Increase patient engagement and satisfaction

Whether you're reaching out to patients to onboard, set an appointment, or to enroll them in a condition management program, engaging health consumers in a world full of distractions is a struggle. 

Telehealth

Studies have shown that providers report positive experiences using telehealth visits, with 98% saying they are comfortable with video delivery and 92% reporting easy patient interaction.¹ Patients too report high levels of satisfaction with ease of communication and care received. Yet, the modality is not without issue as evidenced by a stubborn lack of utilization increases since peak utilization during the pandemic. Technical challenges and support may top the list of hurdles, but poor onboarding and ongoing engagement approaches create challenges as well. 

Condition Management and DTx

Healthcare, in general, has been much slower than other industries to adopt digital technologies despite evidence that consumers are driving expectations that health-related transactions be as easy as other parts of their lives. Digital therapeutic and condition management companies comprise a diverse and evolving landscape of digital health solutions focused on patient engagement, care management, and health advocacy. Yet this evolving landscape has experienced significant patient engagement hurdles, causing health plan payers to question ROI while digital therapeutic firms reassess engagement approaches. Initial outreach and enrollment may top the list of hurdles, but poor onboarding and ongoing engagement approaches create challenges as well.  

Optimize Your Service Delivery

Engagys’ work in both of these segments has focused on a few crucial areas to ensure delivery of successful services that lead to improved utilization and high patient satisfaction: 

• Evaluate your Martech and Telephony Stacks: Inventorying your existing martech stack is a logical first step. Understanding where data silos may exist and where integration opportunities reside allows you to determine if platform upgrades are necessary. Implementing a common data management and marketing execution platform will prove critical to success. Include an evaluation of your contact center operations technologies and practices (e.g., CallerID, number of attempts, number of retries, etc.). For instance, during a recent appointment setting project, simply improving CallerID to eliminate spam and call blocking resulted in a 50% increase in authentication rates. 

   

• Equip your Team: Assessing your team’s skills to define and execute necessary improvements cannot be understated. Analyze in-house expertise, structure, and duties to ensure acquisition, engagement and CX objectives can be achieved. Results may point to altering your hiring and training strategies. Are your agents ready? Be sure they have been trained appropriately—whether they are nurses or administrators—to drive success. Focus on delivering a positive experience for patients while ensuring appointments are set and kept. For example, many of our clients are focused on social risk factor (SRF) training, designed to connect agents to resources at every point of live contact (e.g., if during a medication adherence call it is uncovered the member has food insecurity or loneliness, your resources are trained to assist).

   

• Reimagine your Engagement Process & Approach: Evaluate the details of processes, workflows, designs, and copy related to consumer behavior change communications, campaigns, apps, etc. Be sure they include best practices to inform both martech and people/skills/duties decisions. Looking for a quick win? This evaluation will lead to identification of those opportunities that can be implemented in the first three to six months of 2025 to accelerate achievement of business objectives. During the appointment setting project noted above, updating call policy cadence and frequency resulted in an immediate 50% increase in transfer rates to set an appointment.  

While the list of to-dos may feel daunting, there has never been a better time to tackle this challenge. Healthcare consumers are asking for a better CX—and you can be prepared to deliver. Not sure how to start? Contact us!

1 Front Med (Lausanne). 2023 Jul 19;10:1198096. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1198096