How Healthcare Companies Can Create a Positive Digital Patient Experiences

In recent years, the healthcare industry has gathered a negative reputation.

Patients often find it difficult to find relevant information, struggle to contact customer support, or generally feel unheard.

60% of Americans have had a recent bad healthcare experience (Forbes).

How are you ensuring only positive experience for your healthcare business? 

In this blog, we look at patient centric healthcare strategies that will ensure the best experience for your customers.

9 patient centric healthcare digital experience strategies

Online experiences are going to be a huge part of the future of healthcare companies. And to be able to stay with the times and compete with brands bigger than yours, you’ll need solid strategies for positive healthcare interactions. Here are a few:

1. Prioritize accessibility

How easy is it for patients to engage with you and your services? Is your healthcare brand accessible enough for patients?

Accessibility means removing barriers and making things easy for patients. For healthcare, it includes digital as well as physical factors. Additionally, it also means inclusive and unified experiences.

Here are some ways to improve accessibility for patients:

• Be empathetic towards patients and their needs
• Provide a smooth and seamless experience across touchpoints
• Track patient sentiments with effective social listening tools
• Use automation to ensure seamless flow

2. Incorporate virtual care

A Deloitte study found that by 2040, at least 25% of all outpatient, preventive, and long-term care would move to virtual care. 

Preference for virtual healthcare is on the rise. By meeting patient demands in creative ways via virtual care, you can stay competitive and win over patients.

For instance, here is an outline of a typical patient journey. One way of enhancing patient satisfaction in your healthcare business is to provide virtual capabilities at all these stages—starting from when patients explore and research care options to select providers to follow up post-care. 

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Here’s how you can incorporate this patient-centric healthcare strategy:

• Use efficient tools to help you with virtual healthcare services
• Incorporate tele healthcare 
• Provide virtual doctor consultations, nurse triage, monitoring, etc.
• Train your staff to provide virtual care
• Integrate tools in your healthcare systems to ensure consistency and avoid silos
• Collect data from virtual healthcare assets and channels
• Collect feedback from patients to make their experience better
• Use data to understand accessibility, outcomes, and patient experience

3. Automate routine interactions

Patients and their families usually have a lot of queries. In addition, healthcare providers and hospitals, too, have to share a lot of timely updates with patients. 

For instance, confirmation of consultation, updates regarding check-ups and tests, follow ups, etc. 

One patient-centric healthcare strategy is effective communication—it is critical to patients and healthcare providers—it can help save time, speed up treatment, save costs, reduce patient anxiety, and improve the overall experience. 

However, manual and one-on-one communication can be inefficient and inconsistent. That’s why automating routine communication is one of the best patient-centered care best practices.

Here’s what you can do for improving patient communication in healthcare:

• Automate calls about routine matters such as renewals, reminders, etc.
• Reminders about medication
• Send reminders about appointments
• Provide two-way communication option
• Enable patients to set up appointments

4. Offer better customer experience

From offering telehealth to decrease the gap between patient and provider to using apps for improving patient communication in healthcare, the healthtech industry has continuously enhanced customer experience. 

• Adapt to patient needs via digital tools
• Add a human touch to digital experiences
• Ensure data security in patient communication tools
• Offer multiple and an omnichannel digital communication experience
• Offer fast responses to queries through automated responses
• Offer wearable medical tech devices
• Offer electronic medical reports
• Improve staff competence and empathy via social listening and monitoring
• Use patient data carefully and responsibly
• Collect patient feedback and address it
• Pay attention to patient experience post their treatment

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Explore Radarr to listen to your patients and your competitors online so you can provide top-notch customer experience. 

5. Leverage data

Just like in other online sectors, patient data in healthcare can also be used in an effective way to improve patient experience, treatment outcome, and efficiency of your overall business. 

But first, how to collect patient data? 

There are many ways to collect data, such as, refer to patients past records and interaction, conduct surveys, and social listening. By tracking patients’ conversations, behavior and sentiments from social channels, you can understand patients a little better.

Here are some ways to use that data in healthcare:

• Use data to understand patient needs and pain points. For instance, if patients are struggling to get in touch with you, they might tag you on social media channels. You can then use this information to provide a better way to contact you.
• If you collect negative sentiments around your healthcare brand, you must identify areas for improvement, conduct polls or surveys with patients and enhance your brand perception.
• Personalize patient experience by getting an understanding of patients’ preferences. For example, patients might be talking about requirements for homecare post treatment. You could reach out to them with personalized messages to offer the services.

6. Inculcate empathy in your services

Understand that patients and their families are going through a lot that may be causing them anxiety and other emotions. That’s where empathy comes in as a key patient-centric healthcare strategy.

How to make your healthcare marketing and communication more empathetic?

• Start by listening to patients—one on one and social listening
• Listen to recorded phone calls, track their conversations on social media, etc.
• Keep the focus on the patient rather than your services and products
• Train your staff, especially the patient-facing workers to learn empathy 
• Create a patient journey map and based on where patients are in their journey, listen to what questions they’re asking, their behavior, etc. Based on this, ensure empathy practices at every stage.

7. Leverage digital tools

From telehealth to AI to robot-assisted surgeries, health technology has been advancing by leaps and bounds. From administrative tools to surgery to diagnostics to wearable healthtech, healthtech is a vibrant industry. 

Digital tools such as software and apps are designed to directly enhance patient and provider experience. Apart from these, tools such as social listening, monitoring and analytics, help healthcare businesses to gain insights into patient behavior and needs, and improve their offerings.

Some cues on using digital tools in healthcare:

• Use social listening and monitoring tools
• Use tracking tools and apps to help patients track treatments, medicines, appointments
• Use social listening insights to create relevant content for patients
• Share relevant data and insights with the right department in your healthcare organization
• Track campaigns 

8. Work on building your brand reputation

In the healthcare space, trust matters a lot. Patients need to feel confident about the services and practices of healthcare providers, whether individual doctors or hospitals and clinics. That is why a critical patient-centric healthcare strategy is to build brand reputation.

Here’s an example: One children’s hospital was looking to improve its ranking and reputation. They employed listening and monitoring tools to listen to people’s sentiment for their brand as well as other high-ranking competitor brands. Through listening, they identified opportunities to participate in healthcare awards and sponsor health-related events. These activities would help enhance their brand reputation. 

Here are some ways to build brand reputation:

• Understand your patients so you can serve them better
• Incorporate technology and tools to make patients’ experience easy and better
• Invest in tools that helps you understand your patients better
• Collect patient data via segmentation and create a personalized approach for each segment
• Automate communication to reduce patient wait time

9. Social listening for healthcare

It’s a misconception that only lifestyle brands can use social listening to improve customer experience. Healthcare businesses can also include social listening as a patient-centric healthcare strategy.

Here are some ways in which healthcare companies are using social listening to increase patient satisfaction and engagement:

• Extract real-time information and insights and turn it into strategic marketing opportunities 
• Listen to patients pain points, interests, needs, and provide content that matters to patients
• Collect data and information via your social listening tools and forward it to the different departments to which it would be relevant and useful
• Use social listening to monitor campaigns and assess the success of your campaigns

Build patient-centric healthcare strategies with Radarr + Genesys

We’ve shared some actionable strategies for your healthcare company to get started with. You may apply all the strategies or choose the ones that align well with your goals. 

However, to be able to apply these strategies, you will need to consolidate data and extract insights from online conversations.

That’s where Radarr x Genesys can help you create data-driven customer journeys to deliver positive experiences for patients.

Book a demo of Radarr x Genesys for your healthcare company today!