empathetic in our delivery of care is incredibly important to patients.”
Utilizing quality
satisfaction data is critical to improving loyalty, Greskoviak said. When
providers use substandard satisfaction data, or don’t use it at all, they may become tone
deaf to patient needs and preferences, and run the risk of losing those
consumers.
Patient portal
implementation
Allowing patients
access to their health data and message with their providers through a patient
portal may also help improve patient loyalty, engagement, and satisfaction.
In a July poll from
Care Cloud, 73 percent of patient respondents said that health record access could help improve satisfaction with
their care. Seventy-five percent of respondents expressed interest in
prescription refills via the portal, and 61 percent wanted online bill pay
capabilities.
Some healthcare
organizations have found that when patients are able to access their
medical records on their own, they gain more from their healthcare, improving their satisfaction.
“We actually just put
out a survey within our patient portal and we have nearly 1,500
responses, so I know what patients are thinking about the portal from their
end, and they truly love it as a patient engagement tool,” said Susan Wolver,
internist at VCU Health, to PatientEngagementHIT.com.
“In fact, 80 percent
of people said that it helps them take better care of themselves. So that’s
unbelievable. Eighty-five percent of the people who knew their notes were there
are actually looking at their notes.”
Patient portals may
also be helpful in improving patient-provider relationships. Through secure
direct messaging, patients can communicate with their physicians between care
visits. This may be crucial to forging a relationship, especially for patients
who are only in the office a few times per year.
According to David
Clain, manager at athenaResearch, patients who have a relationship with their
providers over the portal are more likely to go back to that provider.
“If you are a patient
at primary care practice or you have some cardiac issue and you have an ongoing
relationship with a cardiologist, I think it’s really helpful to be able to
continue the conversation outside of the office,” Clain explained.
“Once you’ve done
that a couple of times, you feel that connection to your provider, you have a
sense that they are committed to your health and to ensure that you have good
outcomes.”
Patient-centered
billing for efficient revenue cycle
Patient payment
collection strategies also have implications for patient satisfaction and
ultimately patient loyalty. If patients can’t easily manage their out-of-pocket
costs, they may not return to the provider for another care encounter.
According to Tabitha
Hickerson, CPC, billing department manager at Family Health Care Group of
Modesto, patient-centered billing is about valuing patient convenience over
practice convenience.
In order to ensure
their bill pay methods were convenient for patients, Hickerson and her team
adopted digital bill pay software. This system replaced their old procedures of
accepting credit card payments over the telephone.
“The biggest goal was
just to make things easier for the patient and to automate things a little bit
more. Just to streamline and create more efficiency,” Hickerson said.
“We had received
quite a few patient complaints – it was difficult to reach us, even when they
were calling to make their payments and they didn’t have a question about their
bill or anything like that.”
By making the bill pay
process easier for patients – users can simply log into a secure account and
pay with their credit card or bank information – Family Health Care helped
improve practice payments. According to Hickerson, more patients make payments
in full and on time now that the practice has online bill pay.
These actions have
also helped improve the patient experience.
“For us, letting
patients know that we’re willing to work with them on the balance, it provides
a sense of compassion to their health and shows them that it’s not all about
the money, as important as that is,” Hickerson said.
Hickerson’s digital
strategy was likely effective because it catered directly to individual patient
needs at her practice. Central Maine Orthopaedics took a similar route,
ensuring that their new bill pay strategies would work for their patients
specifically.
“[Central Maine
Orthopaedics] leadership and staff saw the opportunity to help patients by
creating processes that benefited them. They understood the difficulties many
of their patients faced in understanding their financial responsibilities,”
said Central Maine Orthopaedics’ Supervisor of Revenue Cycle Operations Kathie
Phillips in an article coauthored by Navicure’s Jeff
Wood.
This was not a
one-size-fits-all approach. Through personal conversations with various
patients, Central Maine Orthopaedics leaders managed to create a new, online
billing system that would work specifically with patient needs.
Ultimately,
healthcare organizations will need to offer attractive services in order to
maintain patient retention. By offering patient-centered services at all steps
of the care encounter – getting the patient in the door, treating the patient,
helping the patient pay – they may help improve patient loyalty.
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